The Addiction to Danger I Couldn't Quit

I could take the lead at any point in a race. Get out front, control the pace, manage the risk from position one.

Every coach I ever had begged me to do exactly that. Smart skating. Clean skating.

I started winning too easily, and something in me rejected it.

So I'd wait. Sit in fifth or sixth. Let the pack compress until we were all inches apart at 30 mph on a 111-meter oval with no guardrails worth trusting. I'd give myself two laps to go, one lap to go, half a lap -- the worse the math, the more I could feel everything.

My peripheral vision would sharpen. Breathing would slow down instead of speeding up. Noise in the arena would flatten into this low hum and all I could hear was my own blades & the blades of whoever was in front of me.

That feeling was better than winning.

I know how that sounds. But I think anyone who's chased something at a high level for long enough knows what I'm talking about -- there's a version of work that's technically correct and a version that makes you feel like you're alive, and they're not always the same thing.

A teammate grabbed me after a race once, concerned. "You're playing with fire, man. Eventually you're gonna get burned."

He was right. One blade catch at 40 mph & I'd go into the boards so hard I might not walk away. I knew it. I kept doing it anyway.

My coaches fought me on this for years. They had the tape, they had the probability breakdowns -- why give up a near-guaranteed win for a 60% shot? And I couldn't explain it to them in a way that made sense bc the truth didn't make sense.

There were two voices running simultaneously in my head during every single race.

The first one: you're so good you can win from anywhere, so prove it.

The second one: you don't deserve to be out front, you haven't earned it yet, only underdogs get to win.

Both screaming at once. Both contradictory. And I listened to whichever one was louder on any given night, which meant my race strategy was basically a coin flip dressed up as confidence.

I won eight Olympic medals doing this. And I believe I left medals on the table bc of it too. That's the part that's hard to sit with -- the same thing that made the wins feel meaningful was also costing me wins I should've had. I was so addicted to the feeling of pulling off something impossible I manufactured impossible situations just to chase the high.

I see this pattern everywhere now and it's a little unsettling how common it is.

Founders who blow up good deals bc the deal wasn't dramatic enough. Executives who can only perform when the building is on fire -- take away the crisis & they don't know who they are, so they create new ones. Leaders who've built their entire identity around being the person who saves the day, and the quiet part they won't say out loud is they need something to save the day FROM.

I've sat in green rooms before keynotes and had CEOs tell me versions of this without realizing they're telling me. "My team performs best under pressure" usually means "I don't know how to lead when things are calm." I've been that person. I get it.

The thing I've come to understand -- and I'm still working through this, at least for me -- is the addiction to the edge isn't about courage. It's about identity. If you built yourself around performing in chaos, then peace feels like a threat. Stability feels like you're losing your edge.

And the scariest thing in the world becomes a Tuesday where nothing goes wrong, bc who are you on a Tuesday where nothing goes wrong?

I wrote in my books about the voice inside your head nobody trains for. The one that tells you the safe play is the weak play, that comfort is complacency, that if you're not suffering you're not serious. That voice kept me in the back of the pack for years when the front was wide open.

I never fixed this. I want to be honest about that. After 15 yrs of competing I just got better at seeing it come -- got better at choosing the smart play even when every cell in my body was screaming to make it harder than it needed to be.

Some of the best work I've done since retiring has been learning how to perform without needing the fire. Learning you can be fully engaged & fully present & still in control. The aliveness I was chasing in those final laps was available in quieter moments too, I just didn't know how to access it without manufacturing a crisis first.

I think a lot of high performers carry this and don't talk about it bc admitting you need chaos to function doesn't exactly fit the narrative. But maybe naming it is the first step toward not needing it. Maybe the harder thing isn't pulling off the impossible pass w/ half a lap to go -- maybe it's learning to lead from the front & letting that be enough.

I'm still figuring that out. But I'm closer than I was.

--AAO

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