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Seventy-four-year-old Nancy Callan is anything but modest. The longtime Wheaton resident says she tells it like it is and has no problems announcing that she's an all-star athlete.

"I want to win," she said.

For more than 11 years, Callan has been a regular at the Maryland and National Senior Olympics, making sure her competition knows her desire for the top spot at the podium.

"When I'm competing, I just go wild," she said.

Her competitive nature seems to be working for her: She's running out of places to put the 85 medals she's amassed over the years. Most of them are gold, including the prize gold medal her Virginia softball league won in the 2005 National Senior Olympics.

"Isn't it beautiful?" she said, admiring it at the Wheaton Community Center where she just finished playing a volleyball game with her recreational senior volleyball team she started decades ago.

And Callan said she made sure she was acknowledged Nov. 7 at the Montgomery County Senior Sports Association banquet for bringing home the most medals in the county from September's Maryland's Senior Olympics.

Callan isn't just intimidating to her competition. Her peers say they don't even try to keep up with her anymore.

"We suspect she's on performance-enhancing drugs," joked Barbara Corcoran, a member of Callan's volleyball team at the community center.

"She's a fantastic athlete," said Alice Bradford, also a member of the volleyball team.

If there ever was a well-rounded champion athlete, Callan is it. Her gold medals are sprawled all over the Senior Olympics' event list: from discus ("I never practiced at all, and I was good enough to win," she said); to javelin (she "didn't practice a day" for that either); to football toss (she threw the ball some 60 feet).

This year at the Maryland Senior Olympics, Callan tried out a sport many of her peers can play well — golf — and managed to win the bronze medal for an 18-hole course.

"That was tough," she said. "I practiced about four times."

Callan says her athletic ability came from growing up on a farm in West Virginia. She really was one of those people who walked two miles uphill in the snow to get to school. "I remember icicles on my hair," she said.

And in the summers, she was expected to rise at 5 a.m. to saw wood, cut corn, put up the hay and do everything the boys did.

Her physical childhood led her to a career in the Navy, where she worked mostly out of Washington, D.C., and became a recruiter for the Navy in Hyattsville. Her son, Michael, is a sergeant with Montgomery County Police and her other son, Bryan, served in Iraq and Afghanistan in the Army. She also has a daughter, Colleen, who is a stay-at-home-mom in Ijamsville.

But of all her activities, Callan said the most exhausting is taking care of her four grandchildren.

Considering her active lifestyle, her pet peeve is predictable: She hates to sit around. The only Maryland Senior Olympics she's missed since 1997 was two years ago, when she fractured her foot while helping some men move a volleyball net at the Wheaton Community Center .

"I was miserable," she said, adding she was so mad when it happened that she played the whole volleyball game before going to the doctor the next day.

And of course, when her friends want to hang out after volleyball and go out to eat, Callan says she'd rather hit the bowling alley instead.

"I love sports," she said.