…a purple speedo with a red swim cap that doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me.

As you’ve no doubt heard, Dara Torres, a 41-year-old mother of a toddler, qualified for the Olympic swim team last weekend. Score one for the middle-aged athlete! She didn’t just qualify — she bested her own record AND smoked the competition.

I’m not the only one who found this surprising, because swimming is a sport that owes more to physicality than strategy. I mean, it’s a sport where body hair is an impediment; one would think that the depredations of age and child-rearing would automatically disqualify an athlete from the top ranks. I heard a commenter on NPR, though, say that because swimming comes down to fractions of a second, it causes intense psychological pressure, and therefore a seasoned athlete does have an advantage.

I’ve never swum competitively, so I can’t speak to that. But I do know that after more than 25 years of running, I can (finally!) go farther and faster than I did when I was 16.

I have been training again this year for our town’s 10-mile race, and one of the women I have been running with likes to keep a 10-minute-mile pace whether she’s doing three miles or ten. On long runs, I often succeed in slowing her down (you’re welcome!), but overall she has succeeded in speeding me up (thanks!). Last weekend, we did a little over 10 miles at a pace between 10 and 10.5 minutes per mile.

When I was 16, I would never have thought to run that far. The most we ran in practice was 7 miles; although there were marathons and other long road races back then, average people didn’t compete in them. (Also, if I ran for more than an hour I would have had to flip the tape on my Walkman twice, and who wants to listen to the same music?)

So here I am, thanks to the miracle of modern iPod technology and a running partner who is half my size and twice my speed; stronger and faster. Just like Dara.