Amber Glenn, Getting the Hang of It.

The U.S. championship this week served as a test of all tests for Amber Glenn.

Her career had never rolled like syrup over a pancake. Her tears and her anguish welled up at every turn, heart as brittle as yesterday’s crackers. She skated hopefully in the dim corners, weighed down by everything.

Then she won the U.S. title last year. It was monumental, but monumentally difficult. “I didn’t know how to navigate being a champion,” she said on a recent conference call.

Then she showed up at the early-season Lombardia Trophy in Italy and swept through her programs as if she had always been a world champion. Powerful. Clean. Triple Axel singing. Her performance was an exclamation point. It was her first international victory and she was 25 years old and in a sport that had long favoured fresh-faced teens.

Then she won both of her Grand Prix events, (firsts for her) then the Grand Prix Final, too, against the best, against the Japanese world champion, against all of the Japanese.  It was an emotional victory.

Glenn has been to only two world championships, her first at age 23. She didn’t win her first Grand Prix medal (bronze) until she was 22. She didn’t get to her first ISU championship (Four Continents) until she was 20.

Glenn has been to nine U.S. championships, and it would have been 10 if she hadn’t had a mental crisis back in 2016 when she withdrew, she said. She was open about a diagnosis of ADHD, difficult for an elite-level athlete. In 2020, she came out as pansexual, and felt a weight come off her shoulders, because she no longer had to pretend she was something she was not.

But her trip to U.S. nationals in Wichita, Kansas, presented new challenges. She hadn’t been well since the Grand Prix Final. Dealing with some off-ice issues, she felt exhausted. She had pain in her back, leading up to Wichita. She was in against an improving Bradie Tennell, who had already been to four world championships and the 2018 Olympics. Alysa Liu, precocious in her early teens with triple Axels and quads, had retired and has just come back as a renewed skater, with beautiful programs and consistent performances and a joy that can’t be manufactured.

Isabeau Levito, the reigning world silver medalist, only 17, and already a U.S. champion, had withdrawn from this U.S. nationals, battling an ankle problem that has plagued her this season.

Then the unthinkable happened. In the short program, Glenn slightly underrotated her signature triple Axel, her most reliable jump, and turned a triple flip – triple toe loop into a triple-double. She finished only third in the short program. Another test. Not expected. She was behind Liu and Tennell and only .19 points ahead of driving, consistent young star, Sarah Everhardt, 18.

Glenn was about six points behind Liu.

The long program was like a carefully crafted movie script, suspense to the end. And at the very end, Liu wobbled out of her layback spin while in a Biellmann position. She lost a couple of points over that. And Glenn defeated her by 1.46 points. Glenn hadn’t expected to repeat her U.S. title.

In her free program, Glenn landed the best triple Axel of her life, getting 2.40 bonus points for it. She chalked up big bonus points for everything else, until she fell on a triple loop, deemed just less than a quarter short of full rotation. She thought she had lost the title. Emotions fluttered.

Everhardt had already skated brilliantly, but was about nine points behind her with 207.36 points.

When Tennell skated to “Nessum Dorma,” she skated aggressively and well, but fell on a triple Lutz, which became a repeat jump, near the end of her program. She finished behind both Glenn and Everhardt with 199.94. Her free skate mark was behind Everhardt’s by almost eight points.

It was all up to Liu, skating to “MacArthur Park,” as sung by Donna Summer. Her opening triple flip was landed with a soft knee, her triple Lutz-triple toe loop rumbled. She was later to do a triple Lutz – double Axel – double toe loop late in the program, and with a few underrotations, went into the final spin.

She was shocked, not so much when the marks came up, but when her placement came up. She thought she had lost all chance at a medal with that final spin.

“I don’t really remember how the scores worked,” Liu admitted. “That helps with the mystery, I guess.”

After having been away for two years (she had won a world bronze medal and her first of two U.S. titles at age 13), Liu had no particular goals or expectations. She said she skated a decent free program for the first time only a week before nationals.

“Honestly, I had forgotten what scores are considered good and which aren’t,” she said. “And really how the whole scoring system works. So I sat in the kiss and cry, absolutely not understanding what I had scored…and whether it was enough for a podium finish.”

She said it was an absolute surprise for her to be second. “It feels surreal, as if all this isn’t happening to me,” she said. “I had quite a long break in my career.”

Glenn listened with incredulity as Liu revealed her mindset. She trains with Liu every day. But Liu has the second highest international score this year, right on Glenn’s heels.

While Glenn said she wasn’t fully satisfied with either of her routines, she was proud of her “mental fortitude” and the progress she has made to get through a program.

She has always had the mental hill to climb. And when she won Lombardia early in the season, it was a result of the work she has done on herself. It has taken her many years.

“I went from a point of just being at my lowest to recovering for a couple of months a year, to be at that place where I was stagnant,” Glenn said. “I was okay and great, but I was surviving, which wasn’t thriving. That was kind of how I was for quite a few years. I would have flare-ups, setbacks, things would happen. I was in a more delicate state, but better than I was before. It came crashing down.

As Glenn came into her own and reflected on who she was, and having come out as gay, she decided how she wanted to skate, not for the scores, but for herself. She has really set foot on solid ground only in the past couple of years, she said. “So not until I was already in my twenties. Luckily I had a lot of good resources and a lot of good tools and I asked for help, and I was able to get it.

“Here I am, doing what I never thought I would be capable of.” She remains undefeated this season.

This past off-season, she examined her past, realizing that she was doing all the work, and thinking the right things, but still faltering at competitions. “Ice is slippery,” she said. “I’m not saying it’s not going to happen in the future.”

But she realized there was an obvious “disconnect.” Everybody could see it and she could feel it. It got especially worse after she suffered a severe concussion. She also had a severe on back in 2020.

So she began to work with neurotherapy. It’s a system used by Max Deschamps, who also has ADHD.

It has shown her that when she hit her head, it sent her body into a “fire-flight” state. It is triggered very easily. “It goes from zero to 100 real quick,” she said. “And it does not let up until I’m fully out of gas.” The reaction is like a snowball racing down a mountain that just grows quickly into a massive force that can’t be stopped until it hits bottom.

For example, she would do a triple Axel, and exult, her heart rate would spin skywards, and then she had nothing left in her. Even when she was thinking the right things, her mind would go off and think the wrong things.

In a session, she wears a cap with electrodes and sets a baseline, with her eyes closed. Out pops pages of results that she doesn’t fully understand. It also measures heart rate. “They look at heart rate variability, time, spikes, and they examine common levels,” she said. It’s like a biofeedback program that shows her in real time when her rate goes up and down and how she can control it. “It’s literally like training a dog with a clicker,” she said.

During this time of calming, she just breathes. It’s almost like a meditation, she said. “It is like so many things,” she said. She knows it has calmed her down. She used it when she tackled her long program, and skated aggressively, despite everything around her. She has learned that when her alpha levels are high, she needs to calm down, not to do this and to do certain things. She calls it “changing the oil.”

After her marks came up in the kiss and cry, she exhaled.

“I’m not saying I’m perfect now,” Glenn said. “I’m not a master zen person. I’m still a student. I’m still learning.” She has learned that past traumas trigger her flighty heart rate, and keep her breathing from being normal. She now tries to find a way to calm all of that.

Before, she felt the problem was her, that she was throwing away great chances, and that she was failing. But she has realized that there was something wrong in her brain, and she just needed tools to fix it.

The tool is not a fix-all. But look how far Amber Glenn has come. And how far will she go? She doesn’t think what she did at Wichita will be enough for the world championships in Boston. But she has passed a big test, and came out on top. And she’s getting the hang of being a champion.