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How do you recover from a fall?

The full interview with Bode Miller.

by Mel Allen

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Tags: bodemiller, interview, skiing

Bode Miller, the fastest and most notorious Alpine skier of his generation, grew up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, a mile back in the woods, without electricity and running water. He was homeschooled, self-reliant, and raised to think for himself and not be afraid to say what he thinks. He went into last winter's Olympics in Torino, Italy, the most ballyhooed American skier in memory -- and, when he failed to medal, was slammed in the media as a failure.

We caught up with the 29-year-old Miller two days after he made headlines for a spectacular catch while making a celebrity appearance with the professional New Hampshire Pride baseball team. Soon he'd begin training in earnest for the upcoming World Cup season. At the heart of his unique regimen is running in the shallow, fast-flowing, boulder-strewn streams of the White Mountains, hopping from rock to rock -- challenging himself as he's done since childhood.

(Note: Rated PG for mild profanity)

My whole family was there at the [New Hampshire Pride baseball] game, and I think they were all worried I was going to embarrass myself. But I'm not afraid to put myself in a position where there is potential to embarrass myself. That's what's fun about living.

It's been 15 years since I saw a fly ball, but I take pride in giving my best effort and not worrying about screwing up or making myself look dumb. It took the maximum of my ability to make that catch. I'm quick and tall, and I jumped and I was at max extension and I got that thing and smashed myself down on the warning track. It was as much as you could ever hope for. The crowd went crazy.

Ego and pride are great strengths for athletes. They make you work hard. They are incredible motivators. But they're also huge weaknesses. Most athletes don't recognize that other side of ego and pride. You just have to recognize that being an athlete, you have to be willing to constantly test yourself and be willing to accept that maybe the best you have is not good enough. A lot of athletes do not want to find that out. It's just fear.

A lot of athletes won't take the risk of blowing it. Everybody else can pump your tires all day, but that one catch -- that one time where you hang it out there and you know that you may look like a total jackass right now -- it's fifty thousand times more important than what everybody else thinks about me.

For a male athlete, ego and pride are two of the most important things and are what drive a lot of athletes into sports -- they want that reinforcement.

Defining your own version of success sometimes has nothing to do with the version of success that everybody else has. For me, getting up and striking out twice was a success. It was a success because I know that people in the stands and my family were worried I was going to embarrass myself. For me, getting up there and taking my cuts and trying to focus as hard as I could, and making an effort to actually hit the ball, even though I ended up absolutely whiffing -- that was a success for me. That was all I could do.

Success was for me to come in there like the game was on the line and do everything in my power to hit the ball, even though I knew there was a huge chance that I would not do anything right at all. That was awesome for me. A lot of people don't understand that. They don't understand that you can define your own success. And it has nothing to do with what everybody else says.

That's one of the major issues with me that confuses everybody. I define my own versions of success. The fact that I'm good at sports makes people think I like to win. The fact is, my version of success is to be able to objectively analyze myself and my effort and my focus, and know that I was doing everything I could do. The pursuit of your ability -- the things that a lot of homeschooled kids care about -- is a common thread.

People think that I want to win -- or I pursue winning. But my winning is a byproduct of the pursuit to find out what I'm capable of, of always making sure that I give everything I've got, and that I focus, and that I analyze what needs to be done. Those are awesome challenges for me that don't really have much to do with being competitive in itself.

One of the things that throws people off is that I don't ever get pissed off when I lose. The only time I get mad is when I know I didn't do everything I could have. A lot of times that happens even when I win. For me, a win, if I don't perform my best, if I don't hammer the focus in, doesn't mean shit.

That's why the Olympics were different for me than for others. I was so focused. I was intense. Those races were awesome that way. I didn't do well, but I did everything I could do to do well. My focus wasn't to beat everybody else. If it had been, maybe I would have changed my tactics a little bit.

There are some things that I know about myself for that sport -- that if I'm too aggressive in super-G and downhill, I pinch all the time. But it's way more fun for me, it feels like 100 percent, and I put myself in really difficult situations a lot. Where I blew out in the super-G and in the downhill, I pinched and had to make some great recoveries. Whereas if I had just wanted to win the race, I could ski more like at 85 percent and much more casual, relaxed. It allows me to be more fluid on the line, but it doesn't feel as fun to me. It's not like I'm racing.

I've recognized that in downhill, that's the best way for me to be competitive. I didn't do it, because in the Olympics, I wanted to feel like I was doing everything I could to make sure my effort was 100 percent. If you lose while giving 100 percent, you at least know that you did everything you could, gave it 100 percent effort, whereas if I back off and ski 80 percent and I lose, that just pisses me off.

I had a huge falling out with the guy at my local program in Franconia. I had to come over here and ski with a different coach. This is the same shit I was saying then. I was like, "Dude, I'm a kid. What do you think my goals are? Even if I win these races and make you look good, my goals aren't to make you look good. My goals are: I want to have fun, I want to prepare myself to race World Cup when I'm old, I want to maximize my ability, but mostly, I just want to have fun, I want to be out racing, and I want to train. The drills you make me do, although they may make me a better racer right now, are not going to mean shit when I'm 25 and trying to win the Olympics and World Cup and whatever else I do. And they suck, they make me not have fun."

I talked to the other kids on the team and they all thought the same. None of this shit is fun. You make us not have fun when we're doing this. I was like, "I'm going to go do the other stuff, and when it comes time to race, I'll race and you'll see that I'm better than the kids in this area.

"It's not hard for me to win the races right now. When you see me race, look at the shit I'm doing and tell me if I need to do these drills to meet my own goals. Your job, as a coach, is to help me meet my own goals, not help me reach your goals." That is almost to the word the exact conversation we had. And he was like, "This is bullshit." And I was like, "You don't deserve to be a coach of young kids, because you're not on point. The shit you're coming up with is not good." He was not receptive to that at all.

He focused on exact body positions. I mean, it's not a judged sport; people don't care about what position your body is in -- you just have to get to the finish as fast as you can.

Somewhere around 11 or 12, you start encountering people who try to tell you what success is, as opposed to doing it yourself. And you either push against it or you figure out a way to manipulate through it or you just quit. It happens to kids all the time. Think of all the kids who aren't good at sports, who don't have the confidence to not believe that if you're not good at something, you shouldn't be doing it. That's the belief that a lot of America has.

Same with the Olympics. If you're not going to win a medal at the Olympics, why go? That's the most backward idea I can think of. That's why I had such an issue with all the criticism this last year. Think of effect on the young kids. It's really bad. Whether or not you're good at something, or whether or not you can meet someone else's version of success, has nothing to do with whether or not you should participate.

A big part of why I was much better than everybody at a young age is because I grew up skiing with adults. And none of the adults tried to teach me; most of the time they were trying to ditch me. They were like, "Who's this kid that keeps following us?" I had no one else to ski with, so I'd just burn ass after these guys and they were making as fast of runs as they could. They were the local bombers on Cannon Mountain, and the mountain was ours -- empty.

I'd get on the same tram that they were on and they'd be like, "What the hell," and they'd get off at the top and try to ditch me, but I had all my secret little runs I used to catch up to them. I'm one-eighth their size on crappy little skis, and when they're ripping down Avalancher Folly's, I'm going the same speed on tiny little skis in a full tuck. Oh, my God, it was nutty, really.

Growing up the way I grew up, if I went walking in the river on slippery rocks, I fell. And I had nobody to blame for it. When I got up, I'd take a hard look at what happened. I'd say, "All right, my balance wasn't where it needed to be," or, "I wasn't paying attention." I realized how quickly I was able to learn from that.

I gathered huge amounts of valuable information that I didn't think other people were able to gather. It wasn't like if I fell in the river I'd say, "Don't walk in the river anymore." I always got much more specific than that. If I'm going to walk in the river, I'd say, "Pay attention. Don't step on these kinds of rocks that are way too slippery or will move when you stand on them." That's the stuff that made it more fun and only made me want to put myself in more situations like that.

It was the same with skiing. Why did I crash? Was it execution? Was I in over my head? Lots of times I got in over my head trying to follow those guys. I'd get to the bottom and say, "That was pure luck that I didn't just cartwheel into the woods."

One of my biggest strengths is the ability to accurately analyze and access and pick out the stuff that matters -- a really good skill for an athlete. You don't crash just when you're going fast. Sometimes you crash when you're going slow. A lot of kids will say, "Oh, my God, I was going too fast," and a lot of times how fast they were going had nothing to do with why they crashed. They'll use that one circumstance and it will set them back -- sometimes for the rest of their lives.

There's no such thing as a perfect run, never even perfect turns. The closest you can come is perfect effort. When you're in the starting gate and feel completely free of outside influence or expectations or embarrassment or worry. Then you go and you absolutely live the entire run in the present. That's the perfect effort. If you make great turns, you don't celebrate it, because it's gone. If you make a mistake, you don't dwell on it -- all you're doing is dealing with the moment right there.

I don't mind criticism, I don't mind it at all, even when it's not fair or it's not based on truth. I still don't even mind it then. But nobody seems to take an analytical look at my process. They say I don't train or I don't care or I party too much, but I've beaten everybody in the world by doing the stuff that I do -- but nobody writes about that.

If I don't train, how come I've been able to beat everybody else? It's because I have the ability to analyze and assess the situation, come up with a plan and execute -- and it takes a huge amount of intensity to do that stuff. There's never been an article to look at that. It's too much of a contrast there for people to believe that somebody with my personality also has the grit and determination to do the kind of stuff you have to do to be at the top of this sport.

The criticism only matters if there is some rapport there; there has to be some level of mutual respect. A lot of the criticism was from people who don't know what they're talking about. They are people who only watch skiing at the Olympics.

Your challenges are what define 95 percent of the people in the world. It's whether you get to define those challenges yourself or whether they're defined for you. Most people suck at defining challenges for themselves. They're always too soft on themselves. They don't really want to have a really legitimate challenge in front of them, because what happens if they fail?

Once you get to the very top, the eating situation, the sleeping situation, the amount of dry-land training you can do in the wintertime, the way you travel, the way you deal with media -- all those things have an impact on how you perform. Over the past three years, after I got my motor home, I took on the responsibility -- I spent $50,000 to $60,000 a year to take care of my own food and sleeping. The problem was, I didn't have a personal assistant or a public relations person to deal with the perception that my motor home was about partying, about the chicks. The ski team is in Europe for five months, traveling from one hotel to another, and if I want to perform my best, I need to address the two most important issues for me as an athlete -- sleeping and eating.

I do not want to retire. I love skiing. I love racing. But it has to balance out. The last couple of years it hasn't really been balancing out.

This season, I hired a coach who was a coach of mine since I first made the U.S. Ski Team. He left to spend more time with his family, but I hired him to do my dry-land training program during the winter. I always come into the season really strong -- my training during the fall is as good as anyone's in the world for getting me ready to win races. But it drops off once the season starts. I don't have the facilities any more. I don't have the equipment I need. It all goes by the wayside. The last five years I've always had a slump in January. And I'm taking on a personal assistant who'll help me with the media.