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Grant Hackett is back pushing himself in the pool as he aims for history in Beijing, Will Swanton writes.

GRANT Hackett is coughing and spluttering and his voice is hoarse and it’s bleeding obvious he should have stayed in bed. Everyone else is still there: it’s 5am. Go home, you fool. Fish don’t swim this early.

Hackett’s coach Denis Cotterell suggests Hackett should have the morning off because, you know what, Grant, you can do more harm than good if you push yourself while you’re sick. Hackett tells Cotterell to get nicked. He spits in his hand and shows Cotterell the evidence and says: “It’s yellow, not green. I’m OK.”

Cotterell shrugs and lets his pig-headed pupil train. Only a gun to the head, or a really strong tranquilliser dart, might be able to keep Hackett out of the pool.

Might be able to.

“I can’t stop him,” Cotterell said before Hackett’s return to competition yesterday at a Grand Prix Series meeting in Brisbane. A shoulder injury had kept him out of the Commonwealth Games.

Hackett’s normal day starts with a screeching alarm clock at 4.30am. Mercy. He arrives at the Pizzey Park pool on the Gold Coast at 5am. He’s in the water at 5.30am. And then he watches the black line, the black line, the never-ending black line for the next 2 hours.

The black line will eventually lead him to Beijing. It will take two years to get there. Only a special breed embarks on such a journey. Day after day, week after week, year after year, lap after lap, session after session, the monotony of it all. Two sessions a day of 2 hours each. Gym work, eating properly, sleeping properly, the type of physio that hurts.

Swimmers work hard for their money and Hackett is the hardest-working swimmer of them all. “He absolutely flogs the crap out of himself,” was one description of the man who has been a machine since he was a boy.

“People don’t see what a swimmer goes through,” Cotterell says. “They are up there in lights for one, maybe two weeks in a year. There are 50 other weeks left in the year. Grant has his head down and his arse up for 48 of those weeks.

“All the swimmers - not just Grant, all the senior athletes at any pool - I hope they are sources of inspiration for people. They should be. They have a lot of character and a lot of discipline and a lot of determination.”

Hackett’s official comeback was yesterday but, really, for someone like him, someone with such a raging fire in the belly, someone who is such a perfectionist that no stone can be left unturned, racing is the easy part. Hackett could race in his sleep and some days, given the ungodly hours, he probably does. In reality, he returned to competition months ago - against himself.