Dara Torres is amazing. My heroine.

Have to tell a personal story. In May of 2000, Dara was swimming in a
pre-Olympic event in Irvine. My Dad (then 86) and I were timing in
lane 4. Dara had several races that day, where she was in lane 4 and
Jenny Thompson in lane 5. Thompson was all concentration and focus.
Dara was all fun and games. She was then 33 and introduced herself to
my father and smiled and even did a little pretend flirt with him.
Then just got up on the blocks and won the race. Later on, she came
up for her next race, tapped my Dad on the shoulder and said "I'm
baaaack." And won again.

What a terrific, terrific young woman. My Dad's now 94 and he watched/
cheered every one of her races this week. Called me up, just to make
sure I was watching, too (duhhh, as if I'd miss it).

Dara was concerned about the potential for doping accusations. She
enrolled in an accelerated testing program (Phelps is in it, also),
wherein she gets BOTH urine and blood tests, on frequent intervals, as
well as providing "banked" samples for future testing, with future
technology. This doesn't provide 100% proof, but it's all she can do
to convince everyone that she's clean.

Dara does benefit from having had very wealthy parents (she recently
lost her father). She travels with a real entourage of personal
coaches, trainers, psychologist, masseuse, etc. This is a definite
advantage, but, again, she's 41 and she's got to swim the races,
herself.

On to Erik Vendt. He's such a class guy, but, what a bone-headed
mistake. Swims 14:50 in prelims one day before finals; then, not
surprisingly, flames out, going 15:07 in finals and not making the
team (I think he'll still go in the 4 x 200 relay).

Wondering about Larsen Jensen. As noted earlier, he's training with
SprintSalo (Dave Salo) and he's clearly much faster in the 400 (where
he finished 1st in 3:43), but he clearly ran out of gas in the 1500.
So maybe the increased speed did come at a cost.

Peter Vanderkay's 14:45 was pretty special. He looked to be on cruise
control and the swim looked easy.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/beijing_olympics/story/0,27313,23980665-5014197,00.html

- Larry Weisenthal

Dara Torres showed part of her very interesting dry-land training on the
the CBS Early show this am. I would characterize it as very kinetic
weight lifting, ala kettlebells, but with various equipment. She also
stresses the need to rest and has stretching coaches stretch her 3 times
per week. I tried to find video, but there doesn't seem to be any on
the CBS website.
I don't remember the exact figures, but she now does about one-third of
the swim training that she used to do per week.
Madelaine

runnswim@aol.com (Larry Weisenthal) wrote:
> Dara Torres is amazing. My heroine.
>
> Have to tell a personal story. In May of 2000, Dara was swimming in a
> pre-Olympic event in Irvine. My Dad (then 86) and I were timing in
> lane 4. Dara had several races that day, where she was in lane 4 and
> Jenny Thompson in lane 5. Thompson was all concentration and focus.
> Dara was all fun and games. She was then 33 and introduced herself to
> my father and smiled and even did a little pretend flirt with him.
> Then just got up on the blocks and won the race. Later on, she came
> up for her next race, tapped my Dad on the shoulder and said "I'm
> baaaack." And won again.
>
> What a terrific, terrific young woman. My Dad's now 94 and he watched/
> cheered every one of her races this week. Called me up, just to make
> sure I was watching, too (duhhh, as if I'd miss it).
>
> Dara was concerned about the potential for doping accusations. She
> enrolled in an accelerated testing program (Phelps is in it, also),
> wherein she gets BOTH urine and blood tests, on frequent intervals, as
> well as providing "banked" samples for future testing, with future
> technology. This doesn't provide 100% proof, but it's all she can do
> to convince everyone that she's clean.
>
> Dara does benefit from having had very wealthy parents (she recently
> lost her father). She travels with a real entourage of personal
> coaches, trainers, psychologist, masseuse, etc. This is a definite
> advantage, but, again, she's 41 and she's got to swim the races,
> herself.
>
> On to Erik Vendt. He's such a class guy, but, what a bone-headed
> mistake. Swims 14:50 in prelims one day before finals; then, not
> surprisingly, flames out, going 15:07 in finals and not making the
> team (I think he'll still go in the 4 x 200 relay).
>
> Wondering about Larsen Jensen. As noted earlier, he's training with
> SprintSalo (Dave Salo) and he's clearly much faster in the 400 (where
> he finished 1st in 3:43), but he clearly ran out of gas in the 1500.
> So maybe the increased speed did come at a cost.
>
> Peter Vanderkay's 14:45 was pretty special. He looked to be on cruise
> control and the swim looked easy.
>
> http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/beijing_olympics/story/0,27313,23980665-5014197,00.html
>
> - Larry Weisenthal
>
>
>
>

I read where Torres swims only 2 hours per workout, only 5 days per
week. That's only 10 hours a week of swimming !

- Larry Weisenthal

<runnswim@aol.com> wrote in message
news:309f6aa8-7157-4ece-ad3f-d172e529e6fa@y21g2000hsf.googlegroups.com...
>I read where Torres swims only 2 hours per workout, only 5 days per
> week. That's only 10 hours a week of swimming !
>
> - Larry Weisenthal

The biggest thing to go with age is recovery, IMHO. I have, again and
again, been reminded of this fact in my own training, and I have learned
that I can't follow "by the book" a vigorous training program written
for people 1/3 or 1/2 my age.

-S-

"Larry Weisenthal" wrote:

>I read where Torres swims only 2 hours
>per workout, only 5 days per week.
>That's only 10 hours a week of
>swimming !

It's amazing that she's able to perform in competition at the level of
those half her age. She's truly the inspirational catalyst for the US
team going to Beijing. If they (US Swimming) haven't selected a team
captain yet for the 2008 team, she should certainly be first in the
running IMO.

On Mon, 7 Jul 2008 04:00:18 -0700 (PDT), "runnswim@aol.com (Larry
Weisenthal)" <runnswim@aol.com> wrote:

>
>Peter Vanderkay's 14:45 was pretty special. He looked to be on cruise
>control and the swim looked easy.

And supposedly he's not even sure he wants to swim the 1500 next
month!

Dave Clary
Corpus Christi, TX
http://davegetsfit.blogspot.com
Diet, Exercise, and Golf!

runnswim@aol.com wrote:
> On to Erik Vendt. He's such a class guy, but, what a bone-headed
> mistake. Swims 14:50 in prelims one day before finals; then, not
> surprisingly, flames out, going 15:07 in finals and not making the
> team (I think he'll still go in the 4 x 200 relay).

I've been following the results day by day and found it quite surprising that
the fastest qualifier in the 1500m couldn't finish in the top two. That can't
happen often.

>
> Wondering about Larsen Jensen. As noted earlier, he's training with
> SprintSalo (Dave Salo) and he's clearly much faster in the 400 (where
> he finished 1st in 3:43), but he clearly ran out of gas in the 1500.
> So maybe the increased speed did come at a cost.
>
> Peter Vanderkay's 14:45 was pretty special. He looked to be on cruise
> control and the swim looked easy.
>
> http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/beijing_olympics/story/0,27313,23980665-5014197,00.html

That article has this quote from Torres at the end:
"They have girls in the world going 24.1 and 23.9, so I have five more weeks to
try to drop a couple of tenths to be in the competition with those girls ... I
want to win a medal.''

It doesn't say who "they" is, but I guess from the times she's referring to the
Australians.

"DavidW" wrote:

>That article has this quote from Torres at
>the end: "They have girls in the world
>going 24.1 and 23.9, so I have five more
>weeks to try to drop a couple of tenths to
>be in the competition with those girls ... I
>want to win a medal.''

>It doesn't say who "they" is, but I guess
>from the times she's referring to the
>Australians.

First of all it should be "who 'they' are" rather than "who 'they' is."
Secondly, Dara's not doing that bad considering the fact that she's
almost twice the age of those girls and not that far off their times.
Her upcoming fifth Olympic swimming competition is very impressive in
and of itself. A medal win would be "icing on the cake."

Steve Curtis wrote:
> "DavidW" wrote:
>
>> That article has this quote from Torres at
>> the end: "They have girls in the world
>> going 24.1 and 23.9, so I have five more
>> weeks to try to drop a couple of tenths to
>> be in the competition with those girls ... I
>> want to win a medal.''
>
>> It doesn't say who "they" is, but I guess
>> from the times she's referring to the
>> Australians.
>
> First of all it should be "who 'they' are" rather than "who 'they'
> is."

I see that you've taken my advice and worked on your English skills.

> Secondly, Dara's not doing that bad considering the fact that
> she's almost twice the age of those girls and not that far off their
> times.

I'll say. It's quite incredible that the best young swimmers can't beat her.
Also, I would have thought that short sprints are the least favourable races for
an old-timer.

> Her upcoming fifth Olympic swimming competition is very
> impressive in and of itself. A medal win would be "icing on the cake."

After this, I won't be surprised by a medal, even a gold one. She's close enough
that a better start than her main rivals might make the difference.

"DavidW" wrote:

>Steve Curtis wrote:

>>"DavidW" wrote:

>>>It doesn't say who "they" is, but I
>>>guess from the times she's referring to
>>>the Australians.

>>First of all it should be "who 'they' are"
>>rather than "who 'they' is."

>I see that you've taken my advice and
>worked on your English skills.

Sorry, but I rely on my own skills without outside aid, especially if
one supposedly offers advice while making a faux pas like "they is."

"DavidW" <no@email.provided> wrote in message
news:DGAck.66210$8k7.17033@fe111.usenetserver.com...
> Steve Curtis wrote:
>> "DavidW" wrote:
>>

snip

>
> I'll say. It's quite incredible that the best young swimmers can't beat
> her. Also, I would have thought that short sprints are the least
> favourable races for an old-timer.

There just isn't enough data to say. Since she dropped the 100 to
concentrate
on the 50, in the wake of her talking about how beat up she felt, it seems
that she feels better about a shorter event.

Frankly, I think it's more amazing to see how some of the 18-20 year old
women are swimming, dealing with the female hormone storms, and the
dramatic body changes is as hard as aging.

Al Oerter finished 4th in the discus in the US Oly trials in 1980
at age 43, he threw his lifetime best in that meet. I don't know
that the rules have been written yet for what some geezers can do if they
train and they have talent.

Mike Sullivan wrote:
> "DavidW" <no@email.provided> wrote in message
> news:DGAck.66210$8k7.17033@fe111.usenetserver.com...
>> Steve Curtis wrote:
>>> "DavidW" wrote:
>>>
>
> snip
>
>>
>> I'll say. It's quite incredible that the best young swimmers can't
>> beat her. Also, I would have thought that short sprints are the least
>> favourable races for an old-timer.
>
> There just isn't enough data to say. Since she dropped the 100 to
> concentrate
> on the 50, in the wake of her talking about how beat up she felt, it
> seems that she feels better about a shorter event.

If not for physiological reasons, the sheer number of young swimmers competing
in the shorter events would normally be insurmountable competition for a 41yo.
She wouldn't have many to beat if she were an 800m swimmer.

"DavidW" <no@email.provided> wrote in message
news:0DBck.37350$5y2.19567@fe113.usenetserver.com...
> Mike Sullivan wrote:
>> "DavidW" <no@email.provided> wrote in message
>> news:DGAck.66210$8k7.17033@fe111.usenetserver.com...
>>> Steve Curtis wrote:
>>>> "DavidW" wrote:
>>>>
>>
>> snip
>>
>>>
>>> I'll say. It's quite incredible that the best young swimmers can't
>>> beat her. Also, I would have thought that short sprints are the least
>>> favourable races for an old-timer.
>>
>> There just isn't enough data to say. Since she dropped the 100 to
>> concentrate
>> on the 50, in the wake of her talking about how beat up she felt, it
>> seems that she feels better about a shorter event.
>
> If not for physiological reasons, the sheer number of young swimmers
> competing in the shorter events would normally be insurmountable
> competition for a 41yo. She wouldn't have many to beat if she were an 800m
> swimmer.

Suppose there's a physiological advantage for older women (in their early
30s)
over women 17-22? What if that advantage were such that it overcomes the
quantity of the opposition to be overcome?

Torres at 41 is beyond that, of course, and could well be a physiological
freak,
but when athletes 'retire' anymore, they stay much more active than those of
30 years ago. If they stay active, they can always build on whatever base
they've previously established athletically. The mental part is likely
the hardest,
when you are used to out-training others to win, how you do less and do it
better.

In my sport, Rowing, Steven Redgrave won a gold in the four at age 41. He
wasn't the athlete he was at 37 or 33 or 28 when he won his previous golds,
but was better than he was at age 20.

He was simply unable to train at levels he could in his 30s(he would wear
out), but still had
the aerobic base and the ability to train intensely and race.

Mike Sullivan wrote:
> "DavidW" <no@email.provided> wrote in message
>>
>> If not for physiological reasons, the sheer number of young swimmers
>> competing in the shorter events would normally be insurmountable
>> competition for a 41yo. She wouldn't have many to beat if she were
>> an 800m swimmer.
>
> Suppose there's a physiological advantage for older women (in their
> early 30s)
> over women 17-22? What if that advantage were such that it
> overcomes the quantity of the opposition to be overcome?

I suppose it's possible, but swimming has become known more than any other sport
as belonging to the young. So often the fastest swimmers are in their mid-teens.

> Torres at 41 is beyond that, of course, and could well be a
> physiological freak,
> but when athletes 'retire' anymore, they stay much more active than
> those of 30 years ago. If they stay active, they can always build on
> whatever base they've previously established athletically. The
> mental part is likely the hardest,
> when you are used to out-training others to win, how you do less and
> do it better.
>
> In my sport, Rowing, Steven Redgrave won a gold in the four at age
> 41. He wasn't the athlete he was at 37 or 33 or 28 when he won his
> previous golds, but was better than he was at age 20.
>
> He was simply unable to train at levels he could in his 30s(he would
> wear out), but still had
> the aerobic base and the ability to train intensely and race.

I'm a bit sceptical of the punishing training that young swimmers do. I wonder
if it just became accepted wisdom without scientific evidence that you have to
nearly kill yourself in training to swim fast. Coaches used to drive players in
the local football code into the ground during the week, believing that it gave
them maximum fitness for Saturday's game, but now they are trained a lot less
because that works better.

Glad to hear your Dad is still kicking, Larry. (Figuratively and
literally ... assuming he still swims)

I'm a big fan of Erik Vendt's. He's a "little guy" (I would guess
5'10") so incredible that he hangs in there with all those monsters.
When he was at USC, he would sometimes workout so hard that he
couldn't get out of the pool - his teammates would yank him out from
the edge. He planned to join the military after the last Olympics ala
Pat Tillman. But he took a trip abroad after graduating and came home
with a different perspective I guess.

Peter Vanderkay is the only swimmer in the world that I know of who
radically changes his stroke in the middle of the race. I downloaded
the video form the 200 relay at the 2004 Olympics. Vanderkay "loped"
the first 100 with a 4-beat kick. At 100m he switched to a two-beat
crossover so his stroke got substantially shorter. I read where Terry
Laughlin observed a workout at Michigan. He discussed how a certain
swimmer (unnamed) would radically change his stroke during the workout
when his teammates would push him. His stroke got substantially
shorter. Of course Terry considered that a huge faux pas and said
that the swimmer should practice "gears" - that is swimming at
different paces with the same stroke length. What a foolish thing to
say. I all but guarantee you the swimer was Vanderkay who switched to
his two-beat crossover at times. Terry thought his stroke was falling
apart and getting shorter, when in fact Vanderkay was substantially
changing his style. I tell 'ya - it's amazing with what little wisdom
the (swimming) world is ruled.

-Eric

DavidW wrote:
> Mike Sullivan wrote:
>> "DavidW" <no@email.provided> wrote in message
>>> If not for physiological reasons, the sheer number of young swimmers
>>> competing in the shorter events would normally be insurmountable
>>> competition for a 41yo. She wouldn't have many to beat if she were
>>> an 800m swimmer.
>> Suppose there's a physiological advantage for older women (in their
>> early 30s)
>> over women 17-22? What if that advantage were such that it
>> overcomes the quantity of the opposition to be overcome?
>
> I suppose it's possible, but swimming has become known more than any other sport
> as belonging to the young. So often the fastest swimmers are in their mid-teens.
>
>> Torres at 41 is beyond that, of course, and could well be a
>> physiological freak,
>> but when athletes 'retire' anymore, they stay much more active than
>> those of 30 years ago. If they stay active, they can always build on
>> whatever base they've previously established athletically. The
>> mental part is likely the hardest,
>> when you are used to out-training others to win, how you do less and
>> do it better.
>>
>> In my sport, Rowing, Steven Redgrave won a gold in the four at age
>> 41. He wasn't the athlete he was at 37 or 33 or 28 when he won his
>> previous golds, but was better than he was at age 20.
>>
>> He was simply unable to train at levels he could in his 30s(he would
>> wear out), but still had
>> the aerobic base and the ability to train intensely and race.
>
> I'm a bit sceptical of the punishing training that young swimmers do. I wonder
> if it just became accepted wisdom without scientific evidence that you have to
> nearly kill yourself in training to swim fast. Coaches used to drive players in
> the local football code into the ground during the week, believing that it gave
> them maximum fitness for Saturday's game, but now they are trained a lot less
> because that works better.
>
>
It would be hard to quantify what she does by way of training. I'm not
sure her training qualifies as "less" since she seems to do a lot of
very, very sophisticated dry land training, and relatively very little
swimming. The few seconds I saw of her dry land training were like
nothing I've ever seen. My impression is that they had analyzed the
exact muscles, tendons, nervous reactions she needed to excel and they
work those every day rather than having her pound out miles of pool
conditioning (I think she still swims 65,000 meters a week, something
like that, and it must be squeezed into that 10 hours...I'm relying on
memory of what I briefly heard while eating breakfast)
She was doing some fast cross-overs with both hands with cables, then
she did an advanced version of a back arch off of a fitness ball, and
much more.
Now I wish I had a DVR!
Madelaine

DavidW wrote:
>
> I suppose it's possible, but swimming has become known more than any other sport
> as belonging to the young. So often the fastest swimmers are in their mid-teens.

They are? I can't think offhand of a single swimmer who reached their
peak in their teens, let alone in their mid-teens.

The available evidence suggests that most competitive swimmers reach
their peak in their late 20s, unless they decide to bow out of the sport
earlier than that (as, say, Ian Thorpe did).

> I'm a bit sceptical of the punishing training that young swimmers do. I wonder
> if it just became accepted wisdom without scientific evidence that you have to
> nearly kill yourself in training to swim fast. Coaches used to drive players in
> the local football code into the ground during the week, believing that it gave
> them maximum fitness for Saturday's game, but now they are trained a lot less
> because that works better.

I was interested to learn that Gary Hall, Jr. was using spin classes to
do his aerobic conditioning. When I asked him why he didn't do it
through swimming, he explained that there was no way he could swim
enough laps to do aerobic conditioning while maintaining good technique,
so he preferred to do his aerobic conditioning through spin classes and
to make what he did in the water be high in quality.


Bob

On Jul 7, 11:40 pm, "DavidW" <n...@email.provided> wrote:
>
> I suppose it's possible, but swimming has become known more than any other sport
> as belonging to the young. So often the fastest swimmers are in their mid-teens.

I would have thought women's gymnastics had that honor. There are
quite a few young elite swimmers (a young Amanda Beard comes to mind),
but most of the elite seem to be in their 20s.


Ross

Insightful post, Eric. I remember the Laughlin/Michigan anecdote.

Yeah, my Dad still swims an hour a day. He'll be 95 in November. He
swims mostly backstroke now, because he's got a pronounced forward
curvature of his spine (kyphosis), which makes him very un-
hydrodynamic when he swims freestyle, but leaves him shaped just like
a boat when he swims backstroke. So his backstroke is much faster.
He's planning on swimming long course masters this summer. He also
still drives over 10K miles per year (drove from South Florida to
Louisville to Long Island, then on to upstate NY, before he heads back
to Louisville and then back to south Florida. He has a ritual when he
does the drive in the summer of stopping off at the Tennessee River to
do a nice open water swim.

Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach

"Madelaine" <mgd@sei.cmu.edu> a écrit dans le message de news:
g4tgh3$uss$1@usenet02.sei.cmu.edu...
> Dara Torres showed part of her very interesting dry-land training on the
> the CBS Early show this am. I would characterize it as very kinetic
> weight lifting, ala kettlebells, but with various equipment. She also
> stresses the need to rest and has stretching coaches stretch her 3 times
> per week. I tried to find video, but there doesn't seem to be any on
> the CBS website.
> I don't remember the exact figures, but she now does about one-third of
> the swim training that she used to do per week.
> Madelaine


You should have a look here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/magazine/29torres-t.html?sq=dara%20torres&st=nyt&scp=4&pagewanted=all

There is even a 5 min video with her resistance-stretching technique...

-- Olivier


Quoted article:


June 29, 2008
A Swimmer of a Certain Age
By ELIZABETH WEIL
NEAR THE WARM-UP POOL AT THE Missouri Grand Prix swim meet, in Columbia, a
crop of Olympic hopefuls lolled around in practice suits and towels on a
Saturday morning in February. Fully clothed among them stood some relics of
Olympics past: Scott Goldblatt, who won a gold medal in the 2004 Games, wore
an aqua sport coat and a striped tie and was doing on-air commentary for
Swimnetwork.com; Mel Stewart, who won two golds and a bronze in 1992, wore
the same goofy get-up, working as Goldblatt's sidekick. Meanwhile, Dara
Torres, who won the first of her nine Olympic medals in 1984, a year before
Michael Phelps was born, stripped off her baggy T-shirt and sweat pants,
revealing a breathtaking body in a magenta Speedo. She pulled on a cap
marked with her initials and prepared to swim. Torres is now 41 and the
mother of a 2-year-old daughter, Tessa Grace. She broke her first of three
world records in 1982, at 14, and she has retired from swimming and come
back three times, her latest effort built on an obsessive attention to her
aging body.

Torres's retinue includes a head coach, a sprint coach, a strength coach,
two stretchers, two masseuses, a chiropractor and a nanny, at the cost of at
least $100,000 per year. At the Olympic trials, this week, in Omaha, Neb.,
she's expected to swim fast enough to make her fifth Olympic team. If she
does, she'll be the first American swimmer to compete in five Olympics
(despite sitting out 1996 and 2004). She'll also be oldest female swimmer in
the history of the Olympic games.

Stewart walked over to give Torres a hug, but he stopped himself short. "I
don't want to mess anything up," he said, laughing, patting the air around
her torso.

Last November in Germany, Torres clocked 23.82 seconds in the 50-meter
freestyle short course, breaking the American record and making her one of
only five women to swim the event in less than 24 seconds. The day after she
got home to South Florida, she had a bone spur shaved out of her shoulder.
In early January, she had another operation, to deal with a torn meniscus in
her knee. Now just five weeks after the latest procedure, Torres looked
great. She flashed her wide-open smile at Stewart and dove in the pool.
Stewart retreated to Goldblatt and shrugged. "Hey, we'd all be in there if
we could be winning," he said.

As Torres swam, her nearly six-foot frame stretching out across the water,
her head coach, Michael Lohberg, checked her hip rotation and distance per
stroke, while Torres's two stretchers, who moved from Connecticut to Florida
to aid in her training, looked for small asymmetries and tensions in her
body. Torres treats her body the way a motorhead treats his car: obsessively
tuning it up, sparing no expense. If you study Torres's face and neck, you
can see some faint signs of her 40-plus years. But barring the 13 small
surgical incisions on her knees, elbows, shoulders, hands and fingers, her
physique looks nearly flawless. Rowdy Gaines, who in 1996 was the oldest
swimmer (at 35) to qualify for the American Olympic swimming trials,
recently described Torres to me as having "the perfect swimmer's body;
really, it's the picture they'd draw in the dictionary." Her posture is
gangly, loose and cocky, like a teenage boy's. Her proportions more closely
resemble the long inverted triangle of Phelps - broad shoulders, long torso,
slim hips, long arms - than the more tightly muscled curves of two of the
biggest names in American women's swimming, Natalie Coughlin and Katie Hoff.

Torres is known for being both competitive and compulsive. Each year, on her
mother's birthday, she tries to beat her siblings to be the first to call.
In February, when a group of swimmers appeared on "The Today Show" to
promote the new Speedo LZR suit, a Speedo rep offered $100 to the first
athlete to say www.speedo.com; guess who won the money? Torres's partner,
David Hoffman, a reproductive endocrinologist, who is Tessa's father,
describes Torres's personality as "not type A. She's type A + +." As if to
explain, one evening, over dinner with Torres, her mother and me, Hoffman
mentioned how challenging it can be to do any kind of physical exercise with
Torres. "When we go on bike rides, she's gone," Hoffman said.

"That's not true!" Torres objected. "I wait for you!"

Hoffman raised his eyebrows, resting his case.

After her swim, Torres returned to her hotel to eat lunch, nap and tear two
LZR swimsuits worth $1,000 - Speedo failed to send Torres's size, 27 long,
and suggested she squeeze into 26 regular. Then she headed back to the
aquatic center in the late afternoon. Gone was the morning's big smile.
Torres was now 149 pounds of focus. Her body kept warm in a knit cap and Ugg
boots, she lay on a yoga mat in the gymnasium, readying herself for the
preliminaries of the 50-meter freestyle. Most swimmers prep for races by
pinwheeling their arms and trying to relax. For Torres, the chore is far
more elaborate, as her two stretchers work in tandem to contort and flex her
body, in a 20-minute preswim version of the two-hour sequence they do three
times a week at her home.

Swimmers refer to the 50-meter freestyle as "the splash and dash." You dive,
hit the water, go all out for about 20 seconds and then reach for the wall.
In the preliminaries, Torres streaked down the pool in 24.89 seconds,
placing second behind the 22-year-old Kara Lynn Joyce. She was pleased with
her performance.

The next morning, back at the aquatic center for the finals, Torres appeared
more interior. As her stretchers made last-minute adjustments - during
competitions they stretch her five times a day - she stared at the ceiling,
listening to her iPod. Up on the blocks, Torres looked taller and fitter
than the seven other women, who were between 12 and 20 years her junior.
Torres dried her block with a towel, bent down to start and this time
touched the wall in 24.85 seconds, just ahead of Natalie Coughlin and again
behind Joyce.

Within minutes, the three women stood on a podium. A college kid hung a
silver medal around Torres's neck.

"Can I see it?" a high-school swimmer asked Torres after she stepped down.

Torres does not relish coming in second. "Sure," she said. "You can have
it."

TORRES LOVES TO WIN, but not as much as she hates to lose. Growing up in
Beverly Hills, the fifth of six children and the older of two girls, Torres
started following her brothers to swim practice at the local Y.M.C.A. at age
7 and later joined the Culver City swim team. As a kid, Torres didn't have
much of a work ethic, but she did do whatever it took to come in first.
Torres's mother, Marylu Kauder, a former model, told me that one of her
earliest memories of her daughter swimming was watching Torres during
practice swim halfway across the pool and then stop and turn around so she
could beat her teammates back to the wall. Torres lived a privileged life -
her childhood home had 10 bathrooms. Still, when she broke the world record
in the 50-meter freestyle, at 14, the achievement didn't seem to impress or
surprise anyone much in the Torres household. As Torres recalls, her
brothers said, "Congratulations, whatever." Torres's own response wasn't far
more pronounced: "Someone told me I was the fastest in the world, and I
thought, O.K., that's neat. But those things really don't stay with me."

During her junior year in high school, Torres moved down to Mission Viejo,
Calif., to train for the 1984 Olympics with Mark Schubert, who was coaching
one of the best teams in the country and who is now the head coach of the
U.S.A. Swimming National Team. "There are some athletes who love to train
but are afraid to race," Schubert explained to me. "In high school Dara was
the opposite. I wouldn't say she loved to train. But when it was swim-meet
time, that's when she'd really shine." Despite this, the 1984 Olympics in
Los Angeles did not go as planned for Torres. At one point, she recalls, she
peeked out to the pool from the athletes' tent because she wanted to see her
friend Rowdy Gaines swim. "I remember lifting up the bottom and seeing
17,000 people and I just freaked out. I got hot, I had to go to the nurse's
station, they were putting ice packs on me." Torres swam so poorly in the
preliminaries of the 4X100-meter freestyle relay (the 50-meter freestyle did
not become an Olympic event until 1988) that the coaches even considered
whether they could substitute a veteran for Torres in the finals that
evening. But that afternoon a team captain took Torres back to the dorm to
watch soap operas and managed to calm her down. In the finals, Torres swam
her leg in 55.92 seconds, a personal best, and the team won a gold medal.
Still, Torres describes those Olympics as "just scary."

At the University of Florida, which Torres started attending in 1985,
practice became a much more prominent and difficult part of her life. The
coaches routinely weighed all the swimmers, and if a swimmer didn't make
weight, he or she had to swim extra morning workouts. At Florida, Torres
earned 28 N.C.A.A. all-American swimming awards, the maximum number possible
during a college career, but she also became bulimic, forcing herself to
throw up to make weight. In the summer of 1988, between her junior and
senior years of college, Torres was ranked No. 1 in the world in the
100-meter freestyle. But as she puts it, she "just couldn't get it together"
in Seoul at the 1988 Olympics, Torres placed seventh in the 100-meter
freestyle; again she won medals only in relays, a silver and a bronze. Near
the end of the games, Torres overheard the East German swimmer Kristin Otto,
who won gold medals in the 50- and 100-meter freestyle, tell a reporter, "I
thought I'd have more competition out of Dara Torres." "That was a knife in
my back and my heart," Torres told me.

Once her college career ended, Torres decided to retire. But before long she
felt the urge to compete again and was elected an Olympic team captain for
the 1992 games in Barcelona. With her bulimia in check, she won a gold in a
freestyle relay, yet it was her only event. "I would say 1992 was less than
stellar by her standards," Schubert told me, adding sympathetically, "I
don't
ever remember her being good enough for her." Torres had no individual
medals to her name, and her growing collection of relay medals presented a
complicated prize. She kept them under her bed in her apartment in New York,
where, she told me, they turned black with tarnish.

After 1992, Torres lived what appeared to be a glamorous life. She became
the first athlete model in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, married
and divorced Jeff Gowen, a sports producer, kept fit running and cycling in
Central Park and playing basketball at the Reebok gym. But in the spring of
1999, despite not having been in a pool, except to cool down, in seven
years, Torres decided she wanted to compete in the 2000 games and moved to
California to train. After only five months, Torres's time in the 50-meter
freestyle was 0.3 seconds faster than the world record she set in that event
more than 15 years earlier. In Sydney in 2000, Torres, then 33, won three
individual Olympic medals - bronzes in the 50-meter freestyle, 100-meter
freestyle and 100-meter butterfly. She won two gold medals in relays as
well. Though she instantly missed the intensity of training for the
Olympics - she told me she cried on the way to the required urine test after
her last race, sad that it was over and unsure what to do with her life -
she came home and again retired. "I felt like I really didn't have anything
else to prove to myself," she told me. "Plus, I thought 33 was really old.
And I was tired."

Over the next five years, Torres married and divorced again, this time an
Israeli surgeon named Itzhak Shasha, and was inducted in the International
Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. (Torres's father, Edward Torres, a real-estate
developer, was Jewish, and she converted before marrying Shasha.) She also
became the first woman to win the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach car race;
when asked to explain why she entered the event, she replied, "I'm so
freaking competitive it's unbelievable." Then, in the fall of 2005, after
struggling for years to have a baby, Torres finally became pregnant with
Tessa. At the time, she began swimming again for exercise, because, she
says, she had terrible morning sickness and she'd "rather throw up in the
pool gutter than next to the StairMaster." But predictably, Torres soon
found herself racing "whoever the middle-aged guy happened to be in the next
lane," even when she was noticeably pregnant. Three and a half months
postpartum, she raced at the Masters World Championships. Fifteen minutes
after nursing Tessa in the bathroom, she swam the first leg of the 50-meter
freestyle relay in 25.98 seconds - fast enough to qualify for this week's
Olympic trials.

A WEEK AFTER THE MISSOURI GRAND PRIX, in the muggy South Florida haze,
Torres rolled up to the Coral Springs Swim Club at 7:45 a.m. for an 8:00
practice, because, as she explained in a text message: ". . . hate getting
there last! You'd think I would have grown out of that, but I still hate
anything to do with being last!!"

As a swimmer of a certain age, Torres takes much longer to recover between
workouts. In college she swam 10 practices a week, for a total of about
65,000 meters. Now she swims five, totaling around 25,000 meters. In the
water, she does the same workouts as the other sprinters on her team - timed
sets, kicking and drills - and she dispatches each with her signature
flawless technique and the happy-to-be-there enthusiasm of a woman who was
supposed to have hung up her Speedo many years ago. "Isn't he nice to look
at?" Torres whispered to me, cocking her head toward her training partner,
the 6-foot-4, well-muscled, 28-year-old Bulgarian Ray Antonov. At the end of
practice they kissed each other four times on the cheek. "It's a Bulgarian
thing," Torres said, laughing.

Torres's innovations for keeping her body in top shape as she advances
deeper into middle age are almost entirely out of the pool. In Florida,
after her two-hour water workout, Torres changed into a black workout top
and shorts and met her strength coach, Andy O'Brien, in the gym. Over the
past year and a half, O'Brien, who is also the strength coach of the Florida
Panthers hockey team, has switched Torres's focus away from heavy, static
weightlifting and geared her training toward balanced, dynamic exercises
that stimulate her central nervous system. "The idea is not to isolate
muscle groups but to get muscles contracting together in the right
sequences," O'Brien explains. Weight training, he notes, grew out of
bodybuilding, and that low-rep high-weight tradition is ill suited for a
sprinter since a body comprised of big muscles that have been trained to
produce force only individually wastes considerable energy trying to move.
O'Brien
says speed derives from highly coordinated movements and fluid timing. Under
his tutelage Torres is 12 pounds lighter, stronger and more cut than she was
in 2000. Torres told me that it took her head coach, Lohberg, a little while
to embrace O'Brien's program, but she says, "I'm swimming really fast now,
so he can't complain."

Torres does her weight training for 60 to 90 minutes, four times a week. On
this day, O'Brien coached Torres through a series of exercises that she did
while lying on a large exercise ball - lifting weights, doing crunches with
weights behind her head. She also performed cross-body pulls with another
large ball in her arms. Throughout, O'Brien kept his eyes on Torres's
shoulders and upper back (and several of the young men on the team kept
their eyes on O'Brien, unable to afford his services themselves but eager to
see what they could learn). Nearly everyone in Torres's orbit is in awe of
her body - its beauty, its strength, its form. "Look at the way her scapula
is traveling!" O'Brien enthused, noting the place where she just had an
operation. "Dara repairs 10 times faster than most athletes. Considering her
age and the length of time she's been training, it's pretty amazing."

After grabbing a steak salad for lunch, Torres drove home (fast) to be
stretched. Torres puts as much energy - and money - into her workout
recovery as she does into her training. Nearly everybody I spoke to for this
article struggled to find a way to say gracefully that Torres's considerable
financial resources - sponsorships from Toyota and Speedo; money she has
earned from modeling, TV work and motivational speaking; plus a private
sponsor for training expenses - are helping her gain speed. Torres books a
massage three times a week and visits, as she needs to, a chiropractor, who
works his bald head to a frothy sweat as he tries to stick his hand under
her shoulder blade. This afternoon, however, she was getting her two-hour
stretch. BlackBerry in hand, pink flower bolster from Tessa's bed under her
legs, Torres lay on her kitchen floor gossiping with her stretchers, as they
used their bodies to guide her limbs into precise angles and knead knots and
sometimes small pieces of scar tissue out of her muscles.

"Dara and I haven't seen each other in like 10 hours, so we have to catch
up," Anne Tierney, one of the stretchers, explained as she sat on a chair
near Torres's head. Her partner, Steve Sierra, sat on a chair near Torres's
side, and the two proceeded to "mash," or massage Torres's shoulders and
legs with their feet - sometimes standing on her body - so their hands
wouldn't tire and they could apply more force. After 45 minutes, they began
Torres's resistance-stretching sequence, a series of maneuvers that looks
like a cross between a yoga class, a massage and a Cirque du Soleil
performance. The concept behind resistance stretching is that muscles can
gain more flexibility if they're contracted and stretched at the same time.
At one point Torres rolled onto her stomach, tucking one leg underneath her
chest (in what yogis call pigeon pose). Then Tierney leaned her torso
against Torres's slightly bent back leg, pushing it toward Torres's glutes,
as Torres worked to overcome Tierney's force and straighten out that leg.
Later, Torres moved up onto a massage table and Tierney and Sierra worked on
her tensor fascia latae, a muscle that starts on the outside of hip and
extends down the leg. Sierra used his hands and shoulders to rotate Torres's
thigh externally; Tierney stood at the foot of the table, pulling outward on
Torres's calf near the ankle.

Torres calls resistance stretching her "secret weapon." Bob Cooley, who
invented the discipline, describes it in less-modest terms. According to
Cooley, over a two-week period in 1999, his flexibility system turned Torres
"from being an alternate on the relay team to the fastest swimmer in
America." The secret to Torres's speed, Cooley says, is that his technique
not only makes her muscles more flexible but also increases their ability to
shorten more completely, and when muscles shorten more completely, they
produce greater power and speed. "What do race-car drivers do when they want
to go faster?" Cooley asks. "They don't spend more hours driving around the
track. They increase the biomechanics of the car. And that's what resistance
flexibility is doing for Dara - increasing her biomechanics."

Moments from the end of Torres's workday - her swim workout, her gym workout
and her two-hour stretching session nearly complete - Tessa ran into the
kitchen, shouting, "Mama!" The toddler clearly takes after her mom: even at
age 2, she's working on driving her plastic car between the Mini Cooper and
the Lexus S.U.V. in the garage, while standing up. Tessa distracted herself
in the living room full of toys while Sierra finished with Torres, first
working his fingers under her rib cage, a painful technique that,
unexpectedly, helps with shoulder rotation, and then pressing very firmly
with the heels of his hands on Torres's solar plexus, as if doing CPR. None
of this is comfortable - I had the distinct pleasure of being stretched by
Tierney and Sierra myself - but Torres has a very high threshold for pain
and the willingness to endure it.

"O.K., Tessie!" Torres finally yelled, standing up from the table and
sliding on her flip-flops. "Outside? Race ya!"

UPON HEARING THAT TORRES is likely to make the Olympic team at age 41, many
people have the same question: How is this possible? Kinesiologists counter
with a different query: Why are you so surprised? "Dara is extremely
impressive, but she's not as unique as people think," says Michael Joyner, a
competitive athlete and anesthesiologist at the Mayo Clinic who writes
scholarly papers about aging and sports. "Ted Williams hit .388 when he was
39. Jack Foster did very well in the Olympic marathon when he was 40. Karl
Malone earned a triple-double in an N.B.A. game at 40. Jeannie Longo won a
French time-trial championship in cycling at age 47." Torres's events -
short swims - are also well suited to competitors of advanced age. Compared
to, say, running, swimming is more technique-intensive and produces fewer
injuries. Sprints are also kinder to older athletes, in that strength falls
off more gradually than aerobic power. In April, at 37, Mark Foster, a
freestyle sprinter in England, came out of retirement and earned a spot, for
the fifth time, on the British Olympic swim team. "For those of us who pay
attention to this stuff," Joyner said, "Dara's performance is unusual but
not totally unexpected."

So why do we assume a middle-aged swimmer must be all washed up? Because for
nonelite athletes, sporting achievements fall off precipitously with age.
Body composition changes toward more fat and less muscle. Strength and
aerobic capacity decrease as well. But a primary reason that athletic
performance degrades in adulthood is changes in priorities. People tend to
devote more time and energy to jobs and families than to sports. Even
committed athletes downgrade their workout goals from achieving personal
bests to staying in shape. Academics refer to this reduction in physical
activity as hypokinesis. The phenomenon is not limited to humans. A 1985
study showed that rats with unlimited access to running wheels exercised
less as they aged. "But look at people who maintain activity levels," says
Joel Stager, a professor of kinesiology at Indiana University. "It's a
different story! A lot of what we assume is aging is just progressive
hypokinesis. How many people at Dara's age have maintained their training
consistently? I'm going to say there are very, very few."

Even childbirth needn't be a sports-career killer. In 1972, in The Journal
of the American Medical Association, E. Zaharieva published a study of 13
women who were pregnant and then competed in the 1964 Olympic Games. Most
resumed serious training between three and six months after giving birth.
All said, Zaharieva wrote, "they became stronger, had greater stamina and
were more balanced in every way after having a child." Last September,
Lindsay Davenport was back on the pro tennis tour and winning just three
months after giving birth, while in November, Paula Radcliffe won the New
York City Marathon less than 10 months after having a baby.

So how long can peak athletic performance last? Hirofumi Tanaka, the
director of the Cardiovascular Aging Research Laboratory at the University
of Texas at Austin, found that both elite and nonelite runners and swimmers
could maintain personal bests until age 35, after which performance declined
in a gradual, linear fashion until about age 50 to 60 for runners and 70 for
swimmers. Deterioration was rapid from there. Tanaka also found that
swimmers experienced more modest declines than runners and that swim
sprinters, like Torres, experienced the smallest declines of all. At Yale
University, Ray Fair, a runner and an economist, crunched statistics on
aging and peak athletic performance and created what he calls the Fair
Model. The model provides a table of coefficients that enable an athlete to
take a personal-best time and compute how long he or she should expect to
take to complete that same event at a specific point later in life (assuming
he or she has continued to train at the same level). According to the Fair
Model, a woman who swam a personal best 24.63 seconds in the 50-meter
freestyle at or before age 35 should expect to clock 25.37 seconds at age
41. "I am struck by how small the deterioration rates are," Fair wrote in a
paper titled "How Fast Do Old Men Slow Down?" "It may be that societies have
been too pessimistic about losses from aging for individuals who stay
healthy and fit."

Historically, the economics of swimming have also contributed to the
preponderance of young champions. Little sponsorship money existed for
swimmers until about 10 years ago, which tended to mean that once a swimmer
graduated from college, the gig was up - it was time to get a job. But now
Speedo and TYR, among other companies in the swimming business, make it
possible for elite American swimmers to train full time and continue to be
competitive well into their 20s and 30s. This can't fully counteract
"black-line fatigue" - burnout from spending too many hours staring at the
bottom of a pool; Phelps insists he's retiring at age 30 - but the money is
pulling elite swimmers' ages up. Economists who study sports, like Raymond
Sauer at Clemson University, note that if athletes are economically
motivated enough - if, says Sauer, they have "low wealth and poor
income-earning alternatives"- they can stay in sports until a quite advanced
age. Stager, at Indiana University, notes that the average age of
competitors at national swimming championships increased from 16 in the
1960s to 20 in 2004.

Despite evidence that older athletes can remain competitive longer than many
imagine, Torres's achievements have provoked consistent rumors that she must
be doping. These began at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and have been so
persistent in Torres's latest comeback that last September Torres flew to
Colorado Springs, Colo., to meet with Travis T. Tygart, C.E.O. of the United
States Anti-Doping Agency. Tygart acknowledges that since the high-profile
steroid scandals involving Barry Bonds and Marion Jones, the onus has fallen
on athletes to prove that they're clean, and that that's nearly impossible
to do. "Can U.S.A.D.A. give Dara or some other athlete the stamp of
cleanliness?" Tygart asks. "No, the science isn't there yet." Every athlete
who is training for the Olympics is subject to testing at any time, in or
out of competition. But Tygart was able to offer Torres the chance to
volunteer for a pilot program that tests more broadly blood and urine for
signs of doping and presumably will catch a much higher percentage of dirty
athletes. Torres said yes. (Jones, among others, passed less-sophisticated
U.S.A.D.A. tests while using performance-enhancing drugs.) Tygart has not
yet released any data on Torres's testing. But he says the fact she
volunteered is significant. "I think a dirty athlete would be crazy to
volunteer for this program," he told me. He was also heartened that Torres
did not ask how the pilot's protocols worked or what drugs they would be
looking for.

EVEN TORRES KNOWS that if she manages to earn one of the two spots available
on the Olympic team for the 50-meter freestyle, or one of the six available
on the 100-meter freestyle (which includes a relay team), this will be her
last trip to the Games. Mark Schubert, the national team's coach in 1984,
told me he's sure Torres will hold master's swimming records in freestyle
sprints at age 50 and 60 and 70. But - let's face it - compared with the
Olympics, even the Masters World Championship is a glorified losers' round,
and holding a master's world record is hardly an exciting achievement for an
athlete who hit the world stage just as she entered high school and who has
nine Olympic medals to her name. Driving home one night from a sushi dinner,
Torres's partner, David Hoffman, admitted that he'll be relieved when Torres
emerges from her Olympic training tunnel. "We don't spend as much time
together," he told me as he idled his car outside their home. "We can't go
on a vacation." Torres had driven home separately with Tessa. Hoffman
watched the swimmer standing in their driveway at dusk, her mind clearly
turned toward getting Tessa to bed, so that she could get nine hours of
sleep herself. "I can't wait until this is over," Hoffman sighed. "It'll
have been two years."

Still, the next morning Torres rolled back up to the pool, chipper and early
as usual. "Hey, Dara," one of her teammates called, "I heard you were going
up for 'Dancing With the Stars'?"

"I can't dance," Torres laughed, dipping her goggles in the pool. "No way if
I'm going to be the first one off!"

And with that, Torres grabbed her workout sheet, stuck it to the side of the
pool and got down to business. The mood at practice was calm, and as Torres
warmed up, her lean frame stretched out among the 16 other spectacular
bodies, it was easy to forget that before last year nobody believed that a
41-year-old mother of a toddler, coming off a six-year hiatus, could swim
this fast.

According to her coach, Michael Lohberg, Torres should feel less pressure
than his other, younger swimmers. "What's the worst thing that can happen to
her?" he asks. "She goes home to her daughter and her partner. Her whole
sense of self-worth doesn't come down to tenths and hundredths of seconds in
a pool." But Torres doesn't necessarily agree with that opinion. She takes
seriously her new role: hero of the middle-aged. About an hour into the
morning's workout, all the swimmers gathered in the center of the pool for a
much-loathed drill, vertical kicking. The task at hand was to hoist one's
torso out of the water, using only a flutter or dolphin kick, for 40
seconds, 12 times, with 35-second breaks between each rep. For the last 10
seconds of each vertical kick, the coach yelled, "Streamline," meaning the
swimmers, while still kicking, had to extend their arms straight overhead,
one hand on top of the other.

At first Torres led good-natured griping among the swimmers. But after five
kicks, the sets were done in silence, all of the athletes too exhausted and
miserable to complain. The coach even stopped yelling, as his swimmers' eyes
were on the clock; everyone knew when to pop up and when to come back down.
Yet each time, Torres rose to her vertical kick a second before everybody
else, and there she was, rising out of the water, for a few moments longer
at the end.

Elizabeth Weil is a contributing writer for the magazine. Her last article
was about single-sex public-school education.

Olivier--
Wow thanks, great article. The dynamic stretching is really
interesting, and the little video is so well done that I wonder if it is
part of a project for later.

CBS news now has the clip I saw up in the early middle of this recorded
interview:41-Year-Old Olympian Mom
http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=4236096n
Most striking to me is the ball workout where she is "swimming" on the
ball with large weight disks.

I guess 45 is not too old for me to relearn my flip turn.
Madelaine

Silver0l wrote:
>
> "Madelaine" <mgd@sei.cmu.edu> a écrit dans le message de news:
> g4tgh3$uss$1@usenet02.sei.cmu.edu...
>> Dara Torres showed part of her very interesting dry-land training on the
>> the CBS Early show this am. I would characterize it as very kinetic
>> weight lifting, ala kettlebells, but with various equipment. She also
>> stresses the need to rest and has stretching coaches stretch her 3 times
>> per week. I tried to find video, but there doesn't seem to be any on
>> the CBS website.
>> I don't remember the exact figures, but she now does about one-third of
>> the swim training that she used to do per week.
>> Madelaine
>
>
> You should have a look here:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/magazine/29torres-t.html?sq=dara%20torres&st=nyt&scp=4&pagewanted=all
>
>
> There is even a 5 min video with her resistance-stretching technique...
>
> -- Olivier
>