Swimming 1500m in less than 15 minutes is a near-impossible task but one that some of Australia's most revered athletes find far easier than simply stopping.
That's the opinion of respected athlete mentor Michael Blucher, who says elite long-distance swimmers, like Grant Hackett, struggle most with life after retirement from the pool.
Mr Blucher says fellow Olympians Kieren Perkins, Daniel Kowalski and Ian Thorpe all share Hackett's difficulties in facing challenges after their sporting careers finished.
"They emerge from 25 years with their head in a bucket of water and we expect them to be well-adjusted, functional human beings and evidence is to the contrary," he told AAP.
"The sort of people that go into ... something as arduous as long-distance swimming, does it get any tougher than that? They've got to be wired a different way. They've got to have an internal drive. They've got to have a discipline and a focus like few other human beings.
"Therein lies one of the challenges."
Hackett has endured a marriage break-up, battled depression, alcohol abuse and sleeping pill addiction since his initial retirement after the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
"Nothing is ever going to replace the adulation, the sense of achievement that comes clearly from swimming for Australia, winning gold or doing what they do," Mr Blucher said.
"It leaves a massive void in their life.
"It's contrary to every instinct they've had while they've been competing. They're invincible, they're tough mentally, they're tough physically and they're independent.
"They don't want to be weak. They can't show any weakness.
"Years and years of training their brain to do that, all of a sudden they're confronted by a completely contrary set of circumstances and adjusting to that, I can't even imagine how hard it would be.
"It's a complex issue and this is very sad."
Hackett's former teammate Libby Trickett said adjusting your mindset post-swimming to acknowledge weakness and seek help was a challenge she too had to overcome.
"As an athlete you do protect and mask and not show weakness and all of those sort of things, because that's a very important part of competition and of trying to achieve what you're working towards," Trickett told Triple M radio in Brisbane.
"The biggest challenge I faced as an athlete transitioning was trying to work out what you're passionate about."
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