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There are some days where I'll eat 8,000 calories per day, on a day before a 12, 14, 18 hour swim. For a 61-year-old woman, that's a lot! And I try not to eat too much refined sugar - cookies, desserts, those sorts of things.

I swim when I can but I don't work out.

Swimming is probably the ultimate of burnout sports. It's ironic because millions of people who swim as their regular exercise love the meditation aspect of it; you don't wind up with any orthopedic injuries. But when you swim at a world class level for hours and hours - the loneness of the long distance runner.

It has nothing to do with swimming. That happens to be my sport. I'm trying to see how far I can go.

I swim more or less every day.

There's so much more to me than swimming. I like to go and have fun, like to go dancing, hang out with my friends.

I can't imagine what I would be doing if I wasn't swimming. It is what I want to do now; it is what I want to do in the foreseeable future, and that is what I'm focusing on.

When I got to college, I used to run on top of everything else, because when you gain weight in swimming, you have to do something else, like bike or run, to maintain the weight or take the weight off.

If I just swam all day, I'd lose it. That's why I do so many other activities. It keeps me sane.