June 29, 2008

A Swimmer of a Certain Age

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.

Believing by Deanna Boehm

Yesterday was Masters swim class.

For several months now, I've been arriving to Masters class and Ironwoman Canada has pointed to the same lane. I've longingly looked over at the lane where I used to swim. Where I wasn't always the slowest. Where I'd sometimes find familiar and kind faces. Where there'd be people who would be less concerned about intervals and would want to chat and catch-up between sets.

For several months now, I've swam in the lane of dread. With swimmers who'd be so far ahead, they'd lap me on a 200. With several folks who'd strictly adhere to their assigned intervals and had no interest in waiting for the rest of the group (aka, me) to catch-up. With a few guys who can be pretty darn competitive - and have thankfully tolerated me - probably because I've immediately moved over anytime they have come close to my toes.

Every once in awhile, Ironwoman Canada would shift over the superfast people into the next lane, but I would almost always still be the slowest with the swimmers that remained.

So, yesterday, I plopped myself in this lane with my normal sigh of resignation. We started our drills. I was still falling behind, but the gap didn't seem quite as large.

Then we started the first of a bunch of sets of 100s and 200s. I wasn't being lapped. I was finishing close to or before the person in front of me started their next split.

With the next few sets, I decided to try to reach the person in front of me. I'd never been able to draft off these swimmers before. But, somehow, I was doing it - I was keeping up enough to draft.

I'd finish a set and wonder when I'd tire or when the other swimmers would kick into their normal speed. I found myself huffing and puffing, but still hanging on. Even when we went to the 300, the pull buoys or the modified IMs, I was within a respectable distance.

When we ended the class, the guy who I had been drafting off of all night, joked with me and said "Next time, you'll need to lead a few sets." I think we both knew I won't be ready for that for long while, but it was still an indirect compliment - you're doing better.

As everyone began leaving the pool, I walked out with Ironwoman Canada. Around this time I was starting to wonder, maybe these guys were injured or sick or Ironwoman Canada had told them to go easy and let me draft. As I started to voice these thoughts, Ironwoman Canada cut me off.

She told me they weren't true.

She told me she'd been putting me in this lane for a reason - for a day like today to arrive.

She told me I needed to be less timid.

She told me that I had more ability than I thought I did - and that I needed to push myself.

And she told me that one of my biggest obstacles has been just believing in myself.

I'm still a little skeptical about what next week's Masters class will bring, but am mulling over these few new ways of thinking. For trying out a few revised self-definitions.

For wondering what could lay ahead by just believing in myself.

 
November 18, 2007
Torres Is Getting Older, but Swimming Faster By KAREN CROUSE

Dara Torres, the fastest female swimmer in America, plunged toward the bottom of the pool, like a child scavenging for coins. She came up for a breath, grinning. The lanes next to hers pulsed with swimmers pushing themselves through 100- and 200-meter timed sprints, but Torres was under orders from her coach to rest, the better to let her 40-year-old body recover.
It was a Friday, the end of another unorthodox training week for Torres, a four-time Olympian who is doing less in the water to wring more results out of a swimming career that was supposed to have run dry by now.
Her day had begun just after dawn in the weight room, where she worked her legs until they quivered and her arms until they ached ­ without pressing a weight or lifting a dumbbell. The 90-minute workout was the first leg of her training triathlon. It was followed by 90 minutes of swimming and 60 minutes of stretching.
Torres’s training is cutting edge so that her personal pharmacy does not have to be. A nine-time Olympic medalist who made her first Olympic team in 1984, Torres is at a short-course meet in Berlin this weekend, representing the United States in the freestyle sprints in her last competition of the year. She has the 2008 Summer Games in her sights after winning the 100 freestyle and setting a United States record in the 50 freestyle at the national championships in August.
In a one-lap race, where personal bests are typically whittled by hundredths of a second, Torres’s progression is astounding. Her age adds to the intrigue. What she is doing would be akin to Roger Clemens’s throwing a fastball harder now, at 45, than he did 20 years ago or goaltender Ed Belfour’s coming out of retirement at 42 to post his career-best save percentage.
“I think what Dara’s doing is fantastic,” said Gary Hall Sr., who was 25 and considered ancient ­ his teammates nicknamed him the Old Man and the Sea ­ when he swam in his third Olympics in 1976. “It proves that we really don’t know what the peak age of performance is.”
For every person who marvels at Torres’s motor, there are others who wonder what kind of fuel she is putting in her tank. It is the nature of a sport that lost its squeaky-clean image long ago. Beginning in the late 1960s with East Germany’s state-supported doping program and continuing through the 1990s with a rash of failed drug tests by the Chinese, the pool has turned into a breeding ground for skeptics, suspicion and cynicism, which has spread like mildew to sully every superlative performance.
“Behind my back people are saying I must be using something,” Torres said. “I know it. I hear it.”
She has been tested for performance-enhancing drugs more than half a dozen times this year, and the results have been negative, said Mark Schubert, the national team’s head coach and general manager. At Torres’s request, her blood is being drawn regularly so she can be tested for illegal substances like human growth hormone that cannot be detected in urine.
“My attitude is, bring it on,” Torres said. “Do what you have to do to prove I’m clean.”
Torres has ridden the wave of popular opinion from crest to crash. In 1994, she was the first athlete to appear alongside supermodels in Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue, her face instantly recognizable as belonging to the golden girl who graced the American 400 freestyle relay team that beat the big, bad East Germans at the 1992 Olympics and bettered their world record.
In 2000, when she returned to the sport after a six-year layoff and won five medals at the Sydney Olympics, Torres became the face of innuendo, her success grist for the rumor mill. The rumors troubled Michael Lohberg, the coach at Coral Springs Swim Club in Florida. While working with West German swimmers in the 1980s, Lohberg saw how destructive steroid use could be to the health of the users and the emotional well-being of their pursuers who were clean.
One swimmer he worked with was Birgit Schulz, an individual medley specialist who later became his wife. At the 1986 world championships, Schulz placed sixth in the 200-meter individual medley. Four of the finishers ahead of her were from Eastern bloc nations where steroid use was considered rampant. Seeing her frustration crystallized Lohberg’s stance on performance-enhancing drugs: He did not condone them and would not coach anyone who used them.
In late 2005, while pregnant with her first child, Torres began swimming three or four times a week at the Coral Springs Aquatic Complex, where Lohberg’s club is based. After giving birth to her daughter, Tessa Grace, in April 2006, Torres raced in two masters meets and posted times that were competitive with the world’s elite swimmers, emboldening her to try another comeback. She asked Lohberg if he would coach her, and he sat her down to have the Talk.
He asked Torres if she ever had used performance-enhancing drugs. “For myself, I needed to have this clear before we started anything,” Lohberg said.
Torres recalled, “I said, ‘Why do you ask that?’ and he said, ‘Because that’s what everybody was talking about on the deck in Sydney.’”
She assured Lohberg that she would never use drugs. After they began working together, he saw no reason to doubt her.
“Technically, she’s brilliant,” Lohberg said.
“And Dara wants to be perfect,” he added. “She’s very conscientious.”
People who know her say it is ludicrous to suspect Torres of doping. If she is guilty of anything, her friends say, it is of being a compulsive exerciser.
“I don’t think she has ever been out of shape a day in her life,” said Schubert, who coached Torres in the late 1980s. “I think that’s what makes this possible and conceivable.”
At the Olympic trials next June in Omaha, dozens will compete for two berths in Torres’s best events, the 50 and 100 freestyles. When Torres won her 14th and 15th national titles this summer, she became a feel-good story for baby boomers and a bad omen for their freestyle-sprinting progeny.
Rumors that she is doping are hurtful, Torres said, “but in another way it’s sort of a compliment.” It tells her that younger competitors perceive her not as a relic but as a real threat.
Torres works in the water five times a week, down from 10 to 12 water workouts in her teens and 20s.
“My body definitely takes longer to recover,” she said. “I have my good days when I feel like I’m 20, and then I have my days when I can’t lift my arms out of the water.”
The cost of being a middle-age champion can be steep, but she can afford it. Torres enlisted Bloomberg News, Toyota and Speedo as sponsors to help defray her training expenses. She estimated that she would spend about $100,000 this year on her support staff.
In addition to Lohberg, Torres employs a sprint coach, Chris Jackson; a strength and conditioning coach, Andy O’Brien, who also oversees her diet; two full-time personal stretchers, Steve Sierra and Anne Tierney; a physical therapist; a masseuse; and a nanny. She also leans heavily on her boyfriend, David Hoffman, an obstetrician who is Tessa’s father.
Most days, Sierra and Tierney are waiting for Torres at her suburban Fort Lauderdale home when she is finished swimming. They twist and pull her torso and limbs in a vigorous resistance stretching routine that facilitates her body’s recovery by flushing out toxins and lactic acid.
“People can say I’m on drugs or whatever, but they are really my secret weapon,” Torres said, referring to Sierra and Tierney’s torturous routine.
O’Brien, who is on the staff of the Florida Panthers, said, “Dara’s really gone a step ahead of other athletes in terms of taking care of her body.”
He began working with Torres last November, introducing her to an ever-evolving regimen that encompasses Swiss balls, medicine balls, bands and resistance cables. The goal of her four 90-minute strength sessions each week is to stimulate her nervous system and strengthen her core muscles through a variety of multijoint movements.
The results have been striking. Torres’s muscles have grown longer and leaner, with the exception of those in her back and shoulders, which have thickened. She carries 150 pounds on her 6-foot frame, down from 160 in 2000. Her reaction time off the blocks has improved, and she is more efficient in the water.
“Over all, she got a lot fitter,” Lohberg said, adding, “and she’s more balanced in the water.”
One of O’Brien’s longtime clients is Sidney Crosby, the Pittsburgh Penguins’ star center. For all their differences, the 20-year-old Crosby and Torres are remarkably alike, O’Brien said. Crosby becomes nervous when he is given a new exercise or task to complete because he does not want to fail.
“Dara’s the same way,” O’Brien said as he watched her complete a drill on the Swiss ball. “Even if it’s just her and a Swiss ball, there’s almost a little nervous energy before she tries something new.”
He added, “Dara reminds me of the student who’s worried she’s going to fail the test and then gets a 100.”
Days before leaving for Berlin, Torres asked Lohberg to critique her flip turn. Never mind that she has done hundreds of thousands of turns over the years. In Torres’s mind there is always room for improvement. Yesterday in Berlin, she twice lowered the United States record in the 50-meter freestyle on a course that is rarely contested here, venturing further into uncharted waters. 

An Achievable Goal for Every Race by Jay McLaughlin

Anyway, the title of this article is An Achievable Goal for Every Race, and my goal for every race – and for every training session, for that matter – is to “have a good time.” Once a friend of mine said “I always have fun – it’s just a matter of degrees.” How good of a time I have is a matter of degrees too, because sometimes I just don’t feel like working out. But long distance racing doesn’t treat missed training sessions very kindly – and you can’t “cram” for an Ironman. You have to put in the time or you’ll regret it. I don’t mind racing slowly, but I’m almost phobic about having a DNF. So I train, and I focus on the scenery or the people or the breeze or the feel of the water, or I daydream – I have a good time. Once out in Goochland I was riding solo and I came around a corner and there was a bald eagle sitting on the ground not even fifty feet away from me. He took off and flew away and I rode right under his shadow. Once I was riding with a friend of mine and we stopped at his friend’s house out in Louisa and the lady had tamed crows – this is a true story – and she showed us pictures she’d taken of them in little outfits, perched on her back porch rail. I see things and I meet people all the time that I would never get to do if I didn’t do this sport.

And even though I’m slow, the amount of self-confidence I get from finishing an Ironman is astounding. I don’t have to finish fast, and I don’t have to do tons of them. But when I finish an Ironman, I really, really know I’ve accomplished something. And I get to eat a lot!

As I wrap this up, it seems to me I’ve focused too much on Ironmans. That’s because that’s what I’ve done the most recently. But I spent many, many, many years racing much shorter distances, but using basically the same philosophy. As I used to kid around with one of my training buddies, “sprint distance – Ironman pace.”

Next time you’re working out, or next time you’re racing – have a good time. No matter what the clock says.

 
Confessions of a Lazy Triathlete by Jay McLaughlin
Random thoughts on multi-sport racing
 
At 9:04 PM on Saturday, September 29, 2007 I finished my fifth Iron-distance triathlon (in five years) and let me tell you something – anybody can do one of these things. Not just anybody can win one – lazy triathletes don’t win – but if you just want to finish, you can do it. You’re allowed seventeen hours from the time the starting gun fires until the timer stops and if you can swim and ride a bike and walk, you can do this.
 
I have about the same number of personal failings as the next person, but three that stand out are:
 
1. I like to eat too much
2. I’m vain
3. I’m lazy
 
I suspect I’m not alone in my vanity as the phrase "Swim 2.4 miles! Bike 112 miles! Run 26.2 miles! Brag for the rest of your life" is now a registered trademark. (Seriously).
 
It’s hard to balance those three things. When I was young and vain and lazy and liked to eat too much, it wasn’t a big deal. I ate a lot and sat around a lot and didn’t get terribly out of shape, or at least not terribly overweight. I was twenty-five years old in the spring of 1987 when I tried my first triathlon, only partly because I’m vain. I like to swim and bike and be outdoors. It was five years earlier when Julie Moss had crawled across the finish line in Hawaii in second place and most people thought that every triathlon and triathlete was an “Ironman.” Julie Moss swam 2.4 miles, biked 112 and ran 26.2. In my first triathlon, I swam 500 yards (ten laps) in the pool at William and Mary, rode my bike 12 miles around the campus and ran 3.1 miles. An hour and fifteen minutes of moderate effort, suddenly I’m a triathlete.
 
Of course there are a lot of reasons to participate in this sport in addition to being hungry, vain and lazy. In the movie Forrest Gump, when he’s running back and forth across the country, at one point Forrest says “I think a lot.” This is an especially excellent sport if you “think a lot.” My Ironman last weekend took me fourteen hours and four minutes and that’s the fastest one I’ve ever done. That is a whole, whole lot of time to think. And the hours and hours you spend training, lap after lap in the pool, mile after mile on the bike, hour after hour on the run, you get plenty of time to think. If you’re comfortable inside your own head and enjoy being alone with your thoughts, this is a wonderful pastime.
 
At my Ironman this year, I was happy that my race number was 103. I’m always happy to have a “0” in my race number. When I was shivering at body marking in the pre-dawn darkness, I asked the volunteer to put a smiley-face inside the zero. There’s never much chance I’ll take a triathlon too seriously, but carrying around a few big smiley faces for 140.6 miles helps to eliminate that possibility more completely. When I did my first Ironman in 2003, my number was 79 but I asked the girl who was doing body-marking to put a smiley-face below it anyway. Not only is it a good way to keep your mood light while you’re racing, it makes your first interpersonal action of the day a lighthearted one. It sets a good tone.
 
Dr. George Sheehan was a cardiologist and a runner from Brooklyn, NY; he died in 1993 when he was 75 years old. He was the first fifty year old to run a sub-five minute mile. In 1989 he wrote a book called Personal Best and he quoted a 19th Century philosopher named Herbert Spencer who said “if you wish to be a success in this life, you must first be a good animal.” Sheehan then went on to say that being a good animal is a prerequisite for being a good person. And training for long-distance multi-sport events forces you to be a good animal – you eat a lot and sleep heavily and automatically take better care of yourself.
 
Sheehan also had this to say: "No matter how old I get, the race remains one of life's most rewarding experiences. My times become slower and slower, but the experience of the race is unchanged: each race a drama, each race a challenge, each race stretching me in one way or another, and each race telling me more about myself and others." He said that running is “a place to commune with God and yourself, a place for psychological and spiritual renewal.”
 
That first little sprint I did was on Saturday April 11, 1987. In the twenty years since then I’ve finished considerably more than a hundred multi-sport and other endurance athletic events. And as Sheehan said, they’ve all been dramatic, they’ve all been challenging, they’ve all stretched me and they’ve all told me more about myself and others. Somehow I seem to be in constant need of psychological and spiritual renewal. And each finish line I cross seems to flip a little switch that makes me hungry for that next starting line. But first I’m going to enjoy some time on the bike that’s for sightseeing – and nothing else!

Citius, Altius, Fortius: Faster, Higher, Stronger

It’s the Olympic motto.  In a world where athletic events are won by hundredths of a second and competitors do almost anything to win, athletes of all levels explore ergogenic aids (substances that improve athletic performance).  The Tour riders and Richmond runners are no exception.  Legality is a concern.  Governing board policies echoe that of USOC (Olympic Committee).  This article is not saying that ergogenic aids are bad and don’t you dare touch them.  Rather, I realize that you are trying to learn about and use what’s effective and safe… so here’s what you need to know.

Water

Duuuugh.  Drink fluids.  By the time you feel thirsty, you’ve already lost 1% of your fluid volume and 3% of your strength.  It’s legal, free and effective.  But don’t go overboard, or you’ll get water intoxication: hyponatrimia.

Carbohydrates

Carbos are the body’s main source of quickly available fuel.  Loading carbohydrates for 2-4 days prior to a race improves performance if the event is more than 2 hours long.  Drinking carb-containing fluids during the event has been found to IMPROVE PERFORMANCE in marathons and longer races.

Eating a mixture of carbs and protein within 2 hours of an endurance workout helps rebuild glycogen stores and decrease breakdown of the muscles used in the workout.  This means you RECOVER FASTER.

O2

Yes that’s right.  Oxygen is a tremendous ergogenic aid.  It’s free, legal and very effective.  So use it to your benefit.  At the beginning of a climb, take a few slow deep BREATHS.  This will “saturate” your blood with O2.

Keep your red blood cell (RBC) count up, i.e.; DON’T BE ANEMIC.  Since RBCs carry oxygen to working muscle, more RBCs mean more O2… you go faster.  If you think you might be anemic, consult your Sports Medicine health care provider for a simple blood test and appropriate dietary recommendations.

Beta agonists

O2 is good… is more O2 better?  This brings us to the use and abuse of prescription medication to dilate the airways in the lungs.  Most beta agonists are USAT illegal.  But remember ANYTHING IS LEGAL WITH A PRESCRIPTION.  The most common of these medications is albuterol.  In fact, you probably have a training buddy who carries and puffs an albuterol inhaler during workouts. 

In the 2004 OLYMPICS, more than half the triathletes HAD PERSCRIPTION beta agonists for “asthma.”  If you believe all these elite athletes have asthma, then I have a bridge to sell you.

So does albuterol work?  It does.  Not only does it increase O2 to the lungs, but it also has an “upper” effect by increasing you heart rate.  Enter bad side effect: dangerously high heart rate, causing irregular heartbeats.

Other Legal Prescription Meds

Thyroid supplementation can up your metabolism, thereby helping you get leaner and faster.  Ask your Sports Med provider if this might be good for you.

Some prescription anti-depressants (like Zoloft) work by increasing you serotonin levels.  The result is higher pain tolerance and better concentration during very long (> 5 hour) workouts and races.  This is an effective, legal, relatively safe strategy for runners.

Caffeine

Runners know it works… but how?  First of all it is a brain stimulant, which helps concentration during long, tough workouts.  But moreover, it helps METABOLIZE FAT, from the stores, to the blood and into energy.  This helps conserve muscle glycogen stores.  Sounds too good?  Maybe

Too much caffeine will cause tremors, and make you nervous, DEHYDRATED, and unable to sleep.  The ergogenic dose is 250-500mg (about 24 oz of java or 8 sodas). 

Stimulants

You’ve seen these on bottle labels: ephedrine, pseudoephedrine, phenylpropanolamine, herbal ephedrine, and ma huang.  They all increase metabolism, energy, and endurance while decreasing appetite and perceived exertion.  In all regular users they cause hypertension.  In regular and occasional users they cause (potentially LETHAL) IRREGULAR HEARTBEATS. This lethal potential is even higher when stimulants are combined with caffeine.  Ephedrine and its cousins are responsible for the DEATHS of scores of athletes. 

Creatine

You ingest it in beef and fish; your body makes up for any dietary deficits by PRODUCING IT in you liver, kidneys, and pancreas.  So what’s all the hype about getting more creatine? 

Backflash: high school biology

Working muscles use ATP. Used ATP becomes ADP.  Creatine does the job of turning “used” ADP back to the “fresh” ATP.  Increasing muscle creatine means faster regeneration of ATP. 

This helps improve performance only in sports that require BRIEF (<10 seconds) repeated bouts of all out exertion (swinging a bat, jumping to a lay up).  Since repeated 10 second bouts of exhaustion are not what running is about, creatine supplementation will NOT HELP you.  Plus, creatine use results in a 3% weight gain of water.  This might even slow you down. 

Human Growth Hormone (hGH)

Hope for hGH to rejuvenate older athletes like the “fountain of youth” faded about a decade ago.  Studies showed that the laboratory made drug is not as effective as the real thing that young bodies produce naturally.  In older patients (>75 years old) hGH does help lose body fat; however, it does not increase strength, endurance, or concentration.  Although there is no test to detect its use, it is illegal.

DHEA

Dehydroepiandrosterone is a precursor of other hormones.  In other words, in everyone’s liver the body normally converts DHEA to the ergogenic hormone, testosterone, as well as to the feminizing hormone, estrogen.  Does this same conversion happen with DHEA that arrives in pill form in the stomach?  We know that in men on DHEA, estrogen (but not testosterone) levels are increased.  Women taking the supplement DO INCREASE their testosterone levels, but NOT THEIR STRENGTH and endurance.  DHEA is illegal, probably NOT EFFECTIVE, and can produce all the bad side effects associated with anabolic steroids (below).

Anabolic Steroids (AS)

Suffice it to say, in the worst-case scenario, AS cause tendon ruptures, irreversible psychosis, and liver CANCER.  They are illegal in nearly every sport organization and very dangerous.  Just say no. 

There you have it.  Eat right; drink plenty of fluids; go like hell.

-By: Teresa Stadler, MD is an Ironman finisher, dedicated wife and mom of 3, and a local Sports Medicine Physician.  Her office, West End Orthopaedics, is at Commonwealth Sports Medecine

Triathlon Fulfillment Is Highly Personnel

            Five years ago I came to Karen Holloway will a straightforward goal:  to complete a triathlon.  My intent was to set an example for my kids.  I wanted to show them how to set a goal, develop a plan and then carry out the plan.  At the time I did not know how to swim, had never ran more than a mile and owned a banana bike. For better or worse, my exercise in planning became an exercise in persistence and perspective. 

            The first race I did after meeting Karen involved a pool the swim. We both worried about whether I would be able to finish the swim.  I did and then I moved on to swimming in races with open water.  That is when I lost perspective.  The first race was in June of 2003.  It was a windy day and the water was rough.  The swells were five to six feet (at least in my mind) and I panicked.  Every time I looked up I saw a wall of water.  Finally, I struggled to swim over to a lifeboat and threw in the towel.  I was not the only person that gave up that day but it sure felt like it to me.  Karen won the race that day and several of the triathletes that she trained placed in their age group.  I felt like a total failure.

            I remember leaving the race as soon as I could.  I was upset and embarrassed.  I wanted to leave before Karen saw me and I wanted to avoid the rest of our swim group affectionately known as the Guppies.  All I could think about was why would a great athlete like Karen want to waste her time on me and that I was not worthy of associating with the great group of athletes she trained.  My cell phone rang on the way home.  It was Karen.  I ignored the call and decided that I really had put myself in a situation that I did not want to be in anymore.  I had made the decision to quit and to sever all ties with the Guppies.  I could not stand being so inadequate in their eyes.  The calls kept coming and I kept ignoring them until I finally gave up and answered.  When I picked up I had a pretty mad coach in the other end of the phone.  I was surprised because she was not upset with my performance.  She was upset with my attitude. 

            Karen explained that what she and the Guppies respected about me was that I was not gifted and yet worked so hard to reach even a rudimentary skills.  She told me that I grit and work ethic added to the group and that one swim on a horrible day was not an end but rather part of the process.  I would like to tell you that her talk was perfect and that I got it.  Sadly, I didn’t.  All I could think about was measuring myself against the rest of the Guppies and beating myself up for not being able to compete with them.  The very next race the same thing happened and I was sure the Guppies and Karen were going to disown me. 

            The funny thing is that they viewed me differently.  They set up a fourth of July swim at a local river to give me confidence.  One of the Guppies called a local race organizer and got permission to swim in my wave and so he could swim with me.  That was one of the greatest days of my life, I made in through a 1000 meter swim in the Potomac River against a strong current.  All the way through the swim, my dear friend yelled encouragement and told me I was going to finish.  Finally, at one point we were treading water in the river and I told him I would finish if he would please stop talking to me.  We made it and I am proud to say that after getting out of the water I completed one of the longest transitions in triathlon history – I had not gotten to spend much time in the transition area before.  I also wanted to look good for the rest of the race.  If you can’t race fast you should race looking sharp.  

            The following year I did my first Half-Inronman®.   It took me seven hours and twenty three minutes.  Not pretty – but mission accomplished.  Now if you are expecting to read that I went on to Inronman® glory, you will be disappointed.  I have not done many races since.  I did a few last year including two Olympic distance races.  I am not sure if I will race this year.  What I learned from the process was that I did not care about splits, that I had not interest in talking about nutritional supplements and that I had achieved my triathlon goals.  The journey was not a waste of time however.  I cherish the Guppies.  They taught me about loyalty, faith and kindness of heart.  Karen has taught me that athletic accomplishment means little without personnel integrity.

            I have been spent the last three years working with my co-workers of build our firm’s Special Discovery Counsel Practice.  While the task has been daunting, my triathlon experiences have given me the strength relentlessly chase our goals, to ignore and push through failure and to step beyond my own limits.  Finally, I hope and believe the kindness of spirit shown to me by the Guppies has helped make me a better colleague.