JAKARTA - When swimmer Amanda Lim arrived at her room in the Games Village, she couldn't help herself. Some people sleep, she cleaned. Wiped her room. Dusted her cupboards. Everything with her has to be exact. Please understand, she deals in specks of dust. And, almost predictably, fractions of seconds.
Friday (Aug 24) is Lim's 50m freestyle, a taut, terse 25-second sprint. That is what she waits anxiously for. That is when she has to be perfect, and for that she'll do anything.
Even stop breathing.
"I take 40 strokes and zero breaths. I recently mastered the art of breathing, but it took time," she says.
I know what you're thinking: you can hold your breath for 50m. Very nice. Congratulations. But try doing it when you're going flat out and expending all your energy and trying to beat a continent.
But when precisely does she take this one breath that she holds? "I actually don't know when, somewhere around when the gun goes off and I am diving through the air," she says.
I don't dare say to her that it's an imperfect answer.
Perfection is a pursuit, a disease, a calling. Occasionally humans, imperfect themselves, award it to others. Nadia Comaneci was declared a flawless 10 at the 1976 Olympics and so was Greg Louganis at the 1982 world championships on one dive.
But in reality, perfect is an ideal more than a truth, a sweaty search for a destination that's just always out of reach. But this is its very beauty - that even as it cannot be found, it is so dutifully chased.
Perfect is Lim's brilliant obsession. "There's something about the 50m free that I like. People say it's the easiest and the shortest. But to me, it's the hardest because I strive for perfection and I'm quite OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) about a lot of stuff."
One might say that in the 100m there is more time for error, but in the 50m, there is no room for it.
In 2009, Lim timed 25.38sec. This year in June, she equalled it, and her life dedicated to shaving off 0.01 of a second. And to be a millisecond faster, she has to do everything microscopically better. "Every little thing matters" is not a traditional saying for her, it's a religious text.
"You can't afford any mistakes. On the blocks itself, if you have a slower reaction time, you lose out. When you get onto the blocks and you're too anxious, you kind of forget where to place your feet, and it affects your start. So I have to make sure I have composure."
On Friday, everything she does could affect the 0.01. Everything from her head too low at entry to her feet dropping too early to how many underwater kicks she has. A misalignment, a mistake, and a personal best becomes second best.
She's a devotee of detail and so she's been taking a screwdriver to her starts, tightening here, fine-tuning there. "It's not just something that can be changed overnight. It comes down to body awareness, how flexible I am, what my mobility is like, is my range of motion better, do I have better core control."
Every day, during training, after training, she polishes her starts. Films them, studies them, under water and over water. Are her toes not pointed enough? Is something increasing the drag? Is anything keeping her from 0.01?
Perfection is built of ambition, fastidiousness, intensity, and if you think it's a trifle crazy, she'll agree. "They say that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and that's basically what we're doing and that's really insane.
"And if you tell people out of swimming that you improved by 0.01 seconds, they'll be like 'huh?' But to us it's so much and I think nobody sees that significance in 0.01 seconds more than us, and that's something quite fulfilling."
In two days, she takes her test. It is the tension only these adventurers know, when training must mean something, when practice must turn perfect. It's going to be lonely in a full stadium on Friday because it's just her and the clock.
Somehow, she has to be ahead of her time.
