Another shot at glory

THE muscles may not fire as quickly and the bones might creak a little, but all-out, hard-driving competition doesn’t have to stop after the diploma’s in hand. Men and women who gave up their favorite sport after high school or college are discovering that you can go home again decades later -- be it to the track, the pool, the softball field or the ice rink. And they’re doing it in droves, finding coaches and teams and meets and matches that allow them to tap into that competitive nature that never waned. Testing themselves against their peers, or even younger athletes, they’re coming back invigorated, perhaps after experiencing burnout, failing to fulfill goals, or simply missing their sport. The four people here -- a swimmer, pole-vaulter, figure skater and wrestler -- will never make it to the Olympics, but that’s OK. As vaulter Bernie Miller puts it, “You have to go for it, over and over again. Even if you failed at least you can say, ‘I attempted it and I felt good doing it.’ You have to pursue that dream.”

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Ready for another round

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TORD BENNER

SWIMMING

BY the time he was 14, Tord Benner had racked up seven years of competitive swimming in his home state of Pennsylvania. He was doing pretty well, usually finishing in the top tier. But, he says, “I was way burned out.... It was so frustrating and boring, going back and forth and back and forth.”

So at 15, he switched to wrestling, then in college played tennis and excelled in boxing. After college came biking, windsurfing and city-league basketball.

About seven years ago, some friends suggested a triathlon. Always looking for a new athletic challenge, he gave it a shot, but during the event quickly realized he wasn’t prepared for the rigors of the combination swim-run-cycle race. His resulting resolve to start working out more seriously sent him back to the pool.

Benner, a chemical engineer from Costa Mesa, hooked up with the Nova Masters Swimming Program in Irvine -- and found that jumping back in the water wasn’t as easy as he had thought. “All the stuff I did when I was little primes you mentally,” the now 47-year-old says, “but physically I wasn’t so prepared. You swim one race and you’re blown.”

Instead of throwing in the pool towel, Benner worked harder. For starters, his technique needed an overhaul. “My stroke has changed 100%,” he says. “I generate energy from the core, and that’s not how it used to be. I’d go out there and kind of thrash around. It’s learning to get the right rhythm, then driving with the arms and the legs. It’s way more complicated.”

With life experience and maturity, Benner says he now approaches competitions differently. “I’m so much more cognizant of what’s going on now,” he says. “When you’re younger it’s more, ‘You get there and you do it.’ ”

Benner says his friends and family “mostly think I’m crazy,” even though he’s become a veteran of the triathlon circuit. “But ever since I was young I’ve been way more over-the-top athletically. It’s fun as long as you keep it in perspective. There’s a balance between training and overtraining.”

Benner’s not sure yet how far he’ll take swimming now, but like any die-hard competitor, he thinks about it as he continues to shave off hundredths of seconds off his best time (he’s made the top 10 rankings in United States Masters Swimming): “If I’m not improving anymore, but I still enjoy it, is that enough?” he asks. “I see that coming, and it’s a different mental thing. ... I think that’s the next hurdle for me.”

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BERNIE MILLER

POLE VAULTING

WHAT might have been ... those thoughts tumbled around Bernie Miller’s head years after giving up pole vaulting in college. He had loved the feeling of sailing through the air the very first time he had launched himself with nothing more than a steel pole when he was in the seventh grade.

What might have been finally was -- albeit decades later when, three years ago, he picked up a pole, planted it in the ground and once again flew. “It felt exhilarating,” the 46-year-old Miller recalls. “Like I finally woke up from a nap or something. It was unbelievable to get back out there and pole vault again. It was fabulous.”

Miller’s athletic youth was spent in something of a tussle between his twin devotions to pole vaulting and baseball. He got his first taste of vaulting in junior high when he joined the track team, largely because there was no baseball team. Vaulting wasn’t much different from jumping over creeks with a stick, part of his childhood growing up in Vermont and North Carolina. Of course, vaulting in a small town in the 1970s wasn’t exactly state of the art athletics; Miller says he used an inflexible steel pole, landed on less-than-cushy mats (sometimes beanbags) and received virtually no instruction from his coach on proper technique.

But the camaraderie, he says, compensated for it all. “It’s a very tough event -- you could break your neck on each jump,” he explains. “People stick together. Even if you’re on a team, you always root for your opponent to do the best they can possibly do. In baseball, your own teammates laugh at your demise. In pole vaulting, nobody laughs at your demise.”

He traded pole vaulting for baseball in high school until he got cut from the team and started vaulting again. In college, he went back to baseball but tried sneaking in a little vaulting on the side, achieving a personal best of 12 feet. But when the baseball coach asked him to make a choice, he ultimately chose the bat and glove. Thinking back on it now, “It brings back memories of what I could have, should have, would have done,” he says.

Post-college, Miller worked as a stunt man, did a stint on the ‘90s show “American Gladiators,” and played soccer, hockey and tennis. He now lives in San Diego, manufacturing sports gear and working as a personal trainer.

Although he never completely forgot about vaulting, he didn’t pursue it: “There aren’t the facilities for it, you’re not in tune with it, you get away from it, you get busy,” he says. But those excuses evaporated the day he started training a high school track athlete three years ago. When he soared over the bar again, he knew it was back on. He found a coach and began competing.

Of course, he didn’t exactly pick up where he had left off. Over the years steel poles had given way to lighter and more flexible fiberglass and carbon fiber, which in turn allowed vaulters to set new records. Miller had to let go of bad habits and learn a slew of new techniques, from running to clearing the bar. To improve his speed for the running portion of the vault, he’s added sprint drills to his routine, and to better hoist himself skyward he concentrates on upper body strength training.

He’d like to be able to clear 16 feet (his record in college was 12 and he’s jumping 14 feet, 2 inches now; the outdoor record for his age category is about 16 feet, 8 inches).

“As you get older, injuries tend to take a toll,” he says. “You burn out quicker, even though you’re in top shape.” In some open meets, he competes against athletes half his age, but to Miller it’s all good. “It’s an opportunity to learn,” he says. As for what they think of him, Miller offers, “I don’t know what they really think, but they applaud, they want to see you do well.”

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ELIZABETH CHASE

FIGURE SKATING

ELIZABETH CHASE’S petite frame glides on the ice as if she were meant to be here -- and maybe she was. But it’s been a circuitous route from talented teen figure skater to 40-year-old comeback who faces her first competition in 24 years in just two months.

She’s at the Easy Street Ice Arena in Simi Valley on a recent weekday, training with her coach for the upcoming U.S. Figure Skating 2007 Adult Championships in Illinois in April. At the direction of her coach, Chase practices her moves again and again as she strives to lift her leg a little further, spin a little faster and jump a little higher. But while she’s landing double flips and doing layback spins, she’s also running I-must-be-crazy thoughts through her head.

“Last Tuesday I must have slipped three times,” she says. “I wasn’t doing anything special, but I fell flat on my back in the middle of one program. I just lay there going, ‘What am I thinking? I’m too old to do this.’ ”

When she was an 11-year-old growing up in Pacific Palisades, her mother would ferry her, before dawn, almost every day to the now-defunct Santa Monica Ice Rink. But when she was 16, after years of being coached and competing, two major events transpired: the rink closed, and she overheard her coach tell her parents that she didn’t have “it.”

Chase was disappointed, but there were boys and parties and college to think about, and the skates got relegated to the closet. “But I never really considered myself quitting,” she says. “I’m like, oh, yeah, I’m a figure skater. I kept thinking, ‘Eventually, I’ll go back.’ ”

“Eventually” happened after she became a doctor, got married, had a child and set up a cosmetic medicine practice in Pacific Palisades.

She got serious with her skating last summer after friends and fellow skaters urged her to start training and competing again. Now Chase has two coaches and works out several days a week at a variety of rinks whenever she can. “I’m always trying to get back to the rink,” she says. “It’s always in the back of my mind.”

Today her mother, Judy, has come with her to the rink, just like she did years ago. She even sports the sweatshirt she used to wear, which shows a beleaguered skating mom holding a cup of coffee and the words, “Figure skating mom. Happy Hour starts at 5 a.m.”

Judy Chase slides into her old cheerleader/critic mode effortlessly, adding commentary from the sidelines that her daughter can’t hear: A perfectly executed jump elicits applause and a cheer.

After more than an hour of practicing -- in stops and starts -- to her chosen “East of Eden” music, Chase finally exits the ice.

She’s fatigued but not done in. Through the years, Chase has stayed in shape by teaching aerobics, doing yoga, bicycling, weight training, hiking and walking. A back injury a few years ago makes her cautious about some moves and fearful of falling, but not enough, obviously, to stop. Extended warm-ups on the ice are essential before training sessions to loosen up her muscles, something she never had to do as a teen. Asked if she’s nervous about the upcoming competition, Chase hugs her legs, smiles broadly and says, “I’m really excited. I can’t wait to go and get on that airplane.”

Her strategy is this: “I’d rather go out there and skate a beautiful program that makes me feel good, rather than try and do something to get more points. I’m not there for the points. I’m not there to win, I’m there to enjoy myself.”

Chase pauses for a minute. “Of course, I say that ... until the marks come out.”

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RICHARD DESSERT

WRESTLING

IF there’s one thing that symbolizes 60-year-old Richard Dessert’s return to wrestling after about 40 years, it’s a plastic-coated badge he wore at the U.S. National Wrestling Championships last year in Las Vegas. On it is his name, and below it, one word: “Athlete.”

“This is actually one of the things I’m most proud of, because I got to walk around with the other athletes,” he says, holding the badge up to his chest.

Dessert is in the wrestling gym at Santa Monica High warming up before a training session with the school’s coach, who is also his coach. Sometimes Dessert wrestles guys his own age, sometimes he wrestles high school students. “They always think they’re going to win,” he says, smiling.

He wrestled in high school and at Cal Poly Pomona, finding it a good fit “because it’s kind of a mix between a team and an individual sport.” He competed in intercollegiate matches, often placing second or third, but gave up the sport after college.

Dessert, an artist and poet, made his way back to wrestling almost two years ago because of a back injury resulting in a pinched nerve that caused him to lose much of the feeling in one leg. His physical therapist suggested he try wrestling for its core-strengthening attributes, and although the idea seemed counterintuitive, he did, discovering much more than a good core workout.

“I’m sure you experienced this when you were younger -- you’d be doing something physical and there’s this adrenaline thing?” he says of his re-entry. “You think that’s gone away, but it comes back.”

A great deal of the sport came back to him too -- but wrestling itself was different. “We wrestled more on the mat in college,” he explains, “and now it’s totally changed. My best moves were on the mat, so I lost that.” Re-learning the sport, he says, shaking his head, “was the worst. It’s a huge change, and that was hard for me.” It meant he had to revamp his strength training too. “I had Olive Oyl arms,” he says, laughing, “so I’ve been working on my upper body.”

Mark Black, the school’s wrestling coach, says he likes training guys like Dessert because “they listen. They’re not kids. They have a little more passion because they’re trying to do something, and they’re refiring the old synapses that were once there.” Although Dessert was in good shape from running, it took him six months to stop stressing about his back every time he trained. Now, he says, “there’s not a thought of it in my head anymore.”

He digs through his gym bag and pulls out his old wrestling shoes from college. “It looks like another century, doesn’t it?” he says, turning them over. Why did he keep them? “Maybe, even though I never thought of wrestling again, I think it was like a little reminder, you know? It was like a funny little dream in the back of my mind.”

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Adult programs

Many athletic organizations offer masters programs, with training or competitions for men and women generally in their thirties and older. The competitions are usually broken down into age categories so people can compete against their peers, but at some open meets (such as for track and field), people of all ages compete together. Contact:

* U.S. Figure Skating: www.usfigureskating.org.

* U.S. Masters Swimming: www.usms.org.

* U.S. Masters Diving: www.mastersdiving.com.

* USA Wrestling: www.themat.com.

* USA Track and Field: www.usatf.org.

* Nova Masters Swimming, Orange County: eteamz.active.com/novamasters.

Also, local parks and recreation departments offer leagues for masters-age athletes in many sports.