How Dara Torres Does It

You think you're fit? At 41, swimmer Dara Torres just qualified for her fifth Olympic Games. Since she made her Olympic debut in 1984, Torres has won nine medals, including four golds. (She also competed in 1988, 1992 and 2000.) She is set to try again in the 50-meter freestyle, the 4-by-100-meter medley relay and the 4-by-100-meter freestyle relay. She has the option to also compete in the 100-meter freestyle. Last August, after taking a seven-year break and recovering from back and knee surgery—and just 15 months after giving birth to her first child—Torres won the 100-meter freestyle at the U.S. Nationals. She's not the first oldster to excel: Discus thrower Al Oerter won Olympic gold in 1956, 1960, 1964 and 1968, and Carl Lewis won it in 1984, 1988, 1992 and 1996; both were in their early 30s for their final games. But Torres is still an anomaly. She submits to voluntary extra testing in order to combat the inevitable rumors of performance-enhancing drugs (and has never tested positive). So what does explain her astonishing feats? Newsweek's Karen Springen talked with Carl Foster, professor of exercise and sports science at the University of Wisconsin at LaCrosse and past president of the American College of Sports Medicine, about how aging athletes like Torres can still do it. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Does this astound you?
Carl Foster: I'm not terribly surprised. No. 1, the best predictor of very high-level performance is the fact you've done it before. Elite athletes are elite athletes, and they're a different kind of animal. She's an extraordinary athlete. No. 2, your body is sort of like your car. If you drive it enough, it gets dinged up. After a while, your car is beat up even if you never had a big wreck. The same sort of thing is true for an athlete. They're performing at such high levels, and they're training so hard, that even if they never have a catastrophic injury, they just wind up with a lot of little injuries that sort of accumulate. At some point, they retire and can't compete any more. She apparently had a period of retirement. In some ways, you can say she's not as old as 41 in terms of accumulated injuries, or mileage. The other reason people retire is that normal life gets in the way. You get a normal life, you get a family. It gets harder to do the kinds of things you need to do to prepare for an elite competition. Where is the time to do the practice?

So it's not so much her age as her mileage that matters?
That's a simple way to say it. A lot of athletes wind up with just lots of little injuries so it's not fun anymore. They wind up dropping out of sports. Other people manage to not accumulate that many injuries, or they figure out how to deal with it. Again, for me, I was an athlete as a kid, but I was no good. I could train until I was blue in the face, but I'm still going to be no good. But if I were talented and I could figure out how to do it without injuries or other elements in my lifestyle that make me stop, then certainly in the 40s it's doable. We just saw an example of it. There's a famous Olympian named Al Oerter, a discus thrower. Between the Olympics, he had very low-level performances. In his opinion, an elite athlete had four, five or six years at the top. Most people take them continuously. In his case, he took breaks.

Don't you lose muscle mass with age?
You probably start losing it, but not in a big way until your 40s, if you're able to do the training. The problem is most people stop training, so you're both aging and becoming more sedentary. That's what happens to most of us. We might weigh the same, but it's redistributed. In the case of Torres, she apparently had retired, but I heard rumors that she stayed very fit. But again, she's also an exquisitely talented athlete, and that's what it takes to come back. You could just as easily argue that Carl Lewis could come back. I don't know that he could, but it wouldn't astound me.

What happens in the 40s that makes you start declining in athletic ability?
There is an aging curve, and it starts around 40. Every decade after that, extra pieces fall off. After age 60, aerobic capacity really drops off. Somewhere out about 60, it just seems like the motor doesn't work as well. Anybody who has competed into adulthood will tell you they get more fragile, training takes longer to recover from. Anybody in their 30s and 40s will say, "I have to train more carefully. I can't just go beat myself up," which they used to be able to do.

So Torres is not going to be heading to the Olympics at 60?
I'd be surprised.

What about lung capacity in older athletes? Conventional wisdom has it that it's sometimes better to be older in longer-distance track and swimming events. But Torres is winning sprints.
The data are that in early middle age, most of the loss that normal people see is probably as much changes in lifestyle as it is aging per se. The good data are very thin, so you can't say there's a study proving this, but most athletes will tell you that it takes them longer to recover from training probably after their mid-20s. But they get the same performance results.

Do you think Torres' lung capacity is declining?
She's a very young woman in the larger scheme of things. The data is that around age 60, inevitable physical changes seem to occur. From the perspective of what we know about aging, she's a young woman.