By the time she was 5, Michelle Roark says, she had mapped out an ambitious and apparently contradictory life plan.
And despite bumps, twists and turns that include six knee surgeries and living in a tent in a forest while working three jobs along the way, each aspect essentially came to be in harmony with the other.
Plan One: Roark decided she would be a chemical engineer, albeit based on a flimsy sliver of a visit to her father's job site building a natural gas plant in Coalville, Utah.
"It was covered in a big bubble, right, because they were building it. And I was intrigued with all the lights, and I was walking around in the mud and I saw this blond lady with a hard hat on telling all the men what to do," said Roark, in her machine-gunning, stream-of-consciousness style at this fall's U.S. Olympic Media Summit in Chicago. "I said, 'Daddy, daddy, what does she do?' He's like, 'She's a chemical engineer, honey.'
"I'm like, 'That's what I want to be.' "
Plan Two: Around that time, Roark also had simply decided she would be an Olympian. That didn't quite turn out as she envisioned "in figure skating.
But in 2006, at age 31, her imagination was fulfilled in freestyle moguls. She finished 18th at the Turin Olympics.
As the reigning U.S. champ, she figures to contend for the Vancouver Games in the U.S. trials in Steamboat Springs, Colo., Wednesday and Thursday.
And to hear her tell it, she owes it all to "chemical engineering.
While she remains a few credits short of her degree from Colorado School of Mines, she made enormous use of her education after receiving advice from a sports psychologist as her Olympic aspirations were stagnating.
The foundation for her next step was set when she was counseled to use all five senses in competition -- hear it, feel it, see it, taste it and "& smell it?
"I could do all of them but smell it," she said, smiling. "I had no idea what it smelled like to ski well."
Unorthodox as the guidance might have been, the free-spirited freestyler took it to heart and sought a perfume to use for skiing.
"It will be my scent of competition," she told herself.
When she found commercial blends inadequate because they either evaporated too fast or were what she considered the cause of headaches, she took matters in her own hands "& literally.
With that know-how and exhaustive research that included buying antique perfume books to get access to "really ancient formulas," she said, she conjured her own blends of all-natural essences.
It was while wearing "For Confidence," the first of her now seven amalgamations, that she qualified for the 2006 Winter Games.
She has since turned her perfumes into an entrepreneurial endeavor under the banner, "Phi-nomenal," a name explained on the website.
"In art and science, Phi is the Divine Proportion. "From Egypt's inspiring pyramids to DaVinci's majestic masterpieces to the soothing sound of the violin, Phi has empowered creation."
Or as Roark put it: "My goal is to invoke the ancient art of natural perfumery."
At a less grandiose level, Roark is trying to sustain her sponsor-challenged career with her fledgling business, which also includes a beauty salon, spa and perfumery in Denver called "Voila."
She now has seven full-time employees, although no men.
"Unfortunately, no," she said, laughing. "But that's OK. I've moved past that."
Not that she's excluding them from her marketing, with colognes "For Real" and "For Ever."
For Roark, her course hardly has been direct. And not just because she's been to Bulgaria for rose petals and hopes to make an excursion to Madagascar for vanilla.
She gave up figure skating by her mid-teens because it was prohibitively expensive for her family, she said. By 17, she moved on her own to Winter Park, Utah, to pursue skiing but was relegated to tent life to try to fund her efforts.
She laughed and said no comment when asked about her parents' feelings about that plight and tried to play it down.
Still, she recalled asking friends for food -- "a huge bag of pasta" for a birthday present that year -- and said she would "bribe" a gym attendant with pastries from one of her jobs to be able to get workouts in.
But that's not intended as a "sob story," she said more than once.
"It just really makes me appreciate all this all the more," she said.
Even if she saw it coming all the way.
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