An Olympic Bobsledder

Hurtling down an ice track at nearly 100mph, perfecting the practice of visualization, and shaving off hundredths of a second with Kaillie Humphries, an Olympic bobsledder. What's the most feared track in the world? And how do athletes practice when there's no ice in the summer?

NEW BOOK ALERT!
You may be aware that I’ve written or co-written five business books, including The Power of Moments and Made to Stick. I’ve got a sixth book coming out in January called RESET: How to Change What’s Not Working. It’s a book intended to help you and your team get unstuck, to overcome the gravity of the way things have always worked. Learn more about the book or preorder it here.

Got a comment or suggestion for us? You can reach us via email at jobs@whatitslike.com

Want to be on the show? Leave a message on our voice mailbox at (919) 213-0456. We’ll ask you to answer two questions:

• What do people think your job is like and what is it actually like?
• What’s a word or phrase that only someone from your profession would be likely to know and what does it mean?

Transcript

Dan Heath: Kaillie Humphries grew up in the city of Calgary in Canada. It was a great place for a future Olympic gold medalist in bobsledding to be born because there are only around a dozen bobsled tracks in the world. And one of them is in Calgary.

Kaillie Humphries: I'm a product of an Olympic legacy. The city I grew up in had a track. It was the ‘88 Olympics bobsled track, which for most people, that's the Cool Runnings Olympics.

Dan: Cool Runnings, for those of you who weren't around in the early 90s, was a Disney movie based on a Jamaican bobsled team that competed in the 1988 Winter Olympics. So Kaillie had the benefit of having access to an actual bobsled track, but she also had another thing going for her.

Kaillie: I've always been a big, strong female athlete. I've always had really big legs, been really powerful. And when I grew up ski racing and I wanted to switch to something else, then I thought, well, bobsled maybe as an option or speed skating. And bobsled was just the first sport that I tried to see if I even liked it, could be good at it. And yeah, the rest is history.

Dan: Olympic history. She's the first woman to win a gold medal for two different countries, and she won the gold medal in the first ever monobob event.

[Olympics Announcer]: … And Kaillie Humphries in her first Olympics for the Stars and Stripes. It's a golden moment.

Dan: I'm Dan Heath, and this is What It's Like to Be. In every episode, we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession, a London cabbie, an ocean lifeguard, a beer vendor. We want to know, what do they do all day at work? Today, we'll ask Kaillie Humphries what it's like to be an Olympic bobsledder.

We'll talk about what it feels like to zip down the bobsled track, and you might be surprised, how she uses visualization techniques to practice in the offseason and why a lot of Olympic athletes are living on poverty-level incomes. Stay with us.
We're in giving-season now, and I want to highlight an organization I've believed in for many years.

It's called GiveWell, and it's devoted to producing thorough, transparent research on how to do the most good with your donations. They've spent 17 years researching philanthropic opportunities, and they direct funding to the highest impact charities they found. Interventions like bed nets to prevent malaria, providing vitamin A supplements for malnourished children, and more. You can find all of their research and recommendations on their site for free. You can make tax-deductible donations to their recommended funds or charities, and GiveWell does not take a cut. It goes straight to the charity. If you've never used GiveWell to donate, you can have your donation matched up to $100 before the end of the year, or as long as matching funds last. To claim that match, go to their site, GiveWell.org, and at the end of the process when you're checking out, it'll ask you how you heard about GiveWell. Just choose podcast and type in this show's name. That's how you get your match. 

I'm just going to assume you know about as much as I did about bobsledding before I talked with Kaillie, which is not a lot. So here's how it works. 

Kaillie: We train like Olympic sprinters and also Olympic lifters.

Dan: They train like sprinters because for the first 50 meters, they're racing down the track. And they train like weightlifters because while they're sprinting, they're pushing a four or 500 pound bobsled.

Kaillie: So we push as hard as we can from zero to 50 meters. We jump in the bobsled, whether it's mono and you're by yourself, two men, there's two people pushing, four men, there's four people pushing. Once you get in, it's solely up to the driver. We do not touch the brakes. We do not lean, unlike what Cool Runnings has taught us. There's no leaning.

Dan: Oh, you don’t lean? Okay, fascinating.

Kaillie: Yeah. You try and stay as still as possible inside that sled.

Dan: On a two-person bobsled team, there's a driver or pilot and a brakeman. The brakeman is the person who at the end of the race pulls two levers that drop big metal teeth that scrape against the ice and brake the sled. Kaillie is a driver, one of the best in the world. And one thing I should mention, she doesn't steer with a steering wheel. Instead, she works with a couple of ropes.

Kaillie: When you pull the left rope, it turns the front two runners or steel blades to the left. And then if you pull right, it pulls them to the right. You're going anywhere from 80 to 100 miles an hour. And you're working within ranges of a couple inches to about a foot.

Dan: Oh, my.

Kaillie: So you're working within, you know, millimeters of the sled being 80 to 100 miles an hour as you go around bobsled corners.

Dan: I mean, that tells the whole story of the sport. 80 to 100 miles an hour and it's a game of inches and you're steering with ropes. It's not like you're using AI or something.

Kaillie: Definitely not. Races can be won or lost within a hundredth of a second. So for perspective, it takes three tenths of a second to blink your eyes twice. One hundredth of a second is the width of a hair if you're standing still. So I've won or lost races by literally the width of a hair. So we spend a lot of time trying to perfect ourselves physically, mentally, try and perfect our craft. So driving sleds or pushing, hitting every angle, being as strong and as fast as we can possibly be. And then we spend a lot of time on our equipment, just like Formula One or NASCAR. We've got carbon fiber, fiberglass. We've got steel. We've got every aspect. And we try and maximize that. Because we are the engines, but our machine is what can win or lose races by hundredths as well.

Dan: And what does it feel like to go down the track?

Kaillie: It's really hard to describe. It does not feel like what you think. And it definitely doesn't feel what it looks like on TV. It is not a roller coaster at all. It does not feel like that. At no point do I ever get that uplifting feeling where your stomach kind of lifts up on a roller coaster. You’d neve get that in bobsled. If I were to describe it, it would be like if we were going down like this  every five seconds. You get a lot of pressure, a lot of force, like your body weight times two, three, four, five. So if I'm experiencing six G's, six gravitational forces as I go through a corner, that's basically six times my body weight. So force is being applied six times my own weight on top of my body as I go through. So we experience something similar to what a fighter pilot would experience. We just experience it for one to two seconds, not over longer periods of time.

Dan: That's so funny. I mean, what you said about TV is exactly right, because, you know, when you watch it on TV, it looks like a woohoo. This, you know, it's like a fancy water slide or something.

Kaillie: Yes, it does. It does not feel like that inside the sled at all.

Dan: Instead, you're like being assaulted inside a metal cage.

Kaillie: You're just getting whipped around like someone smacking your head and then forcing, jumping on top of you at the same point. That is what it feels like. Sometimes it can feel fairly smooth, depending on the track and the surface. So we have people, we call them icemeisters, that will shape the ice.

Dan: Icemeisters, our next guest on this podcast.

Kaillie: And they make a world of difference. So kind of like a Zamboni, but it's way smaller and way tinier. And we have people that scrape the ice, that give it shape, give it structure, take out some of the ruts and the grooves that can exist, and then they spritz it with water and they make it super fast. And so they can definitely impact the actual run and how fast you go and how smooth it feels.

Dan: And talk us through the dangers of the sport.

Kaillie: Some of the dangers, death being the biggest, most obvious one.

Dan: That would qualify.

Kaillie: That's a big one.

Dan: So people have actually died?

Kaillie: Correct, yes.

Dan: Good gracious. So what happens?

Kaillie: So in Bobsled, we had a girl in 2005 who passed away while she was learning how to drive. The ice conditions were too soft and the sled went from 80 miles an hour to zero instantaneously, which actually caused the sled to flip over on itself, exit the track because it was out of control and it landed on top of her. So you had something that weighed 250 kilos, which is close to about 500 pounds, land on top of her and she broke a bunch of bones and unfortunately passed away. In luge, we saw it during the 2010 Olympics, you had an athlete miscalculate with some pressure and he ended up slingshotting himself out of the track and hitting a metal pole going about 100 miles an hour with no protection.

So unfortunately, that is a risk to our sport. Luge is the sport where you go feet first down the track, bobsled you're in a little bathtub looking thing and skeleton being the one where you go head first. All three of these sports, we utilize the same track itself, luge being the most difficult because it actually has the highest level of skill involvement because they can just turn their sled so quickly and so abruptly, bobsled being the next most dangerous because of the weight of the sleds and the control that we have, and then skeleton actually being the most safe of all three, although you are head first, you don't have as much control and this sled isn't as heavy.

Dan: Kaillie said athletes are also prone to hamstring tears, Achilles ruptures and concussions. And also, and this one is a little hard to hear about, something called ice burns.

Kaillie: So what can happen when you're going those speeds, especially in bobsled with something that's heavy, when you go upside down, unlike Cool Runnings, which taught us that the sled stops, that is not true. The sled does not stop. It continues to go down the track. You're basically in a convertible going a hundred miles an hour with a car on top of you, drilling you into the ice. And so friction burns.

Dan: Oh boy, there's an image.

Kaillie: Yep. And you end up with glorified road rash or ice burn on your skin. And then that's an unfortunate part as well.

Dan: Have you ever been injured?

Kaillie: I have. I have broken some bones. I've had third degree burns on my knee and my shoulder.

Dan: From what you described, like the upside down.

Kaillie: Correct. Yeah. Kind of cheese-graters your skin a bit with friction burn.

Dan: What happened in your situation?

Kaillie: Yeah, we had crashed during a bobsled race and the suits that we wear during races are extremely thin. They're about as thin as most people's pair of underwear. They're not thick. They're not meant for any other reason than just something thin and light. That's one piece to be able to push, but you don't want them thick. You don't want to be resisting a bunch of clothing when you're trying to be the fastest you can be pushing a sled. So the suits are really, really thin. And when you crash, they can easily kind of disintegrate. And then you just have skin on ice and the sled and the ice will win in that case. So yeah, it burned a hole in my knee and my shoulder. I'd go to the hospital every day for about three months and get it debrided and just taking the skin off and the dead skin, so the new skin heals.

Dan: But that didn't deter you?

Kaillie: I did not. No, it definitely made me second guess my life choices a few times. This sport has done that to the best of us, but it has not deterred me. I came back with even more motivation.

Dan: And let me kind of zoom out for a second and talk about this as a career, because this is not just a hobby, right? This is effectively your profession and has been for many years, yeah?

Kaillie: Correct. So I'll be going into my 22nd year. Most people have about an eight to 10 year career. Some, if you're lucky, 12. I've had a very long career out of this, but we're finally at a point now through sponsorships, media appearances, speaking engagements, things like that. I've been able to make a living and support myself and my family with prize money and sponsors to be able to do this full-time.

Dan: Well, this is something I wanted to ask you about and forgive the ignorant question, but are you employed by some Olympic body or is it you're sort of an entrepreneur and you have to cobble together everything yourself? Or how do you get paid?

Kaillie: So, combination of both those things. I have teammates that have second and third jobs who aren't as lucky as I am to be able to have the sponsors. And so not every athlete is the same. The United States Olympic Committee is not government funded. We're the only major governing body worldwide that isn't government funded. So unlike other countries, Canada, Germany, they're all government funded. So a lot of their Olympic sports have assistance, whether it be equipment or their stipends per month are paid for by the government. But the U.S. is not. So as Olympic athletes, we rely on our programs, our federations, United States Olympic Committee, USA Bobsled relies heavily on sponsorships and businesses and organizations to help make it run. And then individualized athletes, we rely on the assistance of those businesses, as well as our own personal sponsors with other businesses and organizations to help offset those costs. So as an Olympic athlete, I make $30,000 a year is my stipend. Or, what I get paid to do what I do. That is taxed.

Dan: Stipend from who?

Kaillie: The United States Olympic Committee.

Dan: OK, OK. But that's obviously pretty minimal and you have to find other…

Kaillie: It sure is.

Dan: I mean, I think a lot of listeners are going to be shocked by that. I mean, you've won four Olympic medals, three of which were gold in four different Olympics. And there are, you know, first year teachers getting paid better than you. I don't think that's most people's mental model of how this works.

Kaillie: No, most people don't understand that or don't know that a huge majority of Olympic athletes in the United States live under the poverty line. We're making less than minimum wage overall. And it's not what people assume. I think people think that when you win an Olympic gold medal, you just automatically are making it big. And for some athletes, that is true. If you're in a popular sport or, you know, you've been able to build up name brand and image, if you've had some amazing results and you've been able to find that backing and that support, you can earn a living most definitely doing the sport. But not every sport is super popular and not every athlete has the means to build up name brand and image or has the results to do so.

Dan: Kaillie said the way the system works in the U.S. while it's tough, it actually gives U.S. athletes a competitive advantage.

Kaillie: The hardships that we go through as Olympic athletes, part of it is what makes the Olympics great. Part of it is what makes us great as a nation and why our athletes are as successful because we're not just handed everything. We have to work. We have to earn for it. We have to, you know, build ourselves up, not just physically, but also mentally.

Do I wish it was a little easier? Yes, most definitely, because sometimes it can be infuriating when you are worried or stressed about where your mortgage payment is going to come from or can I afford food this month? And or, you know, do I have to pay a coach and buy this piece of equipment or do I have to get groceries or, you know, pay my phone and electric bill? And I hate, absolutely hate, especially for our young up-and-coming athletes, seeing that sacrifice and seeing them have to make those choices.

Dan: Hey folks, it's Dan. So I'm going to be talking to an audiobook narrator soon. Can't wait. Somebody who's narrated hundreds of books in his career. What would you want to know about the job? Send us your questions before December 20th. You can send them to jobs@whatitslike.com. And by the way, this was an example of a profession that was not on our radar at all until a couple of you suggested it. So thanks for sending those ideas in. And now back to the show.

Kaillie said that bobsled athletes think in terms of four year cycles, with the culmination being the Winter Olympics. Every year there are eight World Cup races and in the Olympic year, that's a ninth. In the other years, the ninth race is an annual World Championship. Now, the bobsled season runs from the end of November to around the middle of March. So what does she do the rest of the year?

Kaillie: You can practice physically with sprinting and weightlifting. You can get bigger, faster, stronger by being in the gym and running on the running track and pushing cars. And in the summer, there's nowhere you can go and do bobsled in the entire world. So every athlete, I currently live in San Diego, so I can live in San Diego in the summer and still practice and train for my sport because there's nowhere I can go and do bobsled.

On average, they say it takes about eight to 10 years to be a really good bobsled pilot. And that's due to the lack of actual physical time we can do it. I can get seat time. So most people have heard the saying of it takes 10,000 hours to perfect your craft. In 21 years, I have about 22 hours worth of actual seat time in the sled. If each time down the track takes about 50 seconds, it's taken me a long time to build up hours and hours of sliding with only being able to be in a bobsled going down a track. I can only do X amount of runs per day.

Dan: Wait, you just blew my mind. 21 years and 22 actual hours on the track? Wow.

Kaillie: On the track. Yeah. So I do a lot of visualization and I have to be 100 percent focused every time I get in that sled, not just for safety, but also to maximize the time we get on ice because it is very limited. So we don't get a lot of time physically doing it. Our bodies can't handle that much g-force that consistently. Our brains need breaks. So you'll slide a day. You can usually do two or three days in a row and then you have to take a day off and then we're bound by weather. Although tracks are refrigerated, we can only do it when ice can be a certain temperature and it's hard because otherwise you risk sinking into the ice and going max speeds and then basically hitting a wall and it will flip you outside the track.

Dan: I have so many questions about this. First of all, I'm shocked by the fact that there aren't... I would have guessed that there were like artificial bobsled tracks that were iced, you know, year round in July. But it sounds like the surrounding weather has to be right to sustain that, yeah?

Kaillie: Correct. Yes. In the U.S. we're very lucky. We've got an ice house. There's only two in all of North America. One of them is in Calgary in Canada and the other one is in Lake Placid, New York. And so it's an indoor ice facility that is refrigerated year round. But it's only the start. So it's the first 50 meters of a bobsled start. And then there's a bit of a ramp that you go down and then you come back up and you can do that as many times as you want throughout the day. But you're not physically driving it. It's in grooves and the sled just kind of rocks back and forth and you can practice your physical starts. So we do have that. But it's not the length of a bobsled track. A bobsled track is roughly a mile to a mile and a half long. And so refrigerating that over a bobsled track… is normally down the side of a mountain. And so to refrigerate that year round would cost billions of dollars.

Dan: That's probably more impractical than I was giving it credit for.

Kaillie: Don't worry, it's a big question that a lot of people do think. And everybody, you know, even, can you go to Saudi Arabia or someplace that has these indoor ski hills, too? No, it would cost a lot of money for a very limited amount of people that do it. You know, skiing, there's thousands and millions of people around the world, but there's not many that do bobsleds. So you'd be spending a lot of money on the 500 of us worldwide that do the sport.

Dan: So it's almost like your preparation is sort of like a pyramid where at the base is like just power and speed, which you can do all year round. And that's, you know, gym stuff and training. And then the middle layer of the pyramid is visualization. Let's come back to that in a second. And the very, very tip of the peak, that's that's the race.

Kaillie: Correct.

Dan: Fascinating. So talk me through the visualizations. Like, how do you do that?

Kaillie: Close your eyes and you try and picture what you're doing. I think some people can visualize with their eyes open and just kind of drown out what they're not seeing or seeing. But I like to close my eyes. A lot of it is just literally trying to picture what is about to happen. So in bobsled, you're very much reacting to where you are and what's coming ahead.

If you're thinking at any point about what has happened, then you're already another, you know, two, three, four feet down the track and you'll probably end up making some mistakes. So you're trying to figure out where you are in time and space in that sled and then what you need to do to line yourself up, to have a perfect entrance or exit into one of the corners at the next corner.

And so you're forever kind of judging and changing where you're at. And so when you visualize, you close your eyes and I will physically put my hands on the push bar. I will think about pushing, jumping in the sled, grabbing the ropes, driving around the corners, you know, if they go left or right, am I steering once or twice or three times? How hard? And I'll move my hands with my eyes closed as if I'm feeling. And I'll turn my body a little bit if I need to, to try and replicate what happens in the track outside of the track.

Dan: And when you're visualizing, is it in the context of a certain track, of a particular track?

Kaillie: Correct. Yes. So in the summer, I'll go through all the tracks and I'll do it probably once every couple of days. Or once a week, I'll pick one track and I'll do it a couple of times and then I'll pick a different track and do it a couple of times. I can do that as many times as I want. Your mind can't differentiate, but your body can tell the difference. So if I close my eyes and visualize, my mind doesn't know if it's actually seeing it or if it's seeing it just because my eyes are closed. But my body obviously can tell the difference of six times its body weight or not and that load going through it. So I can visualize hundreds of thousands of times. My body just physically can't take that amount of load in such a short four month window every year.

Dan: And in terms of like what you're seeing in your head, is that your memories of having done these different tracks? Are you using video? Are you actually on site walking them? Or how does that part work?

Kaillie: We do all of those things. So when we get to a bobsled track every year, we will walk it and we will walk from bottom to top, top to bottom. We'll look at the corners, the thickness of the ice, the shape of it. And then I will close my eyes, visualize the line that I want to achieve, me driving the sled around that line, how hard I would steer. Some of that knowledge comes from what I'm seeing from physically being there that year. Some of it comes from years and years, that eight to 10 years of being on these tracks. So I roughly know what it will feel like or the speed at which I should be turning around that corner. If I do visualization right, I can close my eyes and get from top to bottom in roughly the same time as it would take in real life.

Dan: That is so interesting. So if you have a race coming up and you're doing your visualizations, how many times would you reckon that you visualize the race before you actually compete?

Kaillie: From top to bottom, about six or seven times.

Dan: Oh, I would have thought more. That's interesting.

Kaillie: And then I go through about each corner, though, on a walk, I go through about each corner about 20 to 30 times. So if I start at the top, I'll be walking down the track and I'll look at corner one and then I'll do one, one, one, one, and then I'll go to two and I'll do corner one into corner two and corner two, corner two. Then I'll get to corner three and I'll go corner three, corner three, one into two, two into three, one into two, two into three. And so by the time I get to the bottom, it's probably been about 100 times. And then I get to the top and I'll run through it top to bottom about five or six times. And then I go and race. I don't want to overdo it. I've done that before where I spend too much time in my head and then I over-analyze and then I start to panic and burn my nervous system out. So I have to go just as many times as I need to feel prepared, but not too many to where I fry my nervous system. And then I go to actually race and I have not much left.

Dan: Is visualization a standard part of the training for the sport? Like, do all Olympic athletes do this?

Kaillie: A hundred percent. And every athlete will do it based on their position. So it's not just drivers that do it. Brakemen do it where they will close their eyes. They'll visualize hitting the sled before they go out. They'll visualize like what it's going to feel like to hit something that weighs 300 pounds and then explode out, run, run, run what it's like to jump in the sled. I think every Olympic athlete utilizes visualization to the 100th degree in every single aspect they do in order to be the best in every element that's important to them.

Dan: I can't help but think that, you know, in a sport where a hundredth of a second might be the difference between winning and losing. And, you know, given what you said about, you know, 22 hours of actual track time in your career, that the difference between first place and second place or first place and 10th place, for that matter, is the quality of your visualizations.

Kaillie: Yeah, it could be. It could be whether you pushed that extra tiny little bit, you know, you got that extra hundredth of a second out of your pushing. It could be the equipment and how much you invested into it. Time, energy, effort, finances. It could be the type of shoes you wear. It could be just about anything. Aerodynamics. Were you bent over in the right position? Were you a little too high, a little bit too low? So in sports where time… swimming, downhill ski racing, bobsled, in any sport where time is the element, you're constantly searching for hundredths of a second all the time in everything that you do. And as Olympic athletes, we will bust ourselves trying to make sure that, you know, we're eating the right foods. We're sleeping the right amounts. Our recovery is high. You know, we're doing contrast hot, cold tubs. We're getting our massages and our therapies and our acupunctures. We're in the gym as much as we should. We're stretching as much as we should. You're utilizing every element to gain that hundredth of a second because you don't necessarily know where it's going to come from. And so you're constantly trying to be, you know, the best version of yourself in order to maximize your performance.

Dan: And when you get to the end of the race, do you know in your gut that you crushed it or is it so finely measured that you really don't know until you look at the clock?

Kaillie: Every race is different. There's some races, my Olympics in 2022 in the monobob, I crushed it and I knew it.

[Olympics Announcer]: The five-time world champion is in command.

Kaillie: Every single time I was going down, my runs felt effortless. Every time I turned the sled and I came out, I could feel the sled accelerate out of every corner. I felt really powerful at the start. I knew on the way down that I was getting faster and faster. I wasn't hitting any walls. The sled was accelerating. The sled was going straight and I could feel it getting faster.

[Olympics Announcer]: She's got it. Final corner coming up. It is gold for Team USA and Kaillie Humphries!

Kaillie: And so to me, those were feelings and I've had them before where I knew I was on the perfect line. I knew I was hitting every steer I needed to hit and I was nailing it. And so by the time I crossed the finish line, I knew it was good. And you look to the clock for that satisfaction of like, yes, you're right. I ended up winning the Olympics by a second and a half over the second place person, which was the greatest margin in male or female history in over 42 years.

Dan: Oh, my gosh. That's got to be such a rush to just know like you are on the perfect line.

Kaillie: Yeah, it sure was. But I look back, my Olympics in 2014, it was in Russia. I was in second place for the entire competition. Every single run I did was second place, second place. But I ended up winning because it was about consistency over four runs. So my final run wasn't actually the winning run. I had to wait for one other athlete to come down and I had to hope and pray that she was going to make some mistakes so that I could win the race. And she did. And the race difference was a tenth of a second. So it was basically 10 hairs put together. And that was the difference over four heats and two days of competition. So sometimes you just know and sometimes you kind of got to hope that your best is better than their best because the difference and margin is so fine that it really could be anybody's game on any given day.

Dan: Kaillie began her Olympic career racing for her home country of Canada. But in 2018, she filed a harassment complaint against the governing body for bobsledding. She alleged physical and emotional abuse from her coach and asked to be released from the team. She did get that release and she went on to win her first gold for the U.S. at the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022. She had won her first gold medal 12 years earlier at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, home turf for the Canadian team she represented at the time.

Dan: What changes in your life, personal or professional, after you win a gold medal?

Kaillie: I think confidence changes. Confidence in your ability, in your definition of success and what that means to you. It's very individual. Validity, either like personal satisfaction and validation or validity in what you're doing is the right thing, whether that be training or execution or planning, you still scrub the toilet the same way. So that doesn't change. And I think it's a misconception to think that once you win an Olympic gold medal, you're just set for life, too, all these people will want to sponsor you and you'll get all this support and you're the best. And so you're just written in the stars and you'll make your million dollars and be on Dancing with the Stars and you're all good. And that isn't the case for a lot of athletes I know. You go right back home and you see your family and you celebrate with the people that have supported you and loved you and helped get you there because it does not happen individually. And then you get either right back to work or you move on.

Dan: So far, we've only talked about Kaillie's wins, but of course, part of the job of a professional athlete is handling the losses, too. We talked about Kaillie's spectacular performance in the monobob race at the 2022 Winter Olympics, but in the two-person race that year...

Kaillie: I ended up coming seventh and it was arguably my worst result ever in the history of the Olympics. It was the only time I haven't medaled. And that was so hard for me mentally because I had just won gold four days earlier, but I knew physically and mentally that I was giving my very best. There was nothing more I could give. So I was upset because I had come seventh, but I was proud of my performance and of myself as an athlete. And I knew that I had put it all on the table and I knew there was nothing else that I could have done differently to create a different result. And sometimes that happens too, and that's okay. And I was okay with that. So I feel very whole and satisfied in my performance, even though I finished seventh.

Dan: And having that sort of contentment, even if the results aren't what you want, is that something you've had to fight hard for? Or do you feel like you were just kind of wired that way from the beginning?

Kaillie: I think the mental strength that I have has come in both forms. One, some of it I'm just born with and some of it I've had to fight for. I've been through a lot within sport. A lot of highs, a lot of lows. I've dealt with sexism, ageism, safe sport issues. There's been a lot of good, but a lot of bad too. It's definitely not just been a straight shot uphill to the very top of the podium. So I think the mental fortitude that I've got has been built, I've had some amazing coaches that have helped teach me the right perspective and the way to look at things when I could have or should have beat myself up over certain stuff. I've had a support system, a very strong support system, and the right people at the right place to say the right stuff.

And so I am as tough as I am because of them. And I'm able to continue to be high-performance even at the age of 39 now. And I'm most definitely able to look at things big picture and not just have my emotions, but my worth wrapped up in one performance because it's not. I am more than one gold medal or one seventh place finish.

Dan: So Kaillie, we always end our episodes with a quick lightning round of questions. What is a word or phrase that only someone from your profession would be likely to know? And what does it mean?

Kaillie: Dry loading. So we practice dry loads. And basically it's when a bobsled is on a surface that's not ice. So if it's just like in a garage or on a dock or anywhere, it's on a solid surface, the sled is. So it's not moving and you practice jumping into the sled with your teammates. So you are on dry land and you're loading into the sled. And so if we're gonna go practice in dry loads, then you are on dry land, practicing loading into the sled for timing and efficiency and to perfect that aspect of it.

Dan: What's the most insulting thing you could say about a bobsled athlete's work?

Kaillie: That they look small. If you ever tell a bobsledder, male or female, that they look small, they're gonna be insulted. I think we spend a lot of time being as big and as strong and as powerful and as fast and to us small, although most women would love to be called small, I think most women bobsledders, but also guys, are not wanting to be called small. So that would be very insulting.

Dan: What phrase or sentence strikes fear in the heart of a bobsled athlete?

Kaillie: Altenburg, Germany. It's one of the bobsled tracks that I would say is probably the most feared bobsled track on circuit. I personally absolutely love that track and it's where I've had probably, it's one of my most successful tracks. I won World Championships there in 2020 and 2021, but most people are extremely fearful of that track and it has cost a lot of careers, it caused a lot of injuries to a lot of people. It is very technical, it is very fast, it is very difficult and so it requires the most focus and it definitely scares the most amount of people.

Dan: What's an aspect of your work that you consistently savor?

Kaillie: The ability to do this as a career. I feel very fortunate to be able to have the support that I have from coaches, teammates, the federation, from my sponsors, to be able to be an athlete full-time. It's what I love to do. I love pushing myself physically and mentally as hard as I can. I love seeing the limits that my body can go to. I love having goals and working really, really hard to be able to achieve them and I love having the opportunity to do it. So I am very grateful to be able to be an Olympic athlete as my career.

Dan: Kaillie Humphries is an Olympic bobsledder. Look out for Kaillie racing for the USA at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy.

Kaillie: My next goal is to defend my Olympic title in monobob in 2026. And an even loftier goal would be also to win the two-man... So to win both gold medals in women's bobsled at a single Olympics. Nobody in history has done that yet. And I will be doing it a year and a half postpartum.

Dan: I'm not sure I've ever been more surprised on this show than when Kaillie said that in 21 years of the sport, she'd only logged about 22 hours of track time. I mean, wow. It made me think about other careers where the core activity that you do is a very small fraction of your total time spent. Film actors and actresses, maybe? Motivational speakers? But, then again, people who speak for a living might log 100 or more hours a year on stage. That's a far cry from one hour. What about boxers? The actual time in the ring, competing, might be quite small, but then, of course, you have a lot more time sparring. And that's the thing about bobsledding, there's no real "sparring" equivalent, which is fascinating. If you think of other careers that have a bobsled-esque ratio of prep time to "the real thing" time, shoot me an email.

I can't wait to watch Kaillie in the next Olympics. I feel invested. And now we know how she'll spend her time between now and then. Honing her own power and speed, visualizing the unique twists and turns of each track, recovering from injuries and burns, and obsessively pursuing every hundredth of a second advantage. 

Folks, that's what it's like to be an Olympic bobsledder.

A shout-out to recent Apple Podcasts reviewers: Salena beena, Tina Sparkle 1000, Paladin in the QC, Alex Fuller Tri, Flapjack 728, E Munch, Reznil Jannery, Slightly Gray, DHT FL 386.

A special thank you to Aron McGuire, who suggested Kaillie for the show. This episode was produced by Matt Purdy. I'm Dan Heath, thanks for listening.