Dark Chocolate and the Questions That Matter

In the summer of 2009 I drove from Salt Lake City to Colorado Springs by myself. No coach, no training partners, no team. Just a truck & a plan to spend five months at the Olympic Training Center doing something I wasn't sure I could do anymore.

I was twenty-seven. Three Olympics behind me. Eight years of international competition that had ground my body down to something I barely recognized in the mirror some mornings.

And the question I kept turning over during that drive -- the one I couldn't answer & couldn't stop asking -- was whether I had another run in me or whether I was just too stubborn to admit I didn't.

I didn't have a good answer. I drove anyway.

Days in Colorado Springs had a rhythm that was almost monastic. Morning sessions that started before the sun. Afternoon sessions that ended after it went down.

I did the Manitou Incline -- 2,744 steps straight up the side of a mountain -- so many times my legs stopped complaining & went numb instead. I ate clean, slept hard, woke up sore, and did it again. For five months the world shrank to the size of a training facility & a handful of trails and I was fine w/ that bc the alternative was thinking too much about whether any of it would work.

But Saturdays were different.

On Saturday nights I'd drive up into the mountains outside the city. Find a spot where the road ended and the sky opened up. I'd sit on the hood of my truck w/ a bar of dark chocolate -- the good stuff, 85% cacao, the kind that's almost bitter -- and I'd look at the city lights below & the stars above and... sit there.

That was my indulgence. One bar of dark chocolate after a week of suffering.

It sounds small and maybe even a little sad when I describe it now. At the time it was everything -- proof I was still a person in there somewhere & not just a body chasing a finish line.

What happens when you strip everything away?

What I remember most about those Saturday nights isn't the chocolate or the stars. It's the questions.

When you strip your life down to training & recovery & nothing else, the noise drops out. Distractions disappear. And what's left are the questions you've been avoiding, the ones too big or too uncomfortable to sit w/ when you have a full schedule and people around you.

Alone on a mountain w/ nothing but dark chocolate and a view, you can't avoid them anymore.

Mine were brutal.

Am I doing this for me or for the version of me everyone else expects?

If I come back and lose, can I live with that?

If I don't come back at all, can I live with THAT?

What am I without this sport?

That last one was the hardest. I'd been skating since I was fourteen. My entire identity -- the way people knew me, the way I knew myself -- was built on ice. Take that away and I didn't know what was underneath.

The thought of finding out terrified me more than any race ever had.

I think about those mountain nights a lot now, maybe more than I think about any of the races. Bc the races had answers -- you cross the line & the clock tells you how you did. There's a scoreboard, a podium, a result.

The questions on the mountain didn't have any of that. They hung in the air and I had to learn to be ok w/ the fact I might not get answers for years.

And I didn't. Not for years.

Vancouver Olympics came & I medaled again -- showed up in the best shape of my career, moved differently on the ice, surprised people who thought I was done. But even standing on the podium I knew what happened on those Saturday nights in Colorado was the real work. Training built my body. The questions built something else, something I'd need long after the medals stopped coming.

I wish someone had told me this when I was sitting on that truck eating chocolate in the dark:

The questions that matter most are the ones you can't answer yet.

We're trained to solve things -- in sport, in business, in life. Identify the problem, build the plan, execute. And that works for 90% of what you face on any given Tuesday. But the questions that shape who you become -- why am I doing this, what do I want my life to look like, who am I when nobody's watching -- those don't respond to planning. They respond to patience, to sitting w/ discomfort of not knowing, & to trusting that clarity shows up on its own schedule, not yours.

I talk to founders & executives about this constantly. The ones who are struggling aren't usually struggling w/ strategy or resources or talent. They're struggling w/ the questions they won't ask themselves -- whether they still want to be doing what they're doing, whether the thing they built is still the thing they believe in, whether the cost of winning is a price they agreed to pay.

Most people wait for clarity before they commit. In my experience, clarity comes after commitment, not before. You drive to Colorado Springs w/ an unanswerable question & you train anyway & somewhere around month three, sitting on a mountain w/ chocolate on your fingers and stars overhead, something starts to shift. Not bc you figured it out, but bc you stopped demanding an answer & let the question do its work.

I still eat dark chocolate on Saturday nights. Different city now, different life, different set of questions. But the practice is the same -- take a breath, look at the sky, and ask the hard thing without needing to resolve it by morning.

More on this later. I'm still sitting w/ a few of them.

--AAO

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