At 19, Summer McIntosh has already figured out what most of us are still struggling with in our 30s 

There’s a kind of tired that has nothing to do with how hard you’ve worked. It’s the kind that comes from deciding things. For instance, what to wear to the office, whether to reply to the dozen group chats now or after lunch, and which emails actually need a response today. By the time your first meeting rolls around, half your brain is already spent on things that didn’t matter.

I used to think that was just the tax of being a working woman in Singapore. That was until I sat down with Olympic gold medalist Summer McIntosh.

At 19, the Canadian swimmer already has three Olympic gold medals, including one from the 400m individual medley at the Paris 2024 Games. She’s been breaking world records as a teenager, with millions watching, and is now the face of TAG Heuer, a partnership that, as it turns out, suits her approach to pressure almost too well. What she told me has stuck with me since, not because it was dramatic, but because it was so deliberately unglamorous.

Being consistent is the strategy

Before every single race, Summer McIntosh does the exact same thing. Same schedule, same order, no exceptions.

“I think keeping that the same really helps me,” she told me. “I know exactly what to expect heading into the race... there’s nothing new, there’s no surprises.” Even if something goes wrong – and she’s clear that things sometimes do – she has a script to return to.

“The things I can’t control, I really try to keep the same,” she said, “and very time-oriented.”

And that made me realise how unromantic this is. There’s no visualisation montage, no mantra. It’s logistics. She’s not relying on willpower to perform under pressure, but she has removed as many small decisions as possible, so there’s nothing left to drain her before the one moment that counts. I wouldn’t go as far as saying it’s a mindset, but it’s a system, built in advance, so that winning doesn’t depend on how she happens to feel that day. But it’s designed and not hoped for.

Pressure isn’t taught, it’s earned the hard way

I asked her who taught her to handle pressure. Was it a coach, her parents, or a teammate?

“I think it’s a bit of everything,” she said. “I had to figure it out on my own a lot, and sometimes some of that came from failing... missing the podium or missing the gold.”

She was candid that there’s no shortcut through that part. “You definitely have to go through it a few times on your own to figure out what works best for you, how to bounce back from it, and how to not do it again.”

There’s something quietly reassuring about a 19-year-old Olympic champion saying, plainly, that no one handed her the answer. In fact, she earned it by missing, and then paying attention to why.

The race isn’t the hard part, but everything around it is

Here’s the part of the conversation that actually surprised me. I assumed the hardest moment for an athlete like her would be the race itself. But, funnily enough, she told me the opposite.

“In the moment, it’s pretty easy to do that,” she said, “because I’m in the water, I can’t really hear anything around me.” The harder work happens outside the pool, like managing her phone, social media, and the noise of other people’s expectations. “You really have to stay focused and not spread yourself too thin,” she said, adding that she tries to “stay off social media as much as possible” during competition and surround herself with people who understand what it takes to keep going.

That reframed something for me. I’d always assumed the hard part of pressure was the performance itself, like the pitch, the presentation, the review. But the performance is usually fine. It’s the in-between that quietly costs the most. For instance, the notifications that distract you mid-task, the mental tally of who else seems to be managing better, and the noise around you.

Engineering the margin, not chasing it

As a professional swimmer, Summer McIntosh’s sport is won and lost in hundredths of a second, but she said she’s deliberately stopped thinking about the margin itself. “Every day in training, I’m trying to make that margin bigger than a hundredth of a second,” she said, just so that she can build in more room before she ever needs it, rather than hoping it holds up under pressure.

That’s the thread running through everything she said, whether she was talking about her pre-race routine, her recovery from missed podiums, or the noise she keeps at arm’s length: none of it is about being calmer in the big moment. It’s about not leaving the big moment to chance in the first place, but it’s about building the conditions for the outcome you want, long before you’re standing on the blocks.

It’s not a swimming tip, really. It’s just a rule worth borrowing: the moment that matters is rarely where the real work happens. The real work happens in everything you quietly decide not to leave to chance.