UrbanUpdate

No event at the Winter Olympics would ever be labeled as "easy," of course. But at a glance, it's not always obvious what makes a given sport so challenging, or just how fit you need to be in order to compete at an Olympic level. The luge is one of those sports. On the one hand, athletes can reach speeds of up to 90 miles an hour while whizzing down a mile-long track. On the other hand, it kind of looks like they're just, you know...lying there.

But the luge has long flummoxed U.S. athletes as well as U.S. audiences. In fact, no American man had ever won an Olympic singles medal before Chris Mazdzer, who broke through Germany's dominance of the sport to take home the silver in Pyeongchang, a scant forty-four one-thousandths of a second separating him from gold. Since a typical luge run is over in about 50 seconds, it can be tough for viewers at home to figure out exactly what the athletes are doing to earn themselves an edge. Thankfully, Mazdzer has been doing this for decades, and he sat down with GQ to explain everything.

GQ: For those of us who aren't luge-savvy, is there any similar activity that works for cross-training?

Chris Mazdzer: There’s no perfect crossover for training, or we would have discovered it by now. Overall body coordination is huge, though. I think the biggest thing for me is to always to try new things to keep the brain and body fresh, because when we’re going down the track we’re making split-second decisions. Even though it looks like we’re lying down, our body is constantly moving. We drive with our shoulders, our feet, and our hands, so it’s important to stay relaxed. The reason I love rock climbing and mountain biking and cliff jumping is that they require performance under pressure. You have to go really fast, and when you feel like you’re out of control, that’s when you have to relax and focus the most.

It sounds like if you can’t recreate the physical conditions, you’re big on recreating the mental ones.

Absolutely. When you’re going down, it’s a minute of complete focus. I think that’s why I love it—my ADHD brain otherwise has a hard time focusing on one thing. If you have to go to the bathroom before you pull off the handles, when you get to the bottom of the track, you’ll have already forgotten. You don’t really hear anything. You feel it when you hit walls, but a lot of the senses kind of disappear.

Is cliff jumping just what it sounds like?

Yeah, it’s just jumping off cliffs into water, doing flips. It’s this high-intensity activity that I really enjoy because it takes confidence to push yourself to the limit. When you get up to 50 or 60 feet, you don’t want to be second-guessing yourself. It's the same with luge—we have to visualize ourselves going down, and then we have to execute. There are lots of ways to train for luge, but the only way to get better is to run the track, in the winter, every day.

Watch:Adam Scott Goes Undercover on Reddit, Instagram, and Twitter

How do you feel when you finish a run?

I feel like I’m at peace. There’s not a better feeling than having a really good, clean run. It’s a high-pressure situation, we’re an inch off of some walls, and we’re cutting it really close. It’s such an amazing sense of accomplishment. It's a body high.

Runs are so short and the speeds are so high that once you realize you’ve made a mistake, it’s too late to do anything about it. How do you feel or intuit when things are going wrong?

You can tell how fast a run is compared to other runs. So if you’re going slower, you can feel it, and there’s going be less pressure in the curves. I guess that moment where you realize you messed up and you’re about to hit walls or crash is different for everybody. Some people will just bail, and some will try to fight through it. For me, they happen so fast that I try to fight through things. But when it gets really bad, the reason I don’t have any broken bones or concussions is that I’m a good crasher. It’s about knowing how far you can let the sled go before bailing.

That sounds like something you can only pick up with a lot of experience.

Exactly. My body does these automatic corrections, and I pat my body on the shoulder a lot, like, “Thanks for saving me back there.” When you’re going down a mile-long sheet of ice, you’re not going to have a perfect run. So the best people are the ones correcting themselves and seeing who can get back to that perfect line as fast as possible. You have to fix your mistakes before they compound and get to the point where it’s too much.

Outside of the cross-training, like jumping off a cliff, what are the workouts like?

We train just like normal athletes. Our sport requires upper-body explosive power, but a lot of that is generated through hip drive, which is actually kind of similar to exercises like the power clean. So a lot of what we do is Olympic lifting-based. And we do upper-body pulling movements, like weighted pull-ups, muscle-ups, and the prone row, where we’re pulling the bar up to us. Also, it’s good to have weight in our sport, so I do a lot of back squats, which are good for hip-driving and for keeping the chest big and the core powerful.

What’s an ideal body type?

It’s a gravity-based sport, so weight is good, but you can’t be a cheese wedge going down because aerodynamics are also part of it. There’s no perfect body type. We’re all over the place. But you need a fast start, so you need upper-body explosive power, and you need enough weight to carry you down the track. We haven’t found the perfect body type, and people keep surprising us with what they can do.

What’s your diet like, since you don’t have to worry about cutting weight?

Most Popular

GQ RecommendsThese Gym Equipment Sales Will Help Your Crush Your ResolutionsBy Tyler Chin

GQ RecommendsThe Alex Mill Sale Just Went Double PlatinumBy Gerald Ortiz

GQ RecommendsThe Best Hair Gel for Men Is Spiking Our InterestBy Adrian Clark

I don’t have a specific diet—I just try to eat well. Breakfast for me is eggs, usually omelettes or over medium. Plain yogurt with honey, and some flax seeds, hemp seeds, and berries. If I’m at a hotel and there’s smoked salmon, I love that with eggs and an avocado.

Pretty high in protein and fat, then.

Yeah, our bodies work as suspension, so we need a little fat to be like a small absorbent layer between us and the sled. If we’re very lean, it’s kind of hard on the sled. That winter layer that keeps you warm also works as a shock absorber.

And for the rest of the day?

I train in Salt Lake City sometimes, and I love burritos. There’s this place called Hector’s, and if you’re in Park City and you’re an athlete, you know about this place. I get the carne asada burrito, two of them, and that’s the ideal lunch for me. I’m all over the place with dinner. Growing up, my favorite kind of food was free food, so I will literally eat anything—get a protein in there, some vegetables, and a starch. One thing I love cooking on my own—and maybe it’s because I’m in Utah a lot and love Mexican food—is chicken fajitas. I’ll cook up chicken, have a ton of vegetables, throw it in a tortilla, and I'm good to go.

That's a pretty omnivorous diet. Is there anything you have to avoid?

Not really. My body is good at consuming anything. The big thing we worry about when we go to Europe is that we’re traveling from September through March. If we can save $10 per person per night, that’s $150 per day. Over a hundred days, we’re saving a lot of money, so we don’t stay in the most glamorous places. And there are always times like—this is a real story—we were served boiled potatoes with sour cream for lunch at one of our hotels in Germany.

Oh no.

We were like, “This is it? Is this it? Okay.” We try to keep from losing weight on the road, so we bring peanut butter, and sometimes we’ll go out and buy a little extra food. The biggest thing when we travel is to make sure we maintain weight. It’s easy to lose weight on the road. Boiled potatoes become unappetizing after week four.

Did that taste better than it sounds?

No. But because we compete around the world, we have to learn to eat everything. If you don’t eat the food in front of you, you aren’t eating that night, especially on the junior circuit, when you don’t have money to go buy more food. I started touring at 13, so I got really good at eating whatever was put in front of me.

Luke Darby is a contributor to GQ, covering news, entertainment, and the environment. A Louisiana native, he now resides in Cleveland, and his writing has also appeared in Outside, the Dallas Observer, and Marie Claire.Related Stories for GQOlympicsReal Life Diet