Long Track Speed Skating

There was a moment this spring when speed-skater Clara Hughes figured she may have finally tested her luck one too many times.

Hughes, a medalist at both the Summer and Winter Olympics who continues to defy the odds at 36, found herself in a precarious situation high atop a mountain near the California-Nevada border.

Trudging up a steep incline with 32 kilograms of camping gear strapped to her back, the ground beneath her suddenly give way. She had gone to the mountains for the kind of lung-busting, high-intensity altitude training that pays off for athletes later in the season, but this sudden turn of events was more than Hughes had bargained for.

"I like to get creative with my base training," she said of the 10- and 13-hour daily hikes, often at altitudes exceeding 4,000 metres, she used to prepare for a summer of workouts back in Canada with her teammates.

"The next thing I knew I was upside down with my leg caught up to my hip, and my foot caught in rocks under the snow," she said. "I didn't make any sudden movements because I knew if I did, I would probably break my ankle. ... And I knew if my leg came out, I would probably take a slide for about 500 or 600 metres straight down. ... I would have been broken into 100 pieces."

Though speed skating and cycling have made her one of this country's most recognizable Olympians, Hughes also knows a thing or two about the outdoors. So she waited patiently as her husband and hiking companion, Peter Guzman, came to her aid and dug her out.

"He said, 'Clara, we're going to get you out of this,'" she recalled.

It was an experience Hughes, who bubbles with excitement, now admits was actually "pretty scary." But after the kind of season she endured last year, it would take more than a little adversity on a mountainside to make her sweat.

Even though Hughes's season ended in spectacular fashion in March with a silver medal in the 5,000-metre event at the world single distances championships in Richmond, B.C., she looks back on last season with a sort of disdain. The silver, in the event she won gold in at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, was possibly an upset because of the kind of season she was having.

Changes to her equipment, including the alignment of her blades to harness more power, left her struggling to adjust. Before long, Hughes found herself turning in sub-par results that dragged through the season and made the ice feel like cement.

Her best finish on the World Cup circuit was fifth. Meanwhile, she battled illness and the lingering effects of an off-season car accident in Montreal that left her fortunate to walk away with only neck problems after he vehicle was struck by a drunk driver.

In the upbeat words of an athlete honed to focus on the positive, she readily admits last winter was the most trying time in her 20 years of competition.

"Last season is the worst season I've ever had as an athlete," Hughes said. "But I've had other periods of struggle where I just somehow know that no matter how bad it seems, it's taking me somewhere."

That somewhere would turn out to be the last race of the season, where Hughes brought the crowd in Richmond to its feet with a second-place finish that has rekindled her drive for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

"As bad as things were going I always knew I had one race inside of me. But I'd have another bad race, and another one, and I'd say ‘Okay, today obviously wasn't the day.' But I get to try this again," she said. "And I literally got down to the last race of the year."

Patience is a virtue Hughes has spent years developing. And so, after getting herself out of the mountain-top jam in April, Hughes grabbed her ice axe, dusted herself off and kept going up the mountain.

By the time she returned home to begin her formal training for the coming season, the whole ordeal had been forgotten. Instead, she was too busy focusing on the gruelling off-ice workouts that lay ahead - from the weight room to the bike and the infamous "low walks" that speed skaters do. The deep bends and loping stride can turn even the most well-trained leg muscles into jelly.

"For a while, I forgot that happened because it was so scary," Hughes said of her stumble on the mountain. "It was about three weeks after the trip that, one day, I remembered. And I was like ‘Oh my god, that happened.'"

As she puts in the long hours of training this summer needed to make a serious run in Vancouver in February, her ultimate goal is to be able to look back on last season with the same sense of disbelief.

Standing atop the podium, perhaps, she will have forgotten all of the bad things last year actually happened.