When a luge athlete comes from a country that isn’t exactly known for its snowy conditions, practice sessions require a bit of creativity.
That’s the case for Shiva Keshavan, an Indian luge athlete who will make his fifth Olympic appearance next month in Sochi. To train, Keshavan and his fellow Indian lugers swap out blades for wheels and careen down the — often jam-packed — highways of the Himalayas.
The exercise, which TIME.com captured in a harrowing first-person video, looks incredibly dangerous, but Keshavan, who will be India’s flag bearer at the 2014 Olympics, has been training this way for years, ever since he picked up the sport after watching a film about a group of other unlikely Olympians.
“The first thing they did was show us a video of the luge and bobsleigh, and then the movie of Cool Runnings,” Keshavan told CNN, remembering his introduction to Olympic winter sports as a 15-year-old. “For me, it wasn’t suddenly I was thinking that I want to go to the Olympics, it’s just I wanted to try it.”
Check out Keshavan’s practice routine in the video below, with a hat tip to The PostGame.
