While Emery Lehman — a four-time Olympic speed skater and bronze medalist — attended Marquette, he didn’t like going to the recreation center on campus in the morning.

It was too far of a walk and took up time in his already packed schedule. He would simply stay inside his dorm, Carpenter Tower, before his 8 a.m. classes.

But he’d be damned if he wasted that time sleeping.

When his alarm went off at 6 a.m., he got up to run the 16 flights of stairs a couple times, then, sweating, went back to his dorm room. Though — that was too easy for Lehman. He hopped on the bike mounted on rollers by his couch or practiced his speed skating form on the slide board by his bed or sat in his altitude tent to train his lungs for when he regularly competes in Salt Lake City.

“He’s an animal,” one of Lehman’s close Marquette buddies, Colin Redman, said.

By the time Lehman came to Marquette in 2014, he had already been on the U.S. Junior World speed skating team for three years and competed in his first Olympics in 2014 at 17 years old: the youngest U.S. Olympic speed skater in history. This year, he’s in Milan, Italy to compete in his fourth.

In between that time, he won a World Speed Skating Championship, competed in two more winter Olympics (winning a bronze medal in 2022) and grabbed the world record in the team pursuit event. For this Winter Games, he is competing in the 1500-meter race and the team pursuit. Lehman will race in the former on Feb. 19 and first round of the latter on Feb. 15.

Lehman’s mother, Marcia Lehman, remembers the first time she was told her son was special at speed skating. It happened when Emery was 10 years old. While talking with Emery’s coach at a hotel during a speed skating competition in Milwaukee, the coach put it plainly.

“Your son is going to be in the Olympics.”

She reminded the coach of her son’s age with a dead pan face, but he was serious.

“You watch.”

Even though Lehman still has the energy of a young man — he surely trained like one for Italy — he’s the oldest male on the U.S. speed skating team at 29 years old.

“Maybe when I was younger and a little more cocky, I took things for granted,” Lehman said. “Whereas now it’s just, holy sh—t, the level of competition is just insane.

“Times that were winning World Cups maybe 12 years ago are now just the bare minimum to get into the Olympics.”

When he steps off the ice for the last time in Milan, his Olympic career will be finished. After spending the majority of his life training for the next winter games, he still hasn’t gotten to stand atop the podium with a gold medal around his neck and hear “The Star-Spangled Banner” play for the world.

This year, given that his team pursuit squad — comprised of him, Casey Dawson and Ethan Cepuran — is the current world record holders and World Champions, he knows people expect that to change.

“We like the pressure,” Lehman said. “We’ve been on the good side of it. We’ve been on the bad side of it. We’ve been the favorites. We’ve been the underdogs. We’ve faced a lot and we’re ready to face whatever happens here.”

He lived by that mentality while he was a civil engineering student at Marquette.

It took him six years to get his degree, changing his enrollment status depending on the speed skating competitions happening during a given year. Three of those were full time, two were part time and he took the 2017-18 school year off to train and compete in the PyeongChang, South Korea Winter Games.

During his education, he often kept his mind on training, no matter the high demand that came with his engineering courses. If he wasn’t in class or doing homework, he would exercise at the Pettit National Ice Center next to the Wisconsin State Fair Grounds in Milwaukee, one of only two facilities with a long track speed skating oval in the U.S.

There, he would train twice a day, between two and a half to three hours each day, six days a week. Besides on-ice time, this included weightlifting, endurance workouts and perfecting his skating form on the slide board.

“Going to school full time and training was some of the toughest things that I’ve ever had to do,” Lehman said.

The juggling act became even more difficult when he got a serious case of mono in his second year at Marquette. It lasted 15 months and set him back a significant amount in his training and physicality. In the later stages of recovery, he could only produce skate times he posted when he was 14 years old. There were a couple days when Lehman called his mom to contemplate continuing to speed skate.

“I remember even where I was standing,” Marcia recalled. “I just said, ‘Emery, if you make a decision not to do this, you’re going to look back, and I think you’re going to regret it. You’re gonna get through it’.”

To take his mind away from the situation, Lehman reined back his training, took a full course load at Marquette and joined the club hockey team, a sport that he played before he ever put on a speed skate.

Lehman arrived at tryouts, never mentioning his speed skating career or acting like the ‘big Olympian in town.’ Conor Coyne — one of Lehman’s eventual lifelong friends from Marquette who was already on the team — walked up to Lehman in the locker room and introduced himself. After a couple practices of Lehman being on the roster, Coyne suggested that they carpool. For the rest of their time at Marquette, there were few days they wouldn’t hang out with each other.

“He’s just…” Coyne said while trying to grasp the words, “…one of the coolest guys.”

Even though Lehman was a world-class speed skater, his hockey skills didn’t come back to him immediately. The team always joked that he could only ever turn left: the only turn made on a speed skating oval. But rustiness didn’t stop him from having fun and forming strong relationships.

“He was one of the guys from the beginning,” Colin Redman, another lifelong friend from the hockey team said.

Right turns or not, Lehman sure didn’t lose his quickness on the rink.

During one of their tryouts, the team had to skate killers. Basically, skating as fast as they can, back and forth across the rink until they finish or throw up. When Lehman completed the round of killers, he stood alone at one end of the ice, long before anyone else finished. The coaches stared at him in disbelief, not knowing at the time he was a two-time speed skating Olympian. Of course, he made the team.

Outside of practice up to five times a week and games twice a week, the team — especially Lehman — loved hanging out with one another. They would go over to Redman’s to watch the final season of “Game of Thrones” as it was coming out or watch late night “Scooby-Doo” marathons, usually before they had to leave early the next morning for a game.

“I think we all miss (those moments),” Lehman said. “It was a really good time.”

He’d also have some of his friends on the team over to his apartment to hang out, but of course, instead of sitting on the couch with them, he’d talk while he rode his stationary bike.

Redman and Coyne stay in close contact with Lehman, even being at each other’s weddings. They stay up-to-date with Lehman’s races, attend as many as they can across the world, spend time with him, call him often and are both traveling to Milan to cheer him on for his final Olympics.

“I’ve had my flights booked since probably about March of last year, probably as early as you could have booked them,” Redman said. “I just booked it and told him ‘no pressure (on qualifying for the Olympics).'”

After graduating in 2020, Lehman moved to Salt Lake City, Utah to train at the Utah Olympic Oval with Team USA while also getting an online masters degree. Coyne visited Lehman in April and was reminded of how seriously he takes his training. The visit was meant to be a golf trip and Lehman technically wasn’t even supposed to be training.

That didn’t stop Lehman from biking up to five hours every morning. And this was during their offseason.

“He’s one of the hardest working people I’ve ever met,” Coyne said.

To prepare for the Olympics, Lehman and his teammates will train three days on, one day off, with two sessions a day that are anywhere from 90 minutes to three and a half hours.

At this point in his career, he isn’t taking anything for granted. He focuses on what’s immediately in front of him because looking too far into the future could be detrimental. Not only for the Olympics, but for everything leading up to it.

“What’s at stake right now is really what’s most important,” Lehman said. “I had to go into some of those races at trials like ‘This could be my last race of the season.'”

His never quit mentality has been with him since the beginning.

At his first trials for the 2014 Olympics, Lehman attempted to qualify for the 10,000-meter race against Jonathan Kuck, who had finished eighth in the event at the 2010 Vancouver games.

With only three laps to go in the 25-lap race, Lehman was four seconds behind Kuck; an eternity in speed skating. Lehman turned the burners on and by the final lap, was caught up. He pushed up the inside lane past Kuck, but Kuck switched back in the final turn to retake the lead. Lehman pumped his arms hard to the line, stuck his right skate out and finished two blade lengths ahead of Kuck.

The 17-year-old stuck his finger up in the air, claiming the win before the official times were posted. He erased seven seconds of his personal best to qualify for his first Olympics.

“I never quite died, I guess,” he said after the race.

Now, 12 years after Lehman pointed to the heavens for the first time, his family and high school friends will join Coyne and Redman in Italy to watch his final races on the world stage.

After he takes off his Team USA speed suit for the final time, Lehman is going to give back to his sport. He plans to move to Chicago and coach young speed skaters at the Franklin Park Speed Skating Club, the arena he competed when his coach first predicted he was going to be an Olympian.

“I love showing up and volunteering my time and doing all that,” Lehman said. “It’s just weird to me because I can vividly remember not so long ago being that little kid looking up to them.”

With the whirlwind of emotions that Lehman could be feeling less than a week away from Olympic competition, he feels content with where he has put himself.

“I’ve had a really good career,” Lehman said. “I’ve accomplished a lot both team and individually. I’ll retire and look back fondly on the years I had as a speed skater.”

There will be a lot of talk from both the media and Lehman’s family and friends; but what happens if he does win gold?

“Boy, a lot of people ask that question,” Lehman’s mom said with a tone of anxiety in her voice. She doesn’t even watch Lehman’s races because she becomes too nervous. “And I hate the word gold. I’m beginning to hate that word a lot.

“I think it would be great, but I think he would be satisfied no matter what happens.”

Although Lehman certainly agrees with his mother, he looks at it a bit differently. It’s a question he has struggled to answer in every Olympics lead-up interview. Instead of answering, he offers a reflection.

The team pursuit is a little longer than three and a half minutes. It’s such a quick moment for the never-ending hours he has put into the sport he loves.

“We remember a lot more the memories you make along the way and the teammates and the struggles and stuff,” Lehman said. “I think that’s much more memorable than the actual race itself.”

But for Coyne, the answer is obvious. Heck, they went to college together.

“I’ve had some great parties with him,” Coyne said. “That’d be the greatest party I’ve ever had.”

This story was written by Benjamin Hanson. He can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter/X @benhansonMU.