TG: Yeah, I'm tiny. I'm not real tall. And during these races I dip down to under 110 pounds. I'm trying really hard to fight that. Skeleton is a gravity sport. You need some kind of weight to take you down the hill. But Chris, you're not huge either.

CS: But I get to put a lot of weight in my sled. Sliders with less body weight are allowed to have a maximum combined weight of body weight with sled weight. The men are allowed to have up to 150 kilograms including themselves, the equipment that'll go down the hill -- helmet, spikes, speedsuit, underwear and the sled. That's one of two ways to make up for being a smaller person. We're allowed a little more weight than the women. That's partially why the women don't have the top speed that we do. If you know your physics, you know that heavier things go faster. You can be 300 pounds and do this. But aerodynamics comes into play. That's another factor.

TG: That's what I have going for me.

CS: There are so many different parts of the sport that are important to speed. We've broken everything down to gain an extra 100th of a second here and an extra 100th there. There's the push right at the top, that brings in your athleticism. And then you've got aerodynamics, which brings into play body type. Then driving skills and the mental side of it. And the equipment, the technical side of it. A 100th of a second is the difference in a race. I've tied in World Cup races for places with a 100th of a second difference. If I had that extra 100th of a second, I'd take it.

TG: And I lose out on the weight, but I just try and make up for it with something else. My driving skills are a plus. And my start's been equal to that of others. You have to make the most of what you have and you can do well. There are so many different combinations available in skeleton. For me, definitely, the driving skills and the aerodynamics are my two advantages. I've worked the hardest on improving my start time.

CS: I'm in the same boat. I work regularly on my push. I can see results from a push. A lot of the things have to be worked on regularly.

TG: I picked two tenths [of a second] up this summer. That's all I thought about all summer long, my push, my push, my push. I woke up every day thinking that. I did six days a week of training specifically for that.

CS: I made up about the same amount of time. You don't take it for granted when you have the push. I had it and then I lost it. Now I'm getting it back, and it's one of the things I'm really proud of achieving this year.

TG: It's so hard. You run bent over. It's not an upright sprinting position. And your hands are fixed on your sled, so you don't use your hands for momentum at all. It is 100 percent created by your lower body. So you're asking your legs to push your body and the sled really fast. My sled weighs roughly 80 pounds. I'm asking my legs to push me, and something that weighs almost as much as me, as fast as some of the girls who are twice my size with a lighter sled.

CS: You have to have the speed starting off. So we train like sprint athletes. The biggest thing is the odd position we're in when we start the push. I used to snowboard and I competed in downhill mountain bike racing, so I do have a background for speed. I think it's one of those things that I picked up easily.

TG: I was a downhill alpine ski racer before I was a skeleton athlete, and I switched over so easily. I can read the ice and the lines before a lot of my other teammates. I picked it up quickly because it's just like ski racing, only in skiing you go up instead of staying flat.

CS: It does have to do with your mental makeup. I mean, there are studies that show that people who are used to adrenaline and used to speed have a different makeup. That, partially, might be a reason for who does it. We're different. When I first started sliding, I noticed the adrenaline and the rush all the time. What really appealed to me was whipping down the hill that fast. Now it's gotten to the point where it's pretty technical. The thing that's giving me a rush now is pushing myself to the limit, being able to go down the hill as fast as I can, and knowing that I did parts of the track, or most of the track, correctly and pushing those things.

TG: It's still a total endorphin rush every time I go down. I'm not over it. I could be having the worst day ever and be fighting with everybody and go up the slide and just be so happy.

CS: I still get that, too. I jump off the sled every once in a while and I give a scream because it's like nothing else. Man, I hope it'll just get faster.

We're very conscious of what's going on the whole way down the track. It's not just like we're lying on the sled and not thinking. You have to fix things when they go askew, either oversteering or dragging a toe or something. With experience you learn how to fix little things. You can tell when things are going wrong.

TG: Like when I mashed my hand out at curve six today. I don't like that curve very much. It's one of the more difficult ones on the track here [in Park City].

CS: There's a curve in St. Moritz called Sunny, because the sun comes up over the hill and just blasts it at a certain hour of the day. The rest of the track isn't really getting hit by sun, so it melts the track at that point. Different track conditions affect your speed in different ways. Having slush on there is a lot slower than having just a thin bead of water. So when the sun first hits it and it gets just above freezing, it creates this thin bead of water right on top and you're able to just glide on top of that. As opposed to frost or any other type of ice where you're kind of pushing through these little fibers of ice the whole time. If there's snow, you have to plough through it the whole time.

TG: That's slow.

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