CHARLOTTESVILLE -- The baby isn't due until early September, but Adam Nelson's struggles at the U.S. Olympic trials in Eugene, Ore., last month nearly wrecked that schedule.

"I told him, 'You're trying to put me in labor,'" his wife, Laci, recalled yesterday at the University of Virginia's Lannigan Track.

Finally, on the fourth of his last six throws in Eugene, Nelson moved into second place in the shot put competition, and his pregnant wife could exhale. Christian Cantwell later passed him, but Nelson's third-place finish earned him a spot on the Olympic team headed to Beijing next month.

This will be the third Olympics for Nelson, who won the silver at Sydney, Australia, in 2000 and again at Athens, Greece, in 2004. He considers himself fortunate to be going to China, because in the finals at Eugene he "wasn't feeling very good, which was unusual," Nelson, 33, said. "I was really struggling on that day, and on a day when five other competitors there could have very easily thrown quite a bit farther than what I threw."

Nelson says he hates down time, and that's a good thing. In the summer of 2006, he entered U.Va.'s Darden School of Business, and Laci began law school at U.Va. A few months later, Nelson said he was confident he could juggle schoolwork, Olympic training, marriage and his part-time job as a reporter/videographer for a group of three Charlottesville TV stations.

Fast forward about 20 months. Nelson is on track to earn his MBA in December, and Laci, carrying their first child, is heading into her final year of law school.

"This has actually been a great experience for me and, I think, for us since we've been in Charlottesville," Nelson said. "Learning to balance our non-personal life -- school and training -- with the demands that we put on our own relationship and personal life has been an awesome experience, and it's taught me a lot about who I am as a person and who I want to be in my relationship with my wife, and a lot about the values I want to take forward into the future.

"One thing that I have learned is that being one-dimensional in life is not healthy. You certainly never challenge yourself when you're only focused on one thing, and you certainly don't have too many opportunities to grow as an individual when you're focusing on one thing."

An Atlanta native, Nelson won the NCAA shot put title as a senior at Dartmouth, where he also played football. At 6-0, 255 pounds, Nelson is smaller than most elite shot putters, but his technical prowess has lifted him to heights few have reached. At the world outdoor championships, he won the gold in 2005 and the silver in 2001, '03 and '07. Still, Nelson said, he has "some unfinished business."

In Sydney, he recalled, "I was just happy to be there. I was probably more of an Olympic tourist and probably didn't deserve as high a finish as I actually got. In 2004, I certainly suffered from lack of motivation. It was a weird thing. It wasn't that I wasn't training hard. I just didn't want to be there. This goes back to my comments about being sort of one-dimensional. I'd been focusing on training for so long that I just wasn't getting a lot of gratification out of it and satisfaction out of it."

This time, Nelson said, his preparation has been better, his focus sharper, and "I'm going to this Games with the goal of executing on the day. I don't care about the medal. . . . If I go to this Olympic Games and throw in the manner that I should, and the manner that I expect to, if I lose, it's because somebody beat me, and not because I lost. And that I can deal with."

Maybe.

"It's somewhat not a whole truth when I'm saying I don't think about the medals. I do," Nelson acknowledged. "But for me the most important thing to do is to go and execute. And if I execute at this Olympic Games the way I can and should -- and will -- I don't believe there's anybody in the world that can beat me."