Kyle Tress

As a skeleton athlete, the hardest thing I’ve had to learn is patience. Patience with sliding, training, and mostly with the development process. There are no shortcuts.

Too often I see athletes enter our program expecting to make the Olympic team in 4 years. This idea has even been encouraged within our development program, which does both veteran and development athletes a great disservice. The process takes 8 – 12 years, which is the absolute minimum amount of time needed to develop the foundational knowledge and maturity to compete at the highest levels of this sport.

Foundational knowledge isn’t something we talk about during the off-season. Instead we are so focused on becoming faster and stronger that we lose sight of the big picture. Faster and stronger is only desirable if it makes us better skeleton athletes. That’s why we train. Not for the Combine. Not to become sprinters or power lifters, but to become better skeleton athletes. Excessive strength and size is useless if it reduces our aerodynamic efficiency, just as sprint mechanics are useless if they don’t translate to pushing a 70-lb sled while running bent-over. Yet we continue to value these traits over the necessary work of building skeleton athletes.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about this development process with friend and mentor Eric Bernotas. Eric proposed the idea that every skeleton athlete must develop four foundational areas to achieve success: Physical, Mental, Technical, and Experience.

Physical

Our physical abilities certainly translate to sliding. Everyone agrees that we must have competitive push times to excel in this sport. However physical training alone isn’t enough, and it can become a distraction if we train for the Combine instead of the season. While the Combine is a useful metric for screening new athletes, it does not predict success in pushing or success on the track.

Mental

To quote golfing great Bobby Jones,

Competition is won or lost on the six-inch playing field between the ears

A skeleton athlete must be relaxed and focused while careening headfirst down an ice track at 90mph. Contrary to popular belief these things aren’t mutually exclusive. It just takes deliberate practice. Summer training should include mental training to prepare us to step on the start line in October. I recommend reading 10-minute toughness by Jason Selk to get started. Commitment is another key aspect to mental training. It’s easy to lose motivation and commitment when you’re standing on the line in Altenberg in -15f weather, facing an angry Kriesel. Even more difficult is putting your life on hold for 12 years in pursuit of a big, hairy, expensive goal.

Technical & Experience

The final two foundational areas are closely intertwined. Technical deals with the mechanics of our sport, from how our sleds work to the physics of the track. Technical knowledge can be taught, but it takes a great deal of experience to truly understand. Experience teaches us when to drive and when to let the sled run. It whispers to us which runners to use for given tracks and conditions. It teaches us to be a quiet professional. It gives us an invisible nudge to find the speed in a given corner. It’s elusive, only coming after thousands of runs, hundreds of races, and years of sliding the tracks of the world. To better understand the experience gap, simply look at the profiles of the top sliders and count the number of races in which they’ve competed. Experience matters, because it’s the piece that ties everything together.

Putting it together

It’s easy to identify the skeleton athletes who masterfully put these pieces together. They are the ones winning World and Olympic medals. At that level the specific techniques don’t matter anymore. Rick Ellis said it best when paraphrasing Bruce Lee:

The ultimate technique is no technique. What he meant is that the goal of an athlete is to posses such well developed knowledge, awareness, fluidity, timing, and sensitivity, that the specific techniques don’t matter anymore; the goal is to go beyond technique into a state of pure effectiveness.

The only way to achieve pure effectiveness in skeleton is to build better skeleton athletes. The development process never stops.