Turning 45 and desperate to mark the milestone, Teri Hatcher put her pedal to the metal and reached her goal – completing the grueling Malibu Triathlon in a respectable 2 hours, 11 minutes.

“I wasn’t panicked about [turning 45] – it just seemed like a milestone,” the Desperate Housewives star tells Prevention magazine for its February issue. “The older you get, the more you become aware of the things you can’t change and the things you can change.”

While not exactly sporting Michelle Obama biceps yet, Hatcher is still grooving on her new strong-armed look. “Just the other day on the set, Marcia [Cross] looked at me and said, ‘It’s great that you’re so strong now,’ ” said Hatcher. “I like my arms.”

Her routine includes a heart-pounding 10-minute workout of 20 lunges, squats, bicep curls, shoulder presses, push ups and chair dips, followed by a Pilates session.

After training for the triathlon daily with 50-mile bike rides, back-and-forth swimming in her backyard pool and lifting free weights, Hatcher didn’t give a fig about her competition when the race started. “I wasn’t really in a race against anything but my own will: Would I make it without stopping, without walking, without stopping to pee: My goal was not to do any of those things, and I didn’t!”

Now on track to keep her naturally lithe shape strong, she nixes counting calories. “I’ve never been a dieter. I put blueberries in oatmeal, but I also put brown sugar in.”

Source, Bauer-Griffin