In Deep with Aaron Peirsol
In Deep with Olivia Smoliga — Season 2, Episode 4: Aaron Peirsol
There are athletes who are great. And then there are athletes who make you think differently about what greatness even means. Aaron Peirsol is the latter.
Three-time Olympian. Seven-time Olympic medalist. Current world record holder in the 200-meter backstroke with a time that has stood since 2009 — broken the year after he took four months completely off from the sport. He joins Olivia for a conversation that goes far deeper than swimming, touching on control, ego, failure, perspective, and what it really means to compete.
Aaron opens the episode by unpacking his approach to the blocks — not the fired-up, chest-pounding version of pre-race preparation, but something quieter and more deliberate. He describes how his body was already preparing physiologically, so his job was to conserve and contain that energy rather than amplify it. He talks about not sleeping the night before his 2008 Olympic final, having his coach tell him he looked like a wreck, and laughing it off — because somewhere inside him, he understood that nervousness and readiness are not opposites.
The conversation moves through one of the most honest discussions of ego and competition you'll hear anywhere. Aaron shares his vision of an ideal competitor — one who can walk up to the person in the next lane, genuinely wish them well, and then race with everything they have. Not as a mind game. As a way of checking what you're actually competing for in the first place.
He talks about the gift his coach Dave Salo gave him as a teenager — an invitation into the process, a sense of ownership over his own training — and how that internal compass carried him through an entire career and into his current work studying psychology. He reflects on the distractions that pull athletes away from what matters, especially as they get better and the world starts paying more attention.
And he talks about rest — not as recovery, but as one of the most formative tools in his career. After the 2004 Olympics and again after 2008, Aaron took four-to-five months completely away from the sport. Both times, he came back and had his best years. He calls it what Wordsworth named a wise passiveness — the ability to step back, observe, and allow things to digest. The world record in the 200 back followed.
The episode closes on the ocean, where Aaron now lives off the coast of Oahu. He describes what open water has taught him about ego, reverence, and learning to fit into something bigger than yourself rather than imposing your will upon it.
This is a conversation about swimming. But more than that, it is a conversation about how to live.
New episodes of In Deep with Olivia Smoliga drop bi-weekly on Spotify.
Listen to the episode below!
