I could take the lead at any point in a race. That is not bravado, it is just what the stopwatch said. Get out front early, control the pace, manage the risk from position one, and collect the win. Every coach I ever had begged me to race exactly that way. Smart skating. Clean skating.
And something in me refused.
So I would wait. Sit fifth or sixth while the pack compressed, all of us inches apart at thirty miles per hour on a 111 meter oval, blades sharp enough to open skin, nothing between us and the boards but padding I had learned not to think about. I would give myself two laps to close. Then one lap. Then half a lap. The worse the math got, the more alive I felt. My peripheral vision sharpened. My breathing slowed down when it should have sped up. The arena noise flattened into a low hum until all I could hear was my blades and the blades of the man in front of me.
That feeling was better than winning. I need you to sit with how strange that sentence is, because this piece is about what it cost me, and about the version of it I suspect is running your life right now, in an office instead of an arena.
A teammate grabbed my arm after one of those races, and he was not smiling. "You're playing with fire, man. Eventually you're gonna get burned." He was right, and I knew he was right. One blade catch at speed and I would hit the boards hard enough that walking away was not guaranteed. I kept doing it anyway.
My coaches fought me on it for years. They had the tape. They had the numbers. Why trade a near certain win for a sixty percent shot? I could never explain it to them in a way that satisfied anybody, because the truth did not make sense, even to me. The best I can do now, with years of distance, is tell you what was actually happening in my head.
There were two voices running during every single race. The first one said: you are so good you can win from anywhere, so prove it. The second one said: you do not deserve to be out front, you have not earned it yet, only underdogs get to win. Two contradictory voices, both screaming, and my race strategy on any given night was simply whichever one was louder. A coin flip, dressed up as confidence.
Psychologists have a name for part of this wiring. The trait is called sensation seeking, the pursuit of novel and intense experience, and according to the research tradition built on Marvin Zuckerman's work, people high in it get a bigger dopamine release from intensity than everyone else, which is exactly why the edge keeps calling them back. Reading that research after I retired was uncomfortable in the way accurate things are uncomfortable. The chemistry was real. But chemistry was only half of my story, and the other half is the half I see everywhere now.
I won eight Olympic medals racing from the back of the pack. I also believe, and this is the part that is still hard to sit with, that I left medals on the table because of it. The same thing that made my wins feel meaningful was quietly costing me wins I should have had. I was so addicted to the feeling of pulling off something impossible that I manufactured impossible situations just to chase the high. Nobody was doing that to me. I was the architect.
Now run the business version of that tape, because I watch it weekly. The founder who blows up a good deal because the deal was not dramatic enough. The executive who performs brilliantly when the building is on fire, and cannot sit still when it is not, so new fires keep mysteriously starting. The leader whose whole identity is being the person who saves the day, whose unspoken need is for something to save the day from.
I have sat in green rooms before keynotes and listened to CEOs tell me versions of this without realizing what they are telling me. When someone says my team performs best under pressure, what I often hear underneath is: I do not know how to lead when things are calm. I have been that person. I am not diagnosing anyone from a distance I have not traveled myself.
Here is what I eventually understood about the addiction to the edge. It is not about courage. It is about identity. If you built yourself around performing in chaos, then peace stops feeling like a reward and starts feeling like a threat. Stability reads as decay. And the scariest thing in the world becomes an ordinary Tuesday where nothing goes wrong, because who exactly are you on a Tuesday where nothing goes wrong?
I want to be careful here, because the redemption arc you are expecting is not coming. I never fixed this. After fifteen years of competing, I did not silence the voice that says the safe play is the weak play, that comfort is complacency, that if you are not suffering you are not serious. That voice kept me in the back of the pack for years while the front was wide open, and it did not retire when I did.
What changed is that I got better at seeing it come. I learned to feel the exact moment the pull toward unnecessary difficulty showed up, the urge to make the thing harder than it needed to be so the win would count, and to choose the smart play anyway while every cell in my body lobbied against it. That is not cure. That is practice. Some of the most important work I have done since retiring has been learning to be fully engaged without needing an emergency to get there, and discovering, slowly, that the aliveness I chased in those final laps was available in quiet moments too. I just had no idea how to access it without manufacturing a crisis first.
At the Games in Italy this past February, reporting for Yahoo Sports, I spent nights standing where the coaches stand, close enough to the short track to feel the cold coming off it. And I found myself scanning for my own ghost. You can spot the back-of-the-pack gamblers within two races if you know what to look for: the skater with front-of-the-field speed who keeps choosing traffic, who needs the impossible angle for the win to feel earned.
I watched one of them thread a pass late in a final that an entire arena gasped at, and I felt two things at once. The old electricity, fully intact after all these years. And, for the first time, something like grief for the kid who believed that was the only door the feeling lived behind. From the reporting side, holding a microphone instead of a starting position, the pattern was so visible it ached. The talent was never in question. The question was always: what does winning have to cost before you will accept it?
If some version of this is you, if you secretly dread the calm quarter, if your team has learned that things only move when something is burning, here is where I would start, and it is the same place I had to start.
Maybe naming this is the first step toward not needing it. Maybe the genuinely hard thing was never the impossible pass with half a lap to go. Maybe it is learning to lead from the front, in your work and in your life, and letting that be enough. I am closer than I was. Rebuilding the relationship between intensity and identity is the core of what I explore as a resilience keynote speaker, because the skill of performing without the fire turns out to be buildable, and most organizations have never trained it.
If you want to follow that work in real time, the honest version with the unfinished edges still showing, I write the Hard Pivot newsletter every week, and this topic comes up more than almost any other. You can subscribe to the Hard Pivot newsletter here.
Subscribe and get Chapter 1 of Hard Pivot free.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.