What goes through your head at 80 miles per hour, face-first, on a sled with no brakes? For U.S. Olympic skeleton athlete Mystique Ro, the answer might surprise you. She calls it "me time”. No emails. No meetings. Just her, the ice, and what she describes as the most peaceful minute of her day. The human penguin who treats the world's most terrifying sport like a spa day

Her surgeon gave her two options: get surgery and go home, or try skiing without an ACL. She didn't think twice. Six weeks later, Rell Harwood was standing in an Olympic start gate. This is her story.

Most people can't remember a single decision they made at five years old. Kamryn Lute has spent the last two decades living out hers. What followed was two decades of showing up, a chronic illness she had to learn to skate through, and a debut in Milan at her first Olympic Games. Her path wasn’t always easy, but she never once questioned the destination.

Landon Wendler tore his ACL at a World Cup and didn't know it for weeks. He rehabbed, got back on snow, and made the Olympic team. Thirteen months later, he was standing in an Olympic start gate in Milan with music cranked as loud as it goes in one ear, and he still couldn't hear it over the crowd chanting his name. This is his story.

Niklas Malacinski spent seven months doing nothing but eating, training, and sleeping. And it almost cost him the Olympics. The 22-year-old Nordic combined skier learned the hard way that wanting something too badly can be just as dangerous as not wanting it enough. This is the story of how he got there and what he figured out on the other side.