They say the best time to start a sport is while you’re young and fit. For Dara Torres, she out did the saying. For her age doesn’t matter and to be fit is a choice we have to make.

Torres is now 41 and the mother of a 2-year-old daughter, is an Olympic swimmer of the 50-meter freestyle, known as “the flash and dash”. Being both competitive and compulsive, her latest effort built on an obsessive attention to her aging body. She treats her body the way a motor head treats his car: obsessively tuning it up. Her proportions more closely resemble the long inverted triangle. The broad shoulders, long torso, slim hips, long arms, and the more tightly muscled curves. If you study Torres’s face and neck, you can see some faint signs of her 40-plus years. But barring the 13 small surgical incisions on her knees, elbows, shoulders, hands and fingers, her physique looks nearly flawless.

Among the seven other women she was competing with, who were between 12 and 20 years her junior, Torres looked taller and fitter.