Gold rings

Kathryn Bertine is pursuing her dream of being an olympic athlete. She's also writing it about it for ESPN.

You can read the first installment here: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=olympianpart1

In her quest she's chronicled a bunch of different sports, but the thing I found most interesting is that many of the individual sports have specific requirements you have to meet before you can even start training. For example, to be on the Pentathlon team, you have to be able to swim 200-M in under 2:40 and run a 3K in under 11:20. In the same day, just a few hours apart.

That's crazy.

Not just the times. I mean, those are attainable. But that this is public information and we could all test ourselves at an Olympic level.

I would bet, if you did a little snooping, you could find some other standards. Then you could try to meet them. That's the idea.

You may never make it to the Olympics, but wouldn't it be cool to know you could compete at an Olympic level? Or at least at an Olympic training level...

This would probably only work for the individual sports.