The pain and the glory: USA speed queen Brittany Bowe’s long road to Beijing

“We’re feeling pain that is unimaginable,” said Brittany Bowe who, long before becoming the fastest woman in the world over 1000m, thought speed skating looked, well, easy. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

The world’s best skaters have a way of making this most rigorous of sports look a breezy enterprise. The liquid stride, the elegant pendulum swing of the arm, other arm tucked behind the back for aerodynamics' sake, one foot over the other in the turns like a two-step -- it all somehow conspires to create the illusion of a pre-dinner stroll.

“At the end of a race, your legs hurt so bad you can’t bend your knees. You taste blood in your mouth,” Bowe told Olympics.com, a little laugh in her voice, addressing the paradox of how top skaters make a sport so lung-busting and brutal seem effortless. “You can’t stand up; you can’t sit down. You can’t bend over to untie your skate because you’ll cramp if you do.”

Bowe’s road to the agonies and ecstasies of the speed-skating oval was long, winding and highly unlikely. “I guess there’s just something in the water down there,” she jokes about launching a niche, cold-weather sporting career from her humid hometown of Ocala, Florida.

There’s no ice rink in Ocala. It's about as far as you can get from speed skating’s cultural home in the Netherlands’ frozen north, where Bowe won last year’s 1000m world championships and re-set the world record with a flawless performance.

“I was at a birthday party at a local [roller] rink for a classmate and there was a coach there and she invited me out to a practice to try inline skating,” Bowe, now 33, remembered of that fateful day so long ago. “I just kind of stumbled onto it.”

That coach was none other than Renee Hildebrand,