Playing Through

W. Hodding Carter

Thanks, Dara. Thanks a lot.

I was feeling pretty good about myself, swimming a bunch of miles at Barton Springs every week. Sure, I'm pathetically slow, but what do you expect? I'm in my 40s! The mere fact that I'm doggedly putting in the miles had seemed worthy of a medal – until Dara Torres came along and put all my efforts to shame. My one consolation is that I'm not alone: In making her fifth U.S. Olympic team at age 41, Torres has put every single person on the planet to shame. Were she alive today, Mother Teresa would be thinking it's time to get her ass in gear and make something of her life. Just consider:

• Torres broke her first world record 25 years ago.

• She won the first of her nine Olympic medals in 1984, a year before Michael Phelps was born.

• Less than four months after giving birth in 2005, she was swimming the 50-meter freestyle – her signature event – in less than 26 seconds.

• She is swimming more than two seconds faster than that today, holding the American record.

• She looks awesome.

Okay, so that last point probably doesn't warrant a bullet. But let's face it: Unless you're a serious professional athlete, what really matters is how you look naked. Or, anyway, how we look in a Speedo. And Torres makes both women and men feel equally insecure about their bodies.

But the writer W. Hodding Carter has good news. It's not too late, he says. "We've been told that as we get older, we get weaker. But it turns out that we can put on muscle mass into our 80s. Dara Torres is not some amazing exception. I mean, she is, but that's because of the fire that burns in her, not because she's doing this in her 40s. There's going to be more and more older athletes competing, and winning. It won't be such a big deal. It's just going to be a lot wrinklier."

To prove his point, Carter resolved four years ago that he, too, would qualify for the Olympic swimming team – at the age of 45 – an adventure he chronicles in Off the Deep End (Algonquin Books).

Perhaps the mad dream was symptomatic of a mere midlife crisis. Or maybe, Carter told me while in Austin on a book tour, it's just a recognition that age and athleticism aren't necessarily opposed to each other. After all, though he didn't qualify for the recent trials in Omaha – he got a life-threatening staph infection, laying him up for nearly three months – he came damn close, swimming even faster at 45 than he had at 22 as an NCAA Division III All-American at Kenyon College.

"Just because I'm a certain age doesn't mean I should give up on a dream," he said. "Despite all the pain and disappointment, we should still go for it. It's a way of finding our boundaries, and people like Dara Torres show us that those boundaries don't have to be defined by age."

So much for that excuse.

Please write Mr. Hackett at [email protected].