Dara Torres-Amazing

Holy smokes, it only took a few minutes to catch up with this thread this morning! I've resisted participating 'cause I didn't feel that I could advance what is essentially a circular argument, but one tiny factoid just blasted into my mind: back in the early to mid-eighties, Sandy Nielson-Bell was constantly pursuing Trials qualification on 50free from about age 35-43 and coming very close. She had been Olympic 100free gold medalist and the level of speed that she attained was astonishing at the time. I wonder if she would have any insight on this discussion? Or do any of the long-timers in the forums know what training regimens she followed? Not trying to make a specific point for either side here, but in retrospect, for the time period, she stood out as relevant to this topic.

Well, what percentage could conceivably look like that? I think the number is rather close to zero. She has extremely low body fat. People have no idea what "healthy" even means anymore. It's not always the same thing as skinny.

...The stay at home mom thing being more respectable for an over 40 woman came over like neanderthal view...forget dark ages... Actually, stay-at-home moms are a fairly recent thing. Neanderthal mothers would have been too busy scraping roots out of the ground, searching for edible plants, and snaring small animals to simply watch the kids and wait for their mates to bring a mammoth home. In the dark ages, most people were agricultural laborers and both parents would have had to work hard in the fields, plus women wove most of the cloth and spun the yarn for it. Even wealthy women spent a lot of their time making cloth. In fact, if you look at parenting through history, you could get the impression that people couldn't wait to get rid of their kids. If they were rich, they sent them off to boarding school at a young age, if they were tradesmen-class they were packed off to be apprentices at about 12**, if they were really poor they might sell off a kid or two into indentured servitude or send them to the factory or mine to work at about age 6. Even royalty - Marie Antoinette's dolls and toys were taken away at age seven and she was dressed as a little adult and expected to act like one. The Victorians started the sentimental ideal of mom at home, surrounded by adoring children, but of course that was mainly for the emerging middle class. And even they had nannys and nursemaids. (**To those of you with annoying teens at home, this is NOT a recommendation!!!) To both points I suggested the main problem is the way media portays women as goods, and depreciable assets who's value is linked to their size, shape, colour, etc etc. These are at the crux of societial influence on eating disoarders. Eating disorders were around at least as far back as the middle ages - some of the saints and martyrs that the Catholic church has since demoted were young women who starved themselves to death. It's a form of mental illness, it has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness, and while the media attention to thinness doesn't help, it probably doesn't cause it in the first place.

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 one... :) I've said for years, though, that Dave is my swimming hero. And it really is a cool poster. Take a look below. To take the photo, the photographer laid on his stomach on the 3-meter diving board and aimed the camera straight down toward the water. Dave pushed off on his back in a streamlined position. Awww, you're so sweet. Yes, I've been immortalized in a poster...me, Mark Spitz, and Farrah! It could have been any swimmer, though, and it would have looked the same. And don't tell anyone, but I have it hanging in my laundry room...shhh!

Wow. Long article but worth the read.

An interesting read for a Tuesday morning....... Spectre Of Doping Haunts China On Eve Of Games www.swimnews.com/.../displayStory.jhtml "Se-Jin Lee, a gene therapy expert at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, injected substance into mice which quadruples muscle mass in a matter of days."

An interesting read for a Tuesday morning....... Spectre Of Doping Haunts China On Eve Of Games www.swimnews.com/.../displayStory.jhtml "Se-Jin Lee, a gene therapy expert at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, injected substance into mice which quadruples muscle mass in a matter of days." I really like the fact that they posed as an "American Swimmer". Like many of us have said here time and again...cheating is growing both in those willing to cheat and the complexity of the drug cocktails...this report doesn't surprise me one bit...but I'm still deeply saddened that there really doesn't appear to be anything we can do about it.

I like the question about the rest of us feeling old after 40. My massage therapist tells me the worse thing we do to our bodies is sit all day at computers working.

I like the question about the rest of us feeling old after 40. My massage therapist tells me the worse thing we do to our bodies is sit all day at computers working. I think drinking soda is the worst thing we can do to our bodies.