Katie Ledecky Writes the Number Down First — Her "Want Times" Method (2026)

Katie Ledecky has nine Olympic gold medals and fourteen Olympic medals in total. She has held the world record in the 800 meter freestyle since Rio in 2016, and in May 2025 the only person who took it off her was her — 8:04.12, breaking her own 8:04.79.

She also does something almost nobody at that level talks about. Before a meet she writes down the time she wants, on paper. After the meet she writes down how far off she was, and keeps the paper.

She has a name for the number. Speaking to The Athletic in September 2025: "It goes way back to when I first started swimming. For some reason, I came up with this name for my goals. I would call them 'want times.'" Not goal times. Want times. She was a kid when she named them, and the name stuck.

We already have a page on the nightly journal her coach Yuri Suguiyama asked her to keep — the main set, sleep, food, a 1 to 10 score. This is a different habit. The journal records what happened. The want time is written before anything happens. One is a record. The other is a target you commit to in ink and then have to face.

Be honest about the rest. Ledecky is the greatest distance swimmer in history because of a body, an engine, a family that drove her to early-morning practices, and coaching almost nobody gets. Writing a number down does not produce a world record. But the writing is the only part of that list you can copy, and it is the part with a research literature behind it.

The habit, precisely

1. The target goes on paper before the event. She writes the want time out ahead of the meet, so it exists in physical form before she races and cannot be quietly revised once she knows the result.
2. After the race, she writes the gap. Per her account to The Athletic, she works out the time she beat the want time by, or how far off it she was. Not a feeling about the race. A signed number.
3. The paper survives the meet. She saves that same sheet and it comes to the next meet with her, so the next target gets set beside the last result.
4. It is a time, not an outcome. As she put it: "I always really loved the fact that swimming is based on time. You can really quantify your progress and see your progress." And why that matters: "I understood from a pretty young age that you can't control what the other swimmers in the race are going to do." The number is hers. The medal is not.

There is a second, stranger version of the same habit, on the record from her coaches rather than from her.

The pull buoy called Beilke

Around 2010 or 2011, when Ledecky was thirteen or fourteen, Suguiyama took a pull buoy from the lost and found at the Georgetown Prep pool for her warm-up. A name was already on it: Beilke. It stayed. He wrote "OT12" on it in Sharpie — Olympic Trials, 2012 — and when she made the London team, Ledecky added "OLY12" herself. She told NBC's Nick Zaccardi, in a piece published 27 June 2016: "I would sometimes leave Beilke at the pool, and Beilke would be right there for me the next session of the meet, waiting for me." After London she retired it: "Beilke was getting a little old. Beilke had just gone to London. It was a big trip. It took a lot out of Beilke."

Beilke 2 carried the Rio goals. Zaccardi could see writing on it and could not read it — he wrote that you would not decipher the code unless you were her coach Bruce Gemmell or close family. Ledecky would only say it was "a few things ... that remind me of my goals in its own way" and that "it's mainly a time."

What the code actually said, we do not know — we have seen "565" repeated online and could not source it, so we are not printing it as a fact. What is sourced is the goal behind it. Dave Sheinin reported in The Washington Post on 10 August 2016 that Ledecky and Gemmell settled on target times for Rio in the autumn of 2013, after she won four golds in Barcelona at sixteen, and kept them private, even from Ledecky's family. The 400 world record then was 3:59.15, set in a since-banned bodysuit. In Rio she swam 3:56.46 and 8:04.79, after nearly three years of aiming at those numbers in practice.

Two honest notes. Gemmell has said he does not remember whether the 3:56 target was his idea or hers. And we read Sheinin's report and Zaccardi's, but nobody outside the family has read the buoy — so take the ink-on-the-buoy specifics as reported, not verified.

What the science says

Specific, hard targets beat "do your best", and the effect is not small. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham summarized thirty-five years of their own goal-setting research in American Psychologist in 2002. Harder goals produced more effort and better performance, with effect sizes (d) in their meta-analyses running .52 to .82; for specific hard goals against telling people to do their best, .42 to .80. Why "do your best" fails is the useful part — it has no external referent, so it can be defined any way you like after the fact. 3:56 cannot. By their own count the base is broad: effects shown "on well over 100 different tasks involving more than 40,000 participants in at least eight countries", in laboratory, simulation and field settings.

The honest limit: this is mostly research about work tasks, not elite sport. Locke and Latham were industrial and organizational psychologists writing about workplace performance, and nobody has run a randomized trial of want times on Olympic swimmers. Their own data also shows the effect shrinking as tasks get harder: in a meta-analysis they cite (Wood, Mento & Locke, 1987), goal-difficulty effect sizes were .48 on the most complex tasks versus .67 on the simplest, and for specific-hard versus do-your-best, .41 versus .77. Goals do the most work on things you already know how to do.

Writing the target is only half of it. The gap is the other half. Locke and Latham are blunt that goals need feedback: without knowing how they are doing, they write, it is difficult or impossible for people to adjust the level or direction of their effort, and goals plus feedback beat goals alone. That is the half of Ledecky's slip everyone drops. A target with no measured gap is a wish.

The behavior-change literature lands in the same place. Michie and colleagues meta-analysed 122 evaluations covering 44,747 people in Health Psychology (2009). Self-monitoring explained more of the difference between programs than any other single technique, and programs combining it with at least one other self-regulation technique — goal setting or feedback among them — reached an effect size of 0.42 versus 0.26. Target plus record, not target alone.

Why writing it first is different from writing it after

Almost everyone who tracks anything tracks it backwards. You run, then log the run — honest, but never at risk, because you write it once you know the answer.

A want time is at risk. It goes on paper while the result is unknown, and the result either clears it or does not. That is why the paper has to exist beforehand — a goal kept in your head gets quietly downgraded at 3pm on race day and you never catch yourself doing it.

Then the part that makes her version unusual: the paper survives. Most people miss a target and throw the evidence away. She brings the sheet to the next meet, so the next target gets set with the last result sitting right there. Over years that stack is the only honest answer to "am I actually getting better" — a question no single result can settle.

How to run it yourself, starting tonight

• Pick one thing you can measure, and write tomorrow's target on paper tonight. Steps, minutes asleep, pages, a lift. One number, somewhere you will not quietly edit it.
• Make it a stretch you would clear about seven times in ten. Harder beats vaguer, but only within your ability. Ledecky's 3:56 sat three seconds under a world record after years of closing on it. Uncomfortable, not fictional.
• Write the gap the next day, with its sign. Not "went okay". Target 8,000, actual 6,400, minus 1,600. The minus sign is the useful part, and the part people skip.
• Keep the paper and write the next target underneath. One page running downward, so the last line is visible as you write the next.
• Review the column every Sunday, five minutes. Clearing it eight times out of ten? Raise the number. Under three? Lower it. A target you never hit becomes background noise.

The mistakes that kill this habit

Setting an outcome you do not control. "Win the race" is not a want time. She cannot control the other swimmers, so the target is a clock reading. Pick a number that answers to your effort.

Writing the target after you already know the result. The most common failure, and it does not feel like cheating. Set it the night before, somewhere you will not revise it, or the habit does nothing.

Skipping the gap. A page of targets with no results beside them is a wish list. The Michie finding is specifically that self-monitoring plus another self-regulation technique beat either alone.

Impossible numbers. Locke and Latham found performance dropped off once goals passed the limits of ability. A target you know you will never hit gets ignored within a week, and then so does the notebook.

Throwing away the misses. The misses are the data. She kept the sheet whichever way the number went. Keep only the wins and you have a scrapbook, and a scrapbook cannot tell you whether you are improving.

Where HealthBrew fits

HealthBrew's nightly close asks for a number and a few honest lines, and shows them back weekly so you can see what your good stretches have in common. The want-time idea is worth stealing on top of it: write the number before the day starts, and the gap after it ends. Your first 30 closes are free, no credit card.

One last thing. We picked Ledecky because she is the best there has ever been at her event, which makes her a badly biased example. Plenty of swimmers wrote want times on scraps of paper and never made a final. The paper did not make her fast — it made her honest about whether she was getting faster, and that part is available to anyone with a pen.

Educational content, not medical advice. The "want times" quotes are Ledecky's own, from her September 2025 interview with The Athletic as reported by Swimming World on 26 September 2025 — the original is paywalled and we did not read it directly. Beilke quotes: Nick Zaccardi, NBC Sports, 27 June 2016. The Rio target times, set with Gemmell in autumn 2013 and kept private even from her family: Dave Sheinin, The Washington Post, 10 August 2016. The widely repeated "565" reading of the ink on the buoy appears in no source we could read, so we do not state it; the pull-buoy details are reported, not verified by us. Locke & Latham, American Psychologist 57(9), 2002, read in full as the published PDF; Michie et al., Health Psychology 28(6), 2009, read from the published abstract.