“My hair froze,” she says, grinning as she greets her boyfriend, Scott Mann, inside a warm student cafeteria at Western Carolina University.

Tidmore and Mann, both students at Western Carolina, are world-class whitewater slalom kayakers and members of the U.S. National Team. As Western North Carolina’s elite paddling power couple, they have their hearts set on going to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing and bringing home the gold.

Two years down the road may seem like a long ways off, but competing for the Olympics is sort of like an election cycle for politicians — the commitment begins early and takes a full four-year campaign to win. There is no off-season for these athletes who endure a grueling winter schedule of paddling workouts at the Nantahala Racing Club twice a day along with weight-lifting several times a week.

They also work in trail running and mountain biking. Finding the motivation to fight through those cold, wet mornings can be tough, but Tidmore knows those are the days when you earn your medals. It’s nice to see the results, she says, when all that training pays off and one good course run is worth all the workouts.

For Tidmore, 2005 was a breakout year. After finishing second at the Pan American Championships in Kernville, Calif., she won the U.S. National Championships there the very next day. She’s currently ranked 26th in the world.

Mann, meanwhile, finished third this year at the U.S. Nationals in Durango, Colo., and just missed finishing in the top 10 at the World Cup Championships in Penrith, Australia, this fall. In 2004, he won the U.S. National Championship and barely missed making the U.S. Olympic Team. In 2003, he was ranked as high as 13th in the world and has finished in the top four nationally the past four years.

Mann, who is originally from Vermont, started paddling at a summer camp and soon got serious with regional whitewater races. Tidmore, a four-sport high school athlete from Tennessee, fell in love with paddling five years ago at a summer camp. The two met while in high school at a whitewater training camp in Penrith — the site of the 2000 Summer Olympic kayaking events.

In case you’re wondering, yes, they do compete against each other, but the mutual respect for one another and for their sport gives them a maturity well beyond their 22 years. Both are Dean’s List students at Western Carolina. Mann, a junior, is double majoring in political science and Spanish. Tidmore, a senior pre-med student, majors in biology. As athletic ambassadors representing Western North Carolina and the United States, they take their roles very seriously, each carrying a rare balance of determination and humility.

“I think it’s important that we put on a good face,” Mann says, “especially since there tends to be a lot of stereotypes about Americans around the world.”

Competing on a national and world stage, they have also come to realize there are a lot of people cheering them on — friends, family, teammates, even fellow competitors.

The couple mostly trains in Western North Carolina but also goes to Australia, Europe and California. Tidmore has decided to take a year off from college to paddle in San Diego in December and will then go to Penrith in January and February in preparation for a slew of national and international competitions.

The U.S. Open at the Nantahala Outdoor Center in March will be the first major race of the season. South Bend, Ind., hosts the qualifying competition to select the top three kayakers for the U.S. National Team in April. Those are the three most stressful days of the year, according to Tidmore, since that will determine whether she’ll get to represent the U.S. in further international competitions, which, in turn, leads to invitations to the Olympic Trials. Next summer, members of the U.S. National Team compete in the World Cup Series in Europe, and finally, there are the World Championships in Prague the first weekend of August.

The Thrill of Uncertainty

Whitewater kayaking competitions are full of unknown variables. Depending on the site, a paddler might be racing down a manmade course or a natural river. It could be freshwater; it could be saltwater. Every course is different, so paddlers have to practice at the site before a competition. There’s no need to memorize a course because the course isn’t set until the day of the race. You don’t get to practice maneuvering through the gates on the course the day of the competition, and you only have two attempts at racing through the course as fast as you can. Depending on the venue, the length of a course is about 200 meters long with 18 to 25 gates a kayaker has to pass through. At least six gates have to be upstream. A good finishing time might range somewhere between 90 and 120 seconds. A mere fraction of a second can often be the difference between winning and heartbreak.

Mann knows all too well the thrill of victory and the agony of a split-second mistake. He took two years off from school to train for the ’04 Olympics only to get hit by a stomach virus the week before the Olympic Trials. Dehydrated and briefly hospitalized before the qualifying races, he still managed to finish in fourth place, but only the top three finishers go to the Olympics. That only served to motivate Mann for the next Olympics, and he’s learned to dig a little deeper this next time around.

It’s easy to pass over success, he said, but you learn more from your failures.

“There’s always something to improve on,” he added.

Changing over to a new standard boat length — 3.5 meters instead of 4 meters as it had been for 20-plus years — also meant getting used to a different kind of race.

“Courses got tighter after that,” Mann said.

Sometimes with all the rush of emotions and expectations packed into a race, a second-place finish can seem like a bitter loss — or so it felt to Tidmore after her race at the Pan American Championships.

“It definitely keeps you motivated,” she said. “I went into the next day fighting.”

And the very next day, Tidmore won her first national championship.

You have to put it in your head that that’s what you want, she said.

It also helps not being the first one to race the course, Tidmore explained, because you can watch and learn from the mistakes of others. Then again, waiting around to compete can bring on racing anxiety. If that’s not enough, weather conditions can change in an instant, delaying events and stretching minutes into more anxious hours.

In preparation for a race, Mann calms himself by reading novels. This summer, the Harry Potter books seemed to be the reading du jour among World Cup paddlers, according to Tidmore, who also reads before races. Sometimes she listens to music — Black Eyed Peas, hip-hop, anything that gets her energized.

This summer, Tidmore and Mann were without Rafal Smolen, their Polish NRC coach and 2000 U.S. Olympic team coach, who left briefly for a stint with the Canadian team. Now that he’s back, his paddling Rhinos (as they are nicknamed) are gearing up for what looks to be a busy year of races.

Look for Mann and Tidmore to compete in the upcoming Glacier Breaker Slalom and Downriver Race in late February at the Nantahala Outdoor Center.

A Growing Sport

Tidmore sees whitewater kayaking gaining more and more interest these days. Though still a relatively small sport in the United States, it has lots of popularity in Europe, especially among Eastern European countries like Slovakia and the Czech Republic that have multiple venues. At the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, the whitewater slalom events were among the most well attended of all the events, according to Tidmore, and unlike other Olympic venues that become obsolete and empty after the games, the Athens site continues to be used for World Cup whitewater competitions.

The Nantahala Outdoor Center in Wesser has long been a whitewater haven for paddlers. The center hosts annual races and training opportunities throughout the year. The Nantahala Racing Club, where Tidmore and Mann train, is a hotbed of talent. Among the NRC Rhinos alumni are whitewater slalom tandem Joe Jacobi and Scott Strausbaugh, who won gold at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, and Scott Shipley, a 9-time National Champion and 3-time World Cup Champion.

Charlotte will soon have its own multi-million-dollar, artificial whitewater venue that is expected to attract world-class events and put the United States on the map as a major host for international competitions and training.

When it opens in June, Tidmore and Mann plan to be competing in Europe, but they’ll be making trips down to Charlotte once they return. In fact, Mann wants to move to Charlotte to train there once he completes his degree at Western Carolina next year. For now, he’s staying busy with school and training.

“It takes a lot of energy to do both,” he says. “You gotta balance everything.”