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All-Around titles in the same year—and he has done it three straight times. He holds world records in two distances (1,000 meters and 1,500 meters). In a sport where victory is usually measured in hundredths of. seconds, Heiden outstrips human comparison: he is Secretariat, stronger, faster, possessed of a greater racing heart than has ever been known. "Sometimes when I'm racing and I'm really stroking strong, I can feel the ice breaking away beneath me," he says. "It is a wonderful feeling, because it means that I have reached the limit, the ice can't hold me any more."
He is a straightforward young man, not much given to such mysticism about his sport because he knows, perhaps better than anyone else (with the possible exception of his sister), the price that must be paid for those moments. "The secret to the Heidens is simple," says Team Manager Bill Cushman. "They have talent and they just work harder than anybody else."
Their regime would drive a marathoner to retirement. During the summer, they work out twice daily, running (up to ten miles), bike riding ("Oh, 100 miles some days, other days just 45"), weight training and, finally, going through the exercises to strengthen specific muscles for speed skating: several miles of duck-walks with weights on their shoulders, endless circling to strengthen the left, or inside leg for turns. When fall comes to their Madison, Wis., home, they put on skates and start training in earnest. "Sometimes I want to quit," Eric says. "But then I look at Beth, and she's digging in and it inspires me. I keep going."
So does she. Says Beth, 15 months younger than Eric: "I played with my brother and his friends from the day I could stand up and run after them. It helped to have a wild older brother, because then people didn't think I was so strange when I came along. But my mother told me that the first word I learned to say was 'Mine!' Not 'Mama' or 'Dada,' but 'Mine,' because Eric was always trying to take my things away."
Beth's drive is as palpable as her brother's. Both seem to have inherited a desire to excel. The Heidens' father Jack, 45, is an orthopedic surgeon who was Big 10 fencing champion as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin. Last year he finished second in the national senior cycling time trials championships. Their mother is the city seniors tennis champion in Madison, and her father Art Thomsen is a former hockey coach at the University of Wisconsin. The young Heidens began skating on the lake behind their house when they were two years old.
When Eric was nine and Beth eight, their parents enrolled them in the Madison Figure Skating Club, but that proved too tame. Says Beth: "Everybody was twirling around and all we wanted to do was go fast and race around the rink. We weren't exactly the favorite kids in the Madison Figure Skating Club."