Bobsleigh

The trip to Hawaii counts as a break. So does the time spent with his two daughters, 3 and 6. But that's about all Pierre Lueders is going to do this summer that isn't related to work.

"I took a break last year but I don't think I will this year," says Lueders, 38, Canada's most senior Winter Olympian. "Based on my performance ... well, I just didn't think it was good enough this year."

Lueders, a four-time Olympian and two-time medalist, finished the 2008-09 season with three medals in the two-man competition (one of them a bronze at the inaugural World Cup event at the new Whistler, B.C., track) and was shut out in four-man events, finishing the season ranked 10th.

Lueders placed fifth in the first two-man event of the year, but then finished 11th, 18th and 17th in a combination of the two-man events. He crashed twice in four-man, and was disqualified at Konigsee, Germany, because his two-man sled was one kilogram over the weight limit.

You'd almost expect to find Lueders brooding, but that's not the case. True, he seemed to revel in the iconoclast's role this past winter during the pre-Olympics frenzy - he was not really a spoilsport, per se, but he was always willing to remind everybody that the 12 to 15 months of hype and pressure being placed on Canada's athletes ahead of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics were a little much, that many were guilty of putting the slider ahead of the sled. He could have used himself as a prime example, but as befits his business-like approach, Lueders believes there is another reason to alter his out-of-season routine.

"One thing I really wanted to do this year was look back at the things I did when I had seasons where I felt the best prepared," Lueders says. "I've picked what I think are the best elements of my past training and put them together. I've been lucky, because I haven't really had any injuries as a result of sliding."

That means Lueders has a treasure trove of past experience on which to draw. It sounds like boiler-plate stuff - which is how Lueders likes it - but his workout routine seems fairly basic. He lifts weights two or three times a week at a basement gymnasium or at Canada Olympic Park in Calgary. Next month, he will hit the sliding team's practice facility, also in Calgary.

Lueders says he spends one or two days a week doing leg weights and focuses on upper-body work the rest of the week. "It depends on the time of the year," he says, analyzing his program.

"Right now, I'm pushing a little higher weight in 10 to 15 repetitions. Closer to the season, I'll do some lower weights."

At one point or another, Lueders will be lifting anywhere between 165 and 205 kilograms by squats or dead-lifts for his legs and upper body. He can go more than 225 kilograms during upper-body workouts. "It's like any other workout: The heavier the weight gets, the less your reps," Lueders explains.

Lueders, an Edmonton native who will turn 39 in September, says he would lift weights even if he were not competing "because it's something I enjoy doing." This summer, he's making up for lost time. He had to limit his lifting last season for about two months because of an endless string of aches and pains. Last year was the first in which Lueders took an active role in the design of his sled. The much-ballyhooed Whistler Bomber played to mixed reviews, to the point where Lueders now says it is "50-50" whether he uses that sled or an older four-man sled.

"I won World Cups in that [the older] sled," Lueders says.

As he said last year, Lueders says he could never have imagined himself getting this involved in the design of a sled. "Time-consuming," he responds with a chuckle when asked what surprised him the most about sled design.

Lueders has already had both of his sleds at the National Research Council wind tunnel adjacent to Ottawa International Airport and says he was surprised that test results showed little difference between the sleds. "Just to look at it, you'd think the new sled was different aerodynamically," he says.

(Lueders laughs when asked if his dalliance with sled design has provided him with any Eureka moment so far - a moment where all that he knew from his experience as a driver melded with some sort of revelation that came from being involved in design. "No," he says. "The only eureka moment would be winning a medal [in 2010] at Whistler.")

Lueders says his two-man sled is essentially finished. Unknown still is whether a pairing with Edmonton Eskimos running back Jesse Lumsden, which helped him win the Canadian two-man championship, carries through to the Olympics.

That would seem to be a lot of unknowns for a person as singular and as prone to micromanaging as Lueders. But he's handling it. He did not attend a recent pre-Olympic summit in Vancouver, he says, because he thought that would play into the "over-hyping" of the Games. Vintage Lueders, that.

"It's not that the attention and hype is a bad thing," he says, matter-of-factly. "It's just that I feel I need to try and maintain some balance right now."