For Evans, whose passage from adolescence to adulthood played out in the public eye, this is a more personal journey. Anything less than a victory is no longer a stinging defeat. At the Olympic trials in June, Evans, like the majority of the roughly 1,500 competitors, will be racing for the pure thrill of it, with no expectations of an Olympic berth. If she makes it to the final eight, she said, she will be ecstatic.

“I know there are people who feel like if I’m going to do this, then I have to make the Olympic team; otherwise, it’s a failure,” said Evans, who is focused more on the process.

In pushing her body beyond what she imagined possible, Evans feels as if she has broken an age barrier.

“I struggled with turning 40,” Evans said. “It was a hard birthday for me. Someone said to me, ‘How do you feel now that your life is half over?’ I wasn’t ready to accept that it was all downhill from here. As a mom, you put so many things on the back burner. For me to find time to train, it was like this gift I could give myself. I think it can come out selfishly to say that, but it was something I could do for myself to feel good about being middle-aged, for lack of a better word.”

Evans, ever the competitor, was not willing to concede defeat to Father Time.

“It’s not about making the Olympics,” she said. “It’s about my body being able to do things that my mind is telling it to do.” Evans started swimming when she was 2 ½, the age her son, Jake, is now. Her mother, Barbara, used to tell a story of Evans’s swimming laps, then emerging from the water for a bottle and a diaper change. Evans set the first of her seven world records at 15, two years before her star turn in Seoul.

At the Barcelona Games four years later, she successfully defended her 800 freestyle crown and took the silver medal in the 400. She retired after the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, where she won no medals.