Tom Himes walks out of the quiet calm of his spartan office into the buzz of dozens of 12- to 14-year-olds milling about on the deck of the indoor pool at the Loyola University Maryland Fitness and Aquatics Center.

Wearing a white T-shirt with the letters NBAC and the words North Baltimore Aquatic Club below them, Himes carries a printout of the afternoon’s workout. The top of the sheet reads “NBAC CHALLENGE 3 PRACTICE THURSDAY MARCH 21, 2024, 5:00 PM–6:45 PM,” but really this could be any day of any week over the course of the more than three decades he has coached for the renowned swim club that launched the careers of Olympic gold medalists Michael Phelps and Beth Botsford, both of whom Himes coached when they were kids.

As always, Himes, NBAC’s head coach and CEO, is meticulously prepared; the sheet breaks down the exact strokes, distances, and minutes allotted for each session into four blocks of time. In many ways he is a man of routine, and NBAC’s results have shown that his routines work.

At this point in Himes’ career, the numbers are staggering. He has coached swimmers to more than 750 national rankings, including 91 number-one rankings, and more than 550 state and area records, according to NBAC. In 2005, he was inducted into the Maryland Swimming Hall of Fame, and last year he entered the International Swimming Coaches Association Hall of Fame. His name has become synonymous with coaching excellence—the Maryland Swimming Age Group Coach of the Year Award was renamed in his honor.

The kids, one somehow more sinewy and skinnier than the next, wear blue swim caps with “NBAC” on one side and “Paris 2024” on the other. After the Olympics in France, they’ll be replaced by ones reading “Los Angeles 2028.” This is aspirational, but given Himes’ record, not completely far-fetched.

The tweens and teens giggle, shout, and bounce from one cluster to another, as tweens and teens are apt to do. Himes, 67, is businesslike but not stern. They gather around him while he runs through the day’s practice plan, then eagerly jump into the water and start swimming laps.

This is the apex of youth swimming; during Himes’ tenure, NBAC has never lost a Maryland Swimming scored championship meet and is consistently recognized by USA Swimming as a top 25 age group club. The kids take practice seriously, which is why they train for generally an hour and a half to two hours, six days a week, 11 months a year.

Many of them hope to swim competitively in college, and a few dream of winning Olympic gold. Yet before practice and during drills, you’re hard-pressed to spot a kid without a smile on his or her face. Despite working so hard, it looks like they’re actually…having fun.

Julia Rommel is a 15-year-old whom “Coach Tom,” as she and many others call Himes, used to work with. At the time, she had an issue with her kneecap, which she thought might derail her career.

“He helped me after surgery get back to where I was,” she says. “I saw myself, when I was first trying to get back, not loving the sport as much. He got me back to where I was loving it again.”

Julia isn’t the only Rommel whom Himes has impacted. Her mother, Jen, swam for him 35 years ago.

“In my opinion, the definition of a good coach is someone who sets an expectation and then holds you to it. And Tom does that well,” Jen says. “Whether he’s being tough with you in the moment or he’s just being matter-of-fact, you know he cares. Even as a kid, I recognized that.”

Himes devotes 60 to 70 hours per week to the job and usually deals with some club business on his “off day.” Having left a career at the Department of Defense (he coached nights and weekends throughout the job), he doesn’t have to be doing this.

“This is about the kids,” he says. “I’m trying to keep it that way. It’s not about me. It’s not about the parents. It’s about them. They love it here. I don’t have to make them come to practice. They want to come to practice. And they know they’re going to have to work hard. I like watching them develop. It’s a great feeling of accomplishment to see a kid get better—whatever that better is.”

For a guy who has devoted much of his life to swimming, Himes doesn’t have an especially decorated background in the pool. The Baltimore native didn’t swim in college or high school; he stopped competing year-round around the age of 15. Yet he remained intrigued by the sport, and he began coaching full-time while attending the University of Baltimore. (He graduated in 1980 with a degree in business management.) After stints in Glen Burnie and at the Howard County YMCA, he was recruited to come to NBAC by the club’s co-founder, Murray Stephens.

“There’s so much more to swimming than swimming up and down the pool,” Himes says. “It teaches commitment, it teaches a work ethic. It’s just a nice challenge to teach the kids to get as much as they can out of the sport. You’ve got to train the kids not only physically, but mentally.”

“THERE’S SO MUCH MORE TO SWIMMING THAN SWIMMING UP AND DOWN THE POOL.”

From 1985 to 2002, Himes was the head age group coach at NBAC. He then left to coach other clubs and worked as an assistant coach at Towson University and UMBC before returning to NBAC in 2009. Among his pupils during his first stint was a 9-year-old Beth Botsford, who had just started swimming year-round. When she showed up to her first practice, she had no swim cap or goggles.

“I remember the warm-up alone was more than I had ever swam at one time in my life,” she says. “I think I made it through maybe half of it, and I got out and said, ‘Oh my God, I can’t do this.’”

Botsford recalls being in tears when Himes approached her and urged her to stick it out for at least two weeks. He saw something in the young swimmer that she did not see in herself.

“She was a mess when she first came here,” he says. “She swam sloppy, but she came back every day. She wanted it, and she worked hard. There’s no secret to this thing. The kids that work the hardest do the best. You can have all the talent in the world, but if you’re not working hard, it’s only going to get you so far. And it’s the same thing the other way. You might not have a lot of talent, but if you work hard, you can get somewhere.”

Six months after Botsford started working with Himes, she broke a national record in the backstroke. Himes sat her down to talk about her future.

“My goal was to make the 2000 Olympics, and Tom was like, ‘You need to put 1996 on [that goal list],’” she says. “I will always remember that because I was only going to be 15 years old then. He just has so much wisdom.”

At the 1996 Games in Atlanta, the not-yet-legal-to-drive Botsford won two gold medals, in the individual 100-meter backstroke and as a member of the women’s 100-meter medley relay team.

Himes’ motivational acumen has been well-documented, but Botsford also credits him with teaching her the importance of kicking. He’s always been an advocate of a strong lower body for swimmers, which is one reason why he knew he had someone special when he first saw Michael Phelps dart through the water. He coached the 23- time Olympic gold medal winner from ages 10 to 12.

“He certainly did a whole heck of a lot more after me than he did with me,” Himes says. “No one could have foreseen the unbelievable level that he reached, and I’m not going to suggest that I did.”

But it was when he saw 10-year-old Phelps do a 500-meter free kick (holding onto a board while kicking to propel yourself through the water) in under six minutes that Himes realized the boy was a special talent.

“That was probably one of the first things that he did that I was like, ‘Wow.’”

Prior to Michael, Himes coached Phelps’ sisters, Hilary and Whitney, both outstanding swimmers in their own rights. (At 14, Hilary had been the fastest distance swimmer in the country for her age group and Whitney was third in the world for the 200-meter butterfly.) After swimming for Himes for a year, Hilary moved to another coach before returning to him.

“Tom welcomed me back, which I [credit] to continuing my love for swimming. If I hadn’t gone back to Tom, I don’t know that I would have stayed with swimming,” says Hilary. “He was always just really warm and compassionate and a great coach. He was an important figure in my life.”

Hilary, like many of Himes’ former swimmers, has fond memories of Himes dressing up like Santa Claus during practice on Christmas Eve. (The only days NBAC doesn’t hit the pool are New Year’s, Easter Sunday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.) The mustachioed Himes has the right look and disposition for the role.

“The younger kids were a little on the fence as to whether it was really Santa,” says Himes, who retired his Kris Kringle suit in 2021. “The older kids figured it out quickly, but I really never gave in to officially letting them know. The little brothers and sisters of team members really thought I was Santa.”

“TOM WAS A GREAT COACH. HE WAS AN IMPORTANT FIGURE IN MY LIFE,” SAYS HILARY PHELPS.

In 2015, Himes, whose two children are grown (his daughter, a former Division II All-American lacrosse player, is an occupational therapist; his son is a Catholic priest), began making plans to cut back on his coaching at NBAC as he and his wife of 38 years, Betty, were moving from Perry Hall to Pennsylvania.

So much for the best-laid plans. Nearly a decade later, he still commutes one hour to NBAC six days a week—he just can’t seem to drag himself away from the pool.

“His motivation is helping NBAC, helping his kids to be better,” says Chris Kaplan, who swam for Himes.

Now 47, Kaplan is the head coach and executive director of Monocacy Aquatic Club in Frederick.

“If a coach called him up and asked for advice, he’d be happy to help. If a coach asked him to come out and watch practices and give them some advice, he’d be there. He’s not in this for himself.”

None of the accolades or awards seem to have a particularly profound impact on the outwardly unassuming Himes.

“I’m honored and thrilled that people acknowledge what I’ve done,” he says. “I’ve been lucky enough to have been around a lot of very good coaches and learned from them. But I just really like what I’m doing and I put everything I have into it.”

That’s clear as he walks the deck at practice, making a point to talk to as many kids as possible. Some get a light ribbing, a few receive gentle criticism, while others are offered words of encouragement.

“There is no question that the swimmers come first and foremost in everything he does,” Jen Rommel says. “There is an expectation not of perfectionism in any way, but that you’re going to bring your best every day.”

Because that’s exactly what you’re going to get from Tom Himes.

On a sweltering summer’s day, Hilary Phelps sits inside Busboys and Poets enjoying an almond milk cappuccino and a skillet of sweet potato hash in her recently adopted neighborhood of Shirlington, VA. After a cataclysmic year, a bookstore cafe seems an apt setting for Phelps to reflect on this new chapter in her life—the one in which, after years of silence, she’s finally sharing her struggles with alcoholism, despite this being a time when her sobriety was truly tested.

“In 2022, I finalized my divorce, I moved, I launched a business, and my dad died,” says Phelps, mom to six-year-old Alexander. “By the end of the year, I had four of the top five life stressors. And after 15 years of sobriety, I wanted to drink badly—but I didn’t.”

Such outspokenness is something new for the 45-year-old Phelps, who is, of course, from that Phelps family—the oldest sister of Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympic athlete in the history of the sport and someone who has revealed his own mental health struggles, a fact that helped encourage Hilary to find her own voice.

Ever since she stopped drinking, sobriety has formed the backdrop to her life. Recovery is always there, like background noise, a constant reminder to stay the course. But for all the ongoing work it has taken her to stay sober, the secrecy surrounding her sobriety has only added to the burden.

“I worried, what if I share this truth and then people don’t like me? If I could help one person not feel alone, it would be worth it,” she says. “But it took me 15 years to get to that point of being able share that openly and to be okay with people not liking me.”

So last May, when Pete Sousa, her friend from their college days at the University of Richmond, asked her to appear on his podcast, The Payoff with Pete, in conjunction with Mental Health Awareness Month, Phelps, a public figure in her own right, knew it was time to talk about her experience. (When your brother is one of the most recognizable athletes in the world, you become a little famous yourself.)

On the day the podcast aired, the public-relations veteran dispatched an all-points-bulletin to her 48,000 friends and followers across social media—just in case anyone had missed her message. Along with a spare black-and-white portrait of herself, she posted: “In June 2007, I voluntarily walked into a treatment center and asked for help. I was scared, I felt alone, and I didn’t know what to do, but I couldn’t stop drinking. My inner light was burned out and I had lost every bit of who I was. It truly felt like a dark night of the soul.”

“I’m so proud of her,” says Phelps’ mother, Debbie, executive director for the Education Foundation of Baltimore County Public Schools. “She’s asked herself, ‘How can I grow from it? What can I do that people will take away?’ The more people who are in the spotlight saying, ‘I’m normal like everyone else,’ the better. There are a lot of people sharing the stories of their journeys about things that have been in the closet for a very long time—it’s healthy and it’s good for people to hear.”

And it’s been healthy for Phelps to share, too. With her perfect posture and sinewy strength, she radiates confidence and vitality. If you didn’t know that she battled severe addiction, you’d never guess it. But she’s worked a lifetime to get here.

Phelps was born on March 17, 1978, at St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson. “I was born on St. Patrick’s Day,” she says, smiling. “It’s fitting for an alcoholic—everyone wants to drink on your birthday.” At the time, the family was living in Whiteford in Harford County. Her sister, Whitney, two years her junior, was her best friend. “We caught crayfish, rode bikes, and played,” she says. “It was a free and fun childhood.”

She first learned to “swim” when she was six months old. With her father, Fred, in the pool, Debbie tossed her in the water, and she paddled to the surface. Seven years later, in 1985—the same year Michael was born—she joined a summer swim team in Jarrettsville. “I loved swimming,” she says. “I was gung-ho from the beginning.”

Before long, Phelps was bringing home respectable third-place trophies, but when she saw the larger first-place trophies other swimmers had earned, she wanted more. “My mom told me that the kids who win the big trophies were usually year-round swim- mers,” she recalls. Within a year of starting the summer swim league, she began swimming year-round with Renaissance All Sports Athletic Club in Bel Air, where she quickly set herself apart as a distance swimmer. As the fastest female on the team, she trained with older boys and was soon winning the tallest trophies.

While at a meet in Edgewater in 1987, Tom Himes, head coach for the North Baltimore Aquatic Club, recruited the nine-year-old to train at the small, elite swim club based at Meadowbrook pool in Mt. Washington. (Also a talented swimmer, kid sister Whitney trained at the same time and later Michael trained there, too.)

By age 11, Phelps was swimming six days a week, three of which entailed waking up at 3:45 a.m. to make it to Meadowbrook to spend two hours in the water before the start of the school day, then heading back to the pool for several hours of swimming after school. By 1990, Phelps was a phenom, the fastest distance swimmer in the country for her age group. “I was tracking my time with Janet Evans, who was at the time at Stanford University and the fastest distance swimmer in the world,” says Phelps. “She was an Olympian—and I wanted to be her.”

Out of the water, she was equally driven. By sixth grade, she was a straight-A student at Southampton Middle School with her own sense of style, short, permed hair, and red Sally Jessy Raphael-style glasses—all of which made her a middle-school mark. “I had stretchy pants and lace-up ballet flats,” she says. To this day, her main memory is the taunting she endured from the popular girls.

“I can still see it,” she says. “These three girls are walking toward me, and they’re like, ‘Nice shoes.’ Later that day, I was flying to a meet in Atlanta, where they fly the top two from North Baltimore, but I felt sad. That was a turning point—I wasn’t good enough anymore.”

Seventh grade at Dumbarton Middle, prompted by the family’s move to Baltimore County, was no better. She had a friend or two but other than that, she says, “no one talked to me.” Vowing to fit in, she grew her hair long and ditched the glasses for contacts. By eighth grade she had moved up the middle school social ladder and was hanging out with the cool kids.

At 14, her substance abuse began with Milwaukee’s Best beer and smoking pot to quiet the insecurity and growing sadness and further fit in. “I remember thinking, ‘This will make me feel better,’” says Phelps, whose paternal grandparents were “problem drinkers,” though never outwardly identified as alcoholics.

In high school, she became increasingly dependent on alcohol, guzzling cheap wine and whatever else she could get her hands on. “I’d drink Wild Irish Rose,” she says, “because I was like, ‘Wine is fancy, and beer is disgusting.’ I’d stand outside a liquor store in Towson with a friend, and we’d call it, ‘Hey, Mister.’ We’d stand there with a $20 bill and say, ‘Hey, mister, can you buy us some Boone’s Farm?’ We’d split a bottle and stay at her parent’s house and steal their liquor, putting vodka in our Gatorade bottles.” Unsurprisingly, Phelps’ swimming career began to suffer. (In the meantime, Whitney’s star was rising, which only added to Phelps’ feelings of inadequacy. At age 14, Whitney was third in the world for the 200-meter butterfly.)

In 1996, by the time Phelps attended the University of Richmond on a full athletic scholarship, her addiction—sometimes that meant three bottles of wine a night—was in full force. “I blacked out every time I drank,” says Phelps, who experienced kidney pain and would find bruises on her body from falling the night before but had been so smashed she had no memory of it. “I never knew where I’d wake up or who I’d be with. College is an open invitation to party, and addiction can go undetected—it’s a breeding ground for drinking.”

While Phelps was alienating everyone around her—“alcohol was my best friend,” she says—others were starting to take note. In her senior year, her swimming coach punished her by making her the only one on the team of four without a captain’s title. And her friends staged an unsuccessful intervention. “I was like, ‘This is college, this is what you’re supposed to do.’”

Debbie knew that her daughter partied but had no idea she had a problem. “I didn’t think it was an issue, but a phase she was going through,” says Debbie, who calls her oldest daughter the “keystone” of the family.

After college graduation in 2000, Phelps’ disease continued to consume her. Her family traveled to Sydney to watch a 15-year-old Michael compete in his first Olympics, a fact that still lights up her face when she talks about it. But mixed with those good memories is one that still stings: She was prohibited from climbing across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the city’s number-one tourist attraction. “You have to take a Breathalyzer first,” says Phelps, “and I was too drunk from the night before to be able to go.”

At the next summer Olympics, this time Athens in 2004, she and Whitney were guests at an epic Sports Illustrated party on a cliff overlooking the Aegean.

“We climbed up on this stage and we were dancing, and they made us get down,” she says. “But the next day, this man was like, ‘You guys had a lot of fun last night, you must have been drunk,’ and I literally said, ‘I wasn’t that drunk. I remember everything that happened last night.’ That was my barometer—if I remembered, it meant I wasn’t that drunk.”

For the following two years, Phelps tried to limit her drinking and made several attempts to quit, but her abstinence never lasted long. “Because I didn’t want to give it up, I was doing everything I could to control it,” she says. “I was like, ‘I’m only going to have one glass of wine tonight.’ I was lying in bed and my body and skin were burning. I was anxious and felt like I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I went to the bathroom and drank a bottle of NyQuil that’s what this disease does to you.”

“AT SOME POINT, YOU EITHER CONTINUE TO DRINK AND BURY THE SHAME OR YOU ASK FOR HELP.”

Things went from bad to worse when Phelps began living in Adams Morgan on her own, roommate-free for the first time. Within the first 10 days, she went on a series of benders, including drinking two bottles of wine by herself at home, then heading to the nearby Holiday Inn, where she gulped six more glasses in 30 minutes just before closing. As she continued to spiral, she knew she needed help.

“At some point, you either continue to drink and bury the shame or you take that other fork in the road and ask for help,” she says. Her ex-boyfriend also sounded the alarm. “[After my move,] I don’t know if I had drunk-dialed him or texted him,” says Phelps, “but he called and said, ‘If you don’t get help, I’m going to tell your family just how bad this is.’”

On Monday, June 11, 2007, after a final round of binge drinking the prior weekend, the then-29-year-old checked herself in to Kolmac, an outpatient addiction treatment center in the East End neighborhood of D.C., just a few blocks from where she lived. In the days that followed, she had intensive outpatient therapy for eight weeks and attended daily, sometimes twice-daily, 12-step meetings and then continued her care for 18 more months, including weekly group therapy sessions.

At the same time, she worked full-time as an event planner at a nonprofit—and told no one about her recovery efforts.  “I was living a double life,” says Phelps, who recalls wandering the aisles of a Target in Alexandria until midnight because she didn’t want to be alone with her thoughts. “I didn’t want to drink, but I didn’t know what else to do, so I went to Target.”

As she started to recover, the first few months were the most daunting. “All those feelings I had stuffed down for 15 years started making their way up and out,” she says. “I’d feel so good one day, then it would swing so drastically to the other side—when people get sober, they don’t know how to manage their emotions. That’s why we drank in the first place.”

It’s been far from easy, but Phelps has stayed fully committed to sobriety, while building a new life for herself in the wake of a devastating divorce. In the past year, she has launched her own public-relations agency, Hilary Phelps Creative, and is a certified yoga and Pilates teacher, addiction recovery coach, and motivational speaker. She leans on good friends whom she jokes are her “board of directors” and takes zero risks when it comes to drinking—even refraining from imbibing non-alcoholic drinks in restaurants (unless they come from a can), having once been served a gin and tonic by mistake. She still attends 12-step meetings, meditates daily, and has pursued alternate therapies—some traditional, like Reiki, and others a bit more unusual, like Kambo, aka “frog medicine,” which causes the participant to purge.

When her father unexpectedly died in his sleep last fall, her alcohol cravings returned with a vengeance. “I was like, ‘What I want to do is go to a bar, find a stranger, get super hammered, and spend the next week drunk and checked out,’” she admits.

Instead, two days after the funeral, she and her friend Charlie Engle, himself sober for 31 years, drove to Ashley Addiction Treatment center in Havre de Grace. “She hadn’t really been very in-touch with the rehab world since her early years of sobriety,” says Engle, who just happened to be headed to the treatment center where he works as a brand ambassador when Phelps called to say she needed support. “I ambushed her in a way. I said, ‘I need you to speak for 15 minutes and tell these 100 people who have less than 30 days of sobriety what it’s like to have 15 years.’ I was worried about her—and I knew it would be powerful for them and change her whole perspective.”

In that moment, Phelps took a deep breath and stepped up to the podium to give an impromptu speech to the crowd of recovering addicts. “‘After 15 years, I wanted to check out, but drinking isn’t going to bring back my dad and it’s not going to make me feel better, because then I’ll have to do [rehab] again,”’ she said, ‘“and there’s no guarantee that if I drink, I’ll come back. I might lose my child, total a car, lose every friend I’ve ever had, and die alone.’ Someone came up to me afterward and handed me a note and said, ‘I was going to leave treatment tomorrow, but your story was so fucking powerful—I’m going to stay.’ I still have that note on my refrigerator.”

Sharing her story has marked a crucial stage in her recovery. “I encouraged her to tell her story,” says Engle, who became an ultra-endurance athlete on his road to finding sobriety. “I told her, ‘You’re never going to live completely in the sober world until you fully share your story. The fact that you’ve gone to so much trouble to hide it and the amount of work it has taken to do that is not helping.’ Once she shared her story, her transformation was almost instantaneous—it was one of those crux moments.”

In addition to finding sobriety, Phelps has found her way back to herself.

“When I first went to rehab, they told us to go home, look at ourselves in the mirror, and say, ‘I love you’–and I couldn’t do it,” she says. “Now when I look in the mirror, I see freedom and peace and joy and happiness and strength. At 45, this is where my story starts. The past doesn’t define us, it’s just part of our story. With recovery and getting sober, I get a second chance at life, and I don’t want to fuck it up. We’re all healing from something, and sobriety is just the vehicle in which I share my story of survival and healing.”

You’ve said starting your lifestyle website Genuine Joy was inspired by completing your first Ironman Triathlon. How so?
At the end of 2009, I signed up for my first Ironman. I had no business doing it, but I wanted a new challenge. I was getting stuck. I would do the same recipes, the same workout, same fashion. I was so scared to try something new. But as I crossed the finish line, I had this really great moment of ‘Oh my gosh, I set my mind to something really hard, and I accomplished it.’ The idea for the website came from that feeling, because no matter the difficulty of the challenge, it’s always fulfilling when we conquer fear.

Have you found that your story resonates with people?
I got great responses from people who were saying, ‘I was scared to run a 5K.’ Because I think we look at people and we assign how we’re feeling on the inside and compare that to their outside, and so people would look and say, ‘Well, you’re an Ironman. You obviously love to work out.’ But there are days that I don’t want to work out. I am like everybody else. And so when I would convey those struggles, I think it really resonated with people. People want to be able to relate and my sharing experiences and difficulties—I’ve shared recipes that haven’t worked out.

In some ways, your website reminds me of the lifestyle blogs and websites that a lot of celebrities have right now, but it’s much more relatable. Is that intentional?
It is, because that’s how I live. You know, in some of those, like for example the Gwyneth Paltrow Goop, like, it’s so aspirational, and you’ll see this pair of pants, and you’ll look and you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, they’re $2,500! I don’t have $2,500 for a pair of pants.’ Yeah, I try to make it what I do. It is relatable. Some things can be inspirational, but it’s not aspirational, like I don’t recommend anything that I don’t like or that I wouldn’t purchase for myself.

What would you recommend for someone who’s going to start a fitness regime in the New Year?
The thing that’s important is to keep your own fitness and your own abilities in mind. Make small steps. If your goal is to run a 5K, track that. Say, if you want to run a 5K in March, in January you start walk/running. For me, it’s always important to write it down. I’m the girl who still uses her calendar. I like to see it in front of me. And I treat a workout like an important meeting. I stick to it. It’s really easy—especially for women because I think we’re really accommodating to others—for things you do for yourself to get push to the side. And I think it’s really important to remember that this is something for you. And when I work out, I’m a better person. I have more fun.

So what is your ultimate goal with Genuine Joy?
I started it around the time that I did the Ironman so it’s been about three years. It started off as a blog, just a place for me to write. And then it transitioned into more of a website where I was hired by a publication to write for them from Fashion Week, and then I was hired by a network to do some pieces for them from the Olympics—kind of a behind-the-scenes thing. So, it’s been this great organic growth, which I really like. So, ultimately, I’d like to see that continue. There are some components that I’ll be adding to the site in 2014 that I think will help the growth.

Like what?
I’ll be doing some videos. The thing that I find the most challenging is understanding that what I know, everybody else doesn’t know. You only know what you know, so I assume that everybody else knows what I know—and that’s not the case. So I’m going to do some step-by-step videos, kind of how-to’s, really simple, have some third-party content, maybe have a makeup artist come in and show a great smoky eye or how to roast a butternut squash. Things that might seem very easy, but I was talking to a friend the other day and she was like, ‘I have no idea how to roast a butternut squash.’ So, it’s just another resource on how-to. There will be a Recipe A Week section. And I get a lot e-mails asking for advice or opinions, so I’ll have an Ask Hilary section. It’s exciting.

With this website you are establishing your own public name and brand, how important is it to you to carve out your own public identity?
It’s always been important to me. My brother and my sister and I are all independent people. That was something important to our mom and dad, that we were different and independent. So, as alike as the three of us are, we each have our own path. And I think that’s important and as we’ve grown older, we’ve become more defined. It’s funny, even though we all started out swimming, Michael’s the swimmer, I went the triathlete route, and my sister went with the extreme races. Within my family, they’re like, ‘Of course you would do this. Of course you would put this information out there. Of course you would share it with others’ because that’s something I’ve always done. My mom joked recently because my sister did the Tough Mudder, she was like, ‘What did I do to you kids? [Michael] won 22 Olympic medals. You did an Ironman in eight months after never having run a marathon in your life, and then [Whitney] just won the Tough Mudder for women! Why don’t you guys just run 5Ks?’ We’re just all overachievers.

It does seem like the Phelps kids like a challenge.
Very much so. And while we’re all supportive of each other, we’re all competitive when it comes to playing each other, if that makes sense. Like, if we are playing air hockey, it’s game on. If we’re bowling, it’s game on. We’re very competitive children, but outside of that, we’re very supportive.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t ask if Michael is going to come out of retirement for the 2016 Olympics?
He’s back in the drug pool, meaning he’s back registered in the USADA drug-testing pool, so I think he’s just keeping his options open. Maybe he will, maybe he won’t.

If you knew, would you tell us?
[Laughs] We always say that we stay in our lane. My mom, my sister, and I are family. Whatever Michael decides, we are 100 percent behind. Now, as a joke, my mom said that she wanted to go to Rio, but whatever Michael does, we want him to be happy and fulfilled and love life. That’s it.