LAKE PLACID, N.Y. — Sometime Friday morning, while her baby is fast asleep on the other side of the world, American skeleton racer Noelle Pikus-Pace will find a quiet spot to be alone.

She'll pray. She'll think of her husband and family. And then her mind will turn to 10-month-old Lacee, her first child.

"Now I know why I'm out here," said Pikus-Pace, a native of Provo and a Utah Valley University grad. "If I'm going to be away from my family and from her, it has to be for a darn good reason."

Oh, there's a darn good reason: The lure of Olympic gold, the medal she never got a chance to race for in 2006, the prize that has brought her back to the track, with only a thin layer of lycra to shield her from the bitter cold as she throws her body onto a thin metal sled and slides headfirst down an icy slope at 80 mph.

It's an obsession, really, and it resumes Friday when a new World Cup season begins in Winterberg, Germany.

"Noelle looks great," Greg Sand, one of the U.S. skeleton coaches, said from Germany this week. "She's sliding fast in training and has pushed personal bests at every track she's been to thus far this year. She started off the season in Lake Placid by establishing a new track record on this year's world championship track and I think that gave her a good amount of reassurance and confidence as we head toward our World Cup schedule."

That confidence is already showing. Pikus-Pace missed last year's World Cup season because she was pregnant with Lacee. But now, fitter and perhaps stronger than ever, the 2007 world champion from Eagle Mountain, Utah is eager to try and reclaim her perch atop the sport.

"I don't want to focus on results, not yet. I want to get comfortable on my sled again," Pikus-Pace said. "But a race is a race and I won't let you beat me at Monopoly, so why should I let you beat me out here?"

Fair enough.

Given the colossal ups-and-downs Pikus-Pace has endured over the last three years, it's a bit hard to believe she's still racing.

She was the No. 1-ranked women's racer in the world three years ago when she suffered a badly broken leg, courtesy of an out-of-control bobsled that didn't stop in time at the end of a training run and crashed into Pikus-Pace, who was standing near the finish line. That wreck cost her a chance of racing at the Turin Olympics, and nearly sent her into retirement.