Apolo Anton Ohno

Ohno was a favorite going into the 1998 Olympic trials, but he finished sixteenth-last-at that competition and nearly quit skating. Yuki drove him up into the mountains near Seattle and left him alone in a secluded cabin for a week to consider what he wanted to do. One day he was running in the pouring rain for his third workout of the day. "I had a hole in my shoe and I was getting a huge blister and I was just so tired. I stopped and sat on a rock on the side of the road," he told Lynn Zinser of the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service. He sat and thought and "realized that if I really desired to keep speedskating that I would keep running. I got back up and kept running." Ohno reclaimed his national title the next year.