Dara Torres-Amazing

Good interview from Newsweek 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... Full interview: www.newsweek.com/.../1 Excerpts: How Dara Torres Does It And what you could learn from her. (No. 1: Get off your butt.) By Karen Springen, Newsweek Web Exclusive Jul 7, 2008 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? Q: So it's not so much her age as her mileage that matters? A: 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. Q: But many of the rest of us feel old after we hit 40. Why? A: Part of that is just we're sitting on our bottoms. People who go to the Olympics are extraordinary examples of the human species. They can do things that the rest of us can hardly dream of doing. You don't lose that. Whatever it is that makes that, it's very clear that the very highest level of athletes, you have to have talent to begin with. There's a lot of people who've trained it very hard, and the talent ain't there. She obviously has both. Q: In the old Soviet days, there were reports of swimmers who were forced to get pregnant and then abort because the theory was that pregnancy hormones made them stronger. Could pregnancy actually make women physically stronger? A: There was not the documentation for that. The pregnancy thing, that's more of an urban legend. When you think about swimming, you think of it as a fitness sport for you and me. But at the level they're competing, it's as much of a skill sport, being able to get hold of the water and pull it is a remarkable skill. A lot of their practice is to get a feel for the water. Now you've got a person, a woman who's another two or three years older because she has a kid, that skill is still there. I don't think pregnancy has anything to do with it. It's a matter that you've had more time in your life to practice. Q: So practice makes perfect in a skill sport? A: Yes. And you're more mature. You see the same thing in track and field. A lot of female athletes come back after they have kids. You lead a more focused lifestyle. You don't waste energy. Q: Is there anything athletes can take that would not show up on tests? A: The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency is as good as it gets. They're at the edge of the curve. It's impossible to ever prove that somebody is innocent. By the same token, it's impossible to do more than Torres is doing. This person is fully participating in all the drug-testing programs; she's in an accelerated protocol. They're doing that to try to make things even better. The athletes are under notice 24-7, 365. At any moment of the day, you can get a knock on your door. You think about your own lifestyle, any moment of any day, someone can come knocking on the door saying I need you to provide a sample for me. If you're going to be an elite athlete under the USADA protocol, you must participate. The standard protocol is primarily urine testing. She's doing blood testing. She's doing what is as close to the ideal protocol as we have today.

Good interview from Newsweek 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... Full interview: www.newsweek.com/.../1 Excerpts: How Dara Torres Does It And what you could learn from her. (No. 1: Get off your butt.) By Karen Springen, Newsweek Web Exclusive Jul 7, 2008 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? Q: So it's not so much her age as her mileage that matters? A: 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. Q: But many of the rest of us feel old after we hit 40. Why? A: Part of that is just we're sitting on our bottoms. People who go to the Olympics are extraordinary examples of the human species. They can do things that the rest of us can hardly dream of doing. You don't lose that. Whatever it is that makes that, it's very clear that the very highest level of athletes, you have to have talent to begin with. There's a lot of people who've trained it very hard, and the talent ain't there. She obviously has both. Q: In the old Soviet days, there were reports of swimmers who were forced to get pregnant and then abort because the theory was that pregnancy hormones made them stronger. Could pregnancy actually make women physically stronger? A: There was not the documentation for that. The pregnancy thing, that's more of an urban legend. When you think about swimming, you think of it as a fitness sport for you and me. But at the level they're competing, it's as much of a skill sport, being able to get hold of the water and pull it is a remarkable skill. A lot of their practice is to get a feel for the water. Now you've got a person, a woman who's another two or three years older because she has a kid, that skill is still there. I don't think pregnancy has anything to do with it. It's a matter that you've had more time in your life to practice. Q: So practice makes perfect in a skill sport? A: Yes. And you're more mature. You see the same thing in track and field. A lot of female athletes come back after they have kids. You lead a more focused lifestyle. You don't waste energy. Q: Is there anything athletes can take that would not show up on tests? A: The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency is as good as it gets. They're at the edge of the curve. It's impossible to ever prove that somebody is innocent. By the same token, it's impossible to do more than Torres is doing. This person is fully participating in all the drug-testing programs; she's in an accelerated protocol. They're doing that to try to make things even better. The athletes are under notice 24-7, 365. At any moment of the day, you can get a knock on your door. You think about your own lifestyle, any moment of any day, someone can come knocking on the door saying I need you to provide a sample for me. If you're going to be an elite athlete under the USADA protocol, you must participate. The standard protocol is primarily urine testing. She's doing blood testing. She's doing what is as close to the ideal protocol as we have today.