Grimmette and Martin back on track

It's 9 a.m. on July 1, and several athletes are already well into their workouts in the strength and conditioning room at the Lake Placid Olympic Training Center. A few more walk in as the morning ticks on, but except for a few quiet hi's, everyone is focused on his or her own routine. At one weight station, an athlete does squats. Across the room another does bicep curls while standing on a fitball - a way to strengthen both her arms and her core muscles.

In the middle of the room, Mark Grimmette is doing a back exercise. It's nothing fancy. One ankle is hooked under a padded bar, and his abdomen is resting on a padded support that's about three feet off the floor. He lifts his torso up, then lowers it toward the floor, hands behind his head. The exercise is designed to strengthen his hamstrings, gluts, and back muscles.

What is remarkable is that Grimmette, 38, is doing back exercises at all. He and luge doubles partner Brian Martin, 35, are the U.S.'s most decorated lugers - having earned two Olympic medals (bronze in 1998, silver in 2002), three overall World Cup titles, and nine World Championship medals in their 13 years paired together. But for the past six years, Grimmette has suffered from a back injury so debilitating that he has had to undergo several epidural injections into his spine to relieve the pain.

Surprisingly, the pain didn't force the pair off the track, but it often affected their results. Their tougher seasons included 2005/06, when they finished eighth overall on the World Cup tour and crashed at the 2006 Olympics, and 2007/08 when they finished no higher than ninth on the World Cup tour and ceded their status at the top U.S. doubles luge team to Christian Niccum and Dan Joye.

But in the past year, thanks to new exercises that keep his core stable and flexible, Grimmette's back problems have improved markedly. He and Martin underscored their return to top form by taking a bronze medal at the 2009 World Championships in Lake Placid in February - their first podium in two years.

"It was nice to be able to focus on the sliding and not so much on my back," says Grimmette about the past season.

They are now heading into the Olympic year as the top U.S. doubles team and favorites to stand on the podium again.

"Mark and Brian have an excellent chance of earning a medal in Vancouver," says friend and former teammate Gordy Sheer, USA Luge's director of marketing and sponsorship. "If there is one thing their past performance has shown, it's that you can't count them out on race day. If you look back at any almost any big race since the late '90s, they've been on the podium."

Grimmette and Martin also learned a valuable lesson after crashing at the 2006 Olympics. This could be a key factor to success on the Whistler track next February.

Grimmette and Martin have been competing in luge longer than many 2010 Olympic hopefuls have been alive. Grimmette first learned the sport in 1984 after a recreational luge track was built on his favorite sledding hill in Muskegon, Mich.

Martin discovered luge in 1988 when USA Luge's Slider Search, a program that introduces luge to kids, came to his hometown of Palo Alto, Calif.

Both Grimmette and Martin moved up USA Luge's development pipeline and started racing doubles. Unlike singles luge, where one slider lies feet-first on a small sled, in doubles, two people lie on the sled, one beneath the other. Surprisingly, doubles slide more slowly than singles sleds. At the 2009 World Championships, men's singles champion Felix Loch's fastest run averaged 77.164 mph. Doubles champions Gerhard Plankensteiner and Oswald Haselrieder averaged 71.487 mph.

The rules do not specify gender, so in theory, a doubles team could be two women, or a man and a women. But traditionally, doubles lugers are both male.

Usually a smaller athlete is on the bottom of the sled, and his job is to establish the sled's line as it goes into a curve. They guy on top does the finesse driving.

"I give it a nice roll so the sled picks up onto the curve nicely and smoothly," explains Martin, who can't see beyond Grimmette's helmet, so he relies on his peripheral vision to know where they are on the track. "Mark's fine tuning the line because he can see where we're going and can correct as we come out of a curve and get us pointed to the next curve - to oversimplify it."

At 6-1, Grimmette tried doubles after a coach suggested the discipline to the tall slider. He took fourth at the 1994 Winter Olympics paired with Jonathan Edwards, then decided to switch back to singles. But he missed the teamwork of doubles so returned to it a year later.

Martin, who is 5-8, saw doubles and thought it looked like fun.

Grimmette and Martin paired in the spring of 1996 after Grimmette and his coach talked about possible partners. "[We] talked it over and decided that Brian was probably the best choice," Grimmette says. "So I called up Brian and the rest is history."

Grimmette tends to be the more talkative of the two, but both are the quiet, analytical sort, and they share similar interests outside luge.

Like wake surfing. Recently, Grimmette, Martin, and Sheer, who took the silver medal in doubles with Chris Thorpe at the 1998 Winter Olympics, purchased a motorboat - dubbed the Ship of Fools - to wake surf on Lake Placid.

The pairing worked on the track too. They finished third at the 1998 Olympics behind Sheer and Thorpe. They then took more bronze medals at the 1999 and 2000 World Luge Championships.

In 2002, they moved up a step to silver at the Salt Lake City Olympics, beating teammates Thorpe and Clay Ives by four-thousandths of a second.

But the following year, Grimmette's back had had enough and gave out while he was tossing a weighted medicine ball in the gym.

"The first thing you learn when you [hurt your back] is that it's not that one incident," he says. "It's the years of accumulated damage."

Luge is notorious for taking a toll on sliders' backs. To start, they thrust the sled back as far as it can go, almost folding themselves in half, then explode forward.

"We're folding ourselves into deep flexion," Grimmette explains. "I think any doctor will tell you it's not a good thing to do, especially when you're doing it explosively."

Luge legend Georg Hackl, who won five Olympic medals and 22 World Championship medals before retiring in 2006, has suggested to the International Luge Federation that the start be modified so that lugers can't slide as far back. "The flexion, that's the worst thing," he said while watching the 2009 World Luge Championships. "It would be very healthy to limit that."

Despite the injuries, lugers tend to stick with their sport. Hackl was almost 40 when he retired, and the average age of the men on the doubles podium at 2009 Worlds was 35.

When asked what has kept them in the sport, both Grimmette and Martin use the word fun. "There's just a feeling that you get when you're going down the track that's very addicting," says Grimmette.

"It's like the perfect wave," adds Martin as he leans back in his chair and smiles.

Both deny that the pursuit of an Olympic gold medal has been the primary reason that they haven't retired yet. Sheer speculates that their desire to win gold is "a piece of the puzzle, but not the sole reason" that they are still competing.

"No one is in this sport for the money or glory," adds Sheer. "They really do it because they love it. They are in it for the fun."

They might also be addicted to the feeling that they get from doing well in competition. After they finished third at 2009 Worlds, Grimmette said he felt an adrenaline rush through his body after they came up the outrun second run and saw the number one in front of their names, confirming that no matter how the last two teams did, they would be on the podium. "I was pretty psyched," he said.

"Anytime you medal in a race, it's always a big rush," added Martin. "To have that come back after a drought, it really does feel good."

And if they are lucky enough to stand on the Olympic podium again, it could be because they crashed in the 2006 Olympics.

They can still recount exactly what went wrong on that fateful first run on the Cesana Pariol track outside Torino - how they were late going into curve 14 and wrecked, ruining their chances of taking another Olympic medal.

Looking back, they both say that they hadn't had enough runs on the Cesana Pariol track to learn it thoroughly. (Although the Cesana track was finished in 2004, organizers reconfigured it after several bad crashes and didn't test it again until October 2005.) Practice was limited to six runs leading up to the Olympics, reported the San Francisco Chronicle. Even with previous trips to the track, they only ran the track 30 times before their first Olympic run in 2006.

"In luge, that's less than 30 minutes of training," Niccum told the Chronicle after his teammates crashed.

Now, looking toward the 2010 Olympics, Grimmette and Martin already have a good feel for the fast Whistler track, thanks to a couple of training weeks and a World Cup there in February, where they finished seventh.

"We went to [the Whistler World Cup] with the intention of learning the track in a more systematic manner and not worrying about pushing ourselves to win the race," says Martin. "The focus was to understand and be able to negotiate the track and learn as much as possible about every inch of it."

"We're much farther ahead than we were when we were in Torino," adds Grimmette.

By the time they enter the start for their first run at the 2010 Olympics, they will have slid down the track over 45 times.

With a good feel for the track and the fact that they can once again work on their starts (now that Grimmette's back is strong again), the two men say they are excited for Vancouver.

"Health is a big key going forward for the next seven months," Grimmette adds. "If I can keep my back healthy and we can train the start the way we need to, then I'm confident that we can be competitive."