CHICAGO – Dara Torres jokes that she had trouble reading the scoreboard after winning the first of two events at the Olympic swimming trials.

Her eyes just might be the only part of her body showing some age.

At 41, Torres is heading for her fifth Olympics – despite taking several years off, giving birth just two years ago and undergoing two surgeries within the past eight months.

Her remarkable feat has left armchair athletes doing a double-take. But exercise experts say Torres’ success at least partly reflects advances in training – and that many of us could come closer to similar achievements than we think.

True, genetic makeup certainly has helped Torres compete at an elite level so relatively late in life. As Dr. Kathy Weber, director of women’s sports medicine at Chicago’s Rush University Medical Center, puts it, she has the right “protoplasm.”

She also has three other key advantages – opportunity, motivation and incentive to train hard, said exercise physiologist Joel Stager, who directs a science of swimming program at Indiana University.

And those things aren’t impossible to achieve, as Torres has demonstrated.

“It shows us what we can do,” Stager said. “It’s just that most of us don’t.”

Torres qualified for the Olympics by beating swimmers nearly half her age in the 100-meter freestyle Friday, then set an American record Sunday in the 50-meter freestyle trials.

Most of the other swimmers on the U.S. women’s team were born after Torres first competed in the Olympics, at the Los Angeles Games of 1984. The youngest, Elizabeth Beisel, was born shortly after the Barcelona Games of 1992, Torres’ third Olympics.

Torres’ regimen includes lots of resistance training – repetitive exercises using external force to push against muscles to make them stronger and increase their endurance.

Torres “is a benchmark” for that kind of dedication, and she shows that devotion to exercise can help redefine aging, Stager said.