Torres Stays Full Speed Ahead

Five-Time Olympian, 41, Believes She Can Still Go Faster

PARKLAND, Fla. -- Dara Torres lay on her stomach on the floor of her formal dining room as a small man with pants rolled up to his knees walked gingerly on her lower back, his bare feet in search of overstressed muscle tissue.

With her head half-buried in a pillow, Torres scheduled an appointment with her chiropractor on her iPhone, then began trying to persuade her toddler Tessa to listen to her nanny and take a nap. Another pair of bare feet belonging to a woman seated in a dining room chair above Torres's head, meanwhile, dug into her shoulders and upper arms.

"Tessa, it's time to go night-night," Torres said firmly, if a bit muffled.

But "I want," Tessa said before dissolving in tears, "to 'mash' Mommy."

After inspiring hordes of middle-aged athletes and working parents by winning three silver medals in her fifth Olympics last summer at age 41, Torres has returned for at least another year of unorthodox training and competition against elite athletes mostly half her age. Though her primary focus is winning a place on the U.S. team that will compete at the world championships in Rome in late July, she also is contemplating a run at the 2012 London Summer Games -- at which she would be 45.

"It just comes from within," Torres said. "Once I have a goal in my head, I just go for it."

Torres said she fully intended to retire after the Beijing Games, but after a week in the pool, a telephone conversation with a trusted coach and a visit to a psychic medium on whom she has relied for guidance for years, she changed her mind.

She considered the practical fact that she seems to have mastered the trifecta of single motherhood, middle age and a high-intensity, multifaceted training program (which includes the "mashing" she receives from her pair of professional stretchers, Anne Tierney and Steve Sierra, three times per week). And, most importantly, she believes she can get faster.

Her fourth retirement, in short, lasted a couple weeks, ending even while she was still celebrating her Olympic success. Torres appeared on countless talk shows, gave dozens of speeches, underwent surgery on national television and wrote a book due for release in April ("Age Is Just a Number").

"I knew she wasn't going to stop after the Olympics," Joseph Chalal, her orthopedic surgeon, said by phone from his office in Boynton Beach, Fla. Her swim coach, Michael Lohberg, "and I laugh about this. I knew that wasn't the end."

A Crowded Routine

Torres's life involves many moving parts and constant background noise. Except for those occasions when she sits in the quiet of her medium's office, where he has for eight years amazed her with the accuracy of his predictions, Torres has learned to function in a world of distraction, mini-crises and unexpected hitches. And she has found she thrives in it.

Tessa dragged over one of her tiny wooden chairs midway through her mother's mashing session and joined in.