Chapter One

Prologue
I’ve been old before. I was old when I was 27 and I got divorced. I was old when I was 35 and I couldn’t get pregnant. I was really old when I was 39 and my father died. But when I was 41 and I woke up in a dorm in the Olympic Village in Beijing, I didn’t feel
old. I felt merely–and, yes, happily–middle-aged. “The water
doesn’t know how old you are,” I’d been telling anyone who would
listen for the prior two years. Though sometimes, I have to admit,
I would think to myself, Good thing it can’t see my wrinkles.
On the morning of the 50-meter freestyle Olympic finals, I set
my alarm for six o’clock. I’m a type A person, or as some of my
friends call me, type A++. Basically, I’m one of those people who
has to do everything I do to the fullest extent of my ability, as fast
as I can. When I recently moved houses I didn’t sleep until all the
boxes were unpacked and all the pictures hung on the walls. I don’t
like to do anything halfway, and I’d set this crazy goal for myself:
to make my fifth Olympic team as a 41-year-old mother. And the
truth was I didn’t just want to make the team, either. I wanted a
medal. I wanted to win. Along the way, I also wanted to prove to
the world that you don’t have to put an age limit on your dreams,
that the real reason most of us fear middle age is that middle age
is when we give up on ourselves.
It was a pretty crazy thing to be doing, especially under the
circumstances. If you’ve ever had a toddler or watched a parent
you adore die, you’ll know what I’m talking a