Luge

EDMONTON - Regan Lauscher sat in her luge sled atop the run in Altenberg, Germany, and shivered with fear.

It was her first time back at the track where - while racing a year earlier - G forces whiplashed her head violently backward onto the ice, knocking her out, leaving her limp body to ricochet down the course, her bruised brain to begin swelling inside her skull.

"I was pretty much a rag doll on my sled going 125 kilometres an hour,'' the two-time Olympian recalls in an interview.

She was rocketing down the bottom of the track at the Suzuki Challenge Cup on that January day in 2007, flat on her back, head raised, looking at the blue-white world of ice flashing between her toes.

She was slow out of Turn 15 and had to make up time.

Move it! Move it!

She took a hard line through 16, but the jet-fighter G forces proved overwhelming, throwing her head back with an ugly thwock, like a cue ball slammed onto the green baize of a pool table.

Lights out.

Teammates and officials, helpless, turned away rather than watch her splayed, inert body, still on the sled, pinball through the remaining corners until it thumped to a stop in the out-run and began sliding backwards.

Medical crews raced over, careful to check for spine damage. They cut off her rubberized speed suit, wrapped her in blankets, and put her on a spine board

"I remember being lifted into an ambulance, my head really hurting, not really understanding what was happening,'' she says.

"I remember my physio(therapist). I remember her voice. They were yelling at me to stay awake.''

They couldn't scan her skull for 24 hours because the brain was too swollen.

She spent months rehabbing. She wore a collar to repair the ripped tissues in her neck. She would get dizzy climbing stairs, get headaches, vertigo. If her heart rate went up, her head started to pound.

It was going to be a long way back.

Regan (pronounced REE-gun) was born on Feb. 21, 1980, in Saskatoon. Her father worked on the rigs and the family followed the oil patch, first to Calgary, and then to Red Deer, Alta., where Lauscher grew up, the youngest of three, with two older brothers.

She liked highland dancing, badminton and volleyball. Her room was decorated in movie posters ("Titanic'') and the boy band New Kids on the Block. She wrote songs, poems and short stories, and would eventually study journalism. Her room was constantly re-decorated and she'd change clothes three or four times a day, says her mother, Vicki.

And she loved to perform. At times in the mall, she'd just break out into dance or song, leaving her brothers pop-eyed in disbelief, red-faced with embarrassment.

In Grade 7, her band teacher took some kids out on a nearby hill to try natural luge, driving around pylons with reins on the sled. Lauscher bombed straight down and slammed into a fence.

She kept at it. By 19 she was competing internationally on luge tracks and rising fast, eventually becoming a seven-time national champion and finishing ninth in the 2005 world championships.

In 2004, she became the first Canadian to win a World Cup luge medal, taking silver at Lake Placid, N.Y.

But it wasn't easy. For years, Lauscher was the only female slider on the Canadian team, the lone X chromosome in a world of Ys.

"She had a thick skin. She could dish out what she received,'' says Walter Corey, who has known Lauscher for two decades and is currently the high performance director for the Canadian Luge Association.

When one coach pushed, criticized and harangued the sliders to the point of mental cruelty, the boys blew off steam by complaining to each other. Lauscher had no one.

There were emotional phone calls home to Red Deer from distant tracks in Austria and Germany, says Vicki.

"There were breaking points there,'' she says. "It was pretty lonely and pretty hard.''

By 2002, Lauscher was at the Olympics, finishing 12th in Salt Lake City. Four years later, she was 10th at Turin.

But as her career and training became more intense, her shoulders were slowly coming apart.

Lauscher, nicknamed Gumby, is so flexible she can touch her forearm with her thumb and zip up the back of her own race suit. In flexibility testing, she could _ flat on her back, butt to the wall, legs to the sky - do the splits until her ankles almost touched the floor.

But such pliability became a curse in a sport where sliders rock back and forth then fire off the start handles like a slingshot.

Gumby Lauscher was more like a worn, flabby elastic band. She could pull back, back, and back until the slingshot momentum was lost and she would have to violently wrench herself forward, straining her shoulders.

At first, it was an odd tweak. But during the Olympic years it was constant, heavy stress. The shoulders would ache occasionally, then constantly, then daily as the labrum cushioning and suctioning her shoulders frayed and broke down.

Picking up her two-year old nephew was hard. Reaching high for a tin of soup brought pain. Then getting into her car, she reached to close the door and her arm slipped out of its socket.

The shoulders now seemed to click in and out like a slide rule. If she got lazy in weight training, didn't brace them properly, they'd pop out to excruciating pain. In competition it was ice and Advil and hit the track.

Finally, in February of 2008, she realized that if she had any chance to fly at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver-Whistler, her wings had to go on the hoist.

Two surgeries over three months and her shoulders feel fine as she embarks next week on the first World Cup event of the season, in Calgary, which she hopes will take her to Whistler.

If she makes it, it will be for the last time.

"I'll lock this chapter of my life up, have fond memories of it and move on,'' she says, adding she may even write a book.

But first, there are more mountains to conquer.

Like Altenberg, the track that bounced her head around like a basketball and found her a year later quaking at the start handles.

"I remember looking at the ice and just shaking and saying to myself, 'You have to do this. It's 56 seconds, and it's going to be scary but you're going to get through it.'''

Then she steeled herself.

And pushed off.