She Seems Fine

What we ask of the people who can hold it

Relaxed Chaos

Her face is an inch off the ice. She is going ninety miles an hour, head first, and she can smell it. Not metaphorically. The ice has a smell, and at that distance you get it along with the sound of the runners and the pressure in your stomach coming out of a curve.

Katie Uhlaender was nineteen the first time. Day three, she flipped, got back on the sled, and something changed. She described watching herself from above and being entirely inside her body at the same time. She had no idea what she was doing. She could see where she wanted to go anyway.

She has a phrase for what that state requires. Relaxed chaos.

Here is the physics, in her words. Skeleton is a momentum sport. You are not going straight down, you are going through curves, and every bit of friction you create costs you. The fastest athlete on the track is the one closest to dead weight. Tense up, oversteer, anticipate too hard, and you slow yourself down. Two people can take lines that look identical from the outside and one of them arrives four hundredths of a second earlier because she wasn’t fighting the ice.

But you cannot be entirely loose, either. Sometimes tension is exactly what the curve wants, pressure applied at one precise point, and without it you have no steering at all. So it isn’t relaxation. It isn’t control. It is knowing, at ninety miles an hour with your face an inch off the ground, which one this particular curve is asking for, and having the answer before you have the thought.

This is what we mean by kinesthetic. Knowing that lives in the body, in the feel, and language lags far behind. I asked her how much of the run is strategy and how much is feel, and she said if she could answer that clearly she would have the key to the sport. She isn’t being coy. You can sit with a scientist and map exactly where the pressure should go and when, and it will not give you the feeling.

Coaches in her sport call it the magic. You can bring in the fastest sprinter alive and he may never get it. Some people have it. Most don’t.

Check out the full conversation with five-time Olympian Katie Uhlaender on The Quiet Tension.

What She Can Hold

Katie’s gift was never only about the ice. She can hold tension almost anywhere, and she has been handed a great deal of it. She missed a medal by four hundredths of a second to a woman later named in a state doping program, was awarded the bronze, and then learned from hate mail that it had been taken back. She still won’t judge the athlete who took it. She says the woman did what her country told her to do, and that she doesn’t know what she would have done in her place.

A person who can hold that can be asked to hold anything.

Spent

In 2009 Katie’s father was dying. She asked to go home three times. She was told she couldn’t, that the team needed her to perform or the funding would be cut. She stayed. He died without her there. Days later her federation told her that talking publicly about his death would help the team and draw attention to the sport. She said she didn’t want to. She did it anyway.

Read that with relaxed chaos in mind. Who do you ask to do that? Not the athlete who comes apart. You ask the one who has demonstrated, publicly and repeatedly, that she can hold impossible tension while everything arrives at once. The gift is the qualification.

Composure is not read as effort. It gets read as evidence that no effort is required. So the demands sort themselves. The person who visibly struggles gets asked how they are doing. The person who holds gets asked for more, and the asking never feels cruel to anyone doing it, because she seems fine.

She is fine. That is the whole problem.

Her fineness is a skill she trained for twenty years and it is being scored as a personality trait. Nobody rations what appears to be free.

And the ones who have it rarely object, because objecting would require noticing. From the inside, relaxed chaos does not feel like labor. It feels like the thing you are best at.

Stranded

Relaxed chaos shows up in my work with executives and founders. I work with a woman who has spent years taking companies public. She had a finesse in that world that was exactly what Katie describes on the ice. Her timing, her execution, her problem-solving were exceptional. She showed up creative, warm, and she delivered every time. When the market for those deals contracted, she went in-house. Not because she had to. She wanted to be part of something larger than her own name on the work, part of a team that won together.

Nothing about that decision was wrong.

But look at what she walked into. Her gift is calibrated for chaos. Speed, incomplete information, decisions that have to be made now by whoever is closest to them. That was the condition she was built for, and she was the one people looked to when it arrived.

In-house there is no chaos. There is planning. There are quarters and approvals and a calendar that knows in March what will happen in September. The tension is still there, it just doesn’t move, and a person whose whole talent is finding the line at speed has nothing to find. The track went flat.

What she found was a CFO between her and every decision she used to make herself. She is consulted now rather than deciding. She waits for approvals on judgment calls she used to make in an afternoon. She experiences this as micromanagement. It may be. It may also be what a structure is.

I said it sounded like being benched, and she stopped and said yes.

She was a starter. She was in the huddle with the people calling the game. Now she is dressed and on the roster and watching, and she cannot say any of that out loud without sounding like someone who can’t be a team player, which is the exact thing she came in-house to be.

And here is where it turns on her. She has started asking whether her contributions are actually strategic. Whether she was ever as good as the outcomes suggested or whether the situation was doing the work. Whether the thing she has been proud of for twenty years is a real capability or was just a set of conditions that no longer exist.

Nothing was taken from her. Every quality that made her formidable is intact and none of it has a surface to work on.

That is the part people cannot metabolize. Being consumed at least confirms your value. Being stranded feels like a referendum on whether you had anything to begin with.

The Work

When I work with an athlete or an executive, the work isn’t always what people expect. They often expect expediency. A formula. A coaching plan with outcomes clearly stated and efficiently met. They come in wanting the strength that made them who they are restored. Put me back on the track. Put me back on the fast track.

What I hand them is a process. We look underneath the hood at what has actually worked for them. We test environments and name whether fit is the problem or whether uncertainty is the new test.

Humans change at a much slower cadence than a hand-made track in St. Moritz. Holding the space for change, for questioning, for indecision, for sorting before committing, that is the process.

Katie generously tells us her story is now less clear than it has ever been. She has Columbia and no track. My client has a track and isn’t sure it’s the right one for her skills.

What She Got

Katie had a hip replaced in May. She is forty-one. She lost the cartilage pushing through pain a coach told her to push through, which she says she knew better than to do, and her own line about it is that the tread on the tires gets used up.

Now she is deciding whether to go back. Not entirely for the racing. She says that if a full-time job with security doesn’t come, returning makes sense, because being on the team is how she keeps health insurance. So the question is whether to put a replaced hip back on a track at ninety miles an hour, or leave the only thing she has ever been the best in the world at, and there is no version of that with a clean answer.

My executive is asking the same question. Stakes are sometimes physical. Stakes are sometimes emotional. Stakes are sometimes identity. Stakes are sometimes self-worth.

Katie benched something too. Not a role. Twenty years of a life that would have had a home in it, a partner, probably children. She names all of it plainly and says she wouldn’t trade it, which people mistake for having made peace. What she is describing is the shadow that comes with a chosen life, the one that doesn’t disappear just because the choice was right. And the sharpest version of that shadow is not the family she didn’t have. It is her father dying without her there, while she was on a track, doing the thing she was best at.

She lost three friends in sport. One was Steve Holcomb, an Olympic champion in bobsleigh, close enough that she called herself his annoying little sister. A week before he died, on his birthday, watching a movie, she asked why he wasn’t drinking. He told her that if he started he couldn’t stop. It was the first time she had heard him say anything was wrong.

Holcomb had told her he felt like nobody cared. He had spoken openly, on camera, about mental health. He still got missed, by people who loved him, by a friend sitting right there.

Ask Katie what she got for all of it and she does not begin with medals.

She talks about living in Fiji.

She talks about the years she cannot get back and the family she might have had if she had chosen differently, and she says she wouldn’t trade any of it.

And then she talks about a night in Italy, at what turned out to be Pavarotti’s last live performance, when she started crying and reached over and took the hand of the stranger sitting beside her.

“Are you hearing this?” she said.

The stranger looked back at her and smiled.

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The Quiet Tension Journal Prompt

This is where it becomes yours.

Somewhere in your life is a strength you have stopped questioning.

• What are you currently being asked to hold, specifically because you have proven you can hold it?
• Where has a strength of yours stopped fitting, and how quickly did you decide the problem was you?
• What are you rushing to decide because sitting in the not-knowing feels like failure?

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If this conversation raised something for you, you don’t have to carry it alone. In the US and Canada, call or text 988 for immediate support.