She told her dad she needed to make a plan for taking time off from the racing circuit and let her coaches know.

"He said, 'You need a plan? I'll give you a plan: Win,'" she says. "Then he was like, 'I think we've got the same plan in this game. I've got to win against cancer, and you need to go to kick the world's butt.'"

This weekend, that's what she's aiming to do at the season's first World Cup event in Winterberg, Germany.

"I just want to be home," she says. "I just can't, because he asked me not to be."

Ted Uhlaender played eight seasons in the majors, including a 1972 World Series appearance with the Cincinnati Reds. He knows such glorified pursuits require singular vision and, too often, emotional sacrifice. The next competition always is on the horizon. Opponents are working to get an edge.

This year, 2007 world champion Noelle Pikus-Pace, Uhlaender's top U.S. competitor, is back after taking a year off to have a baby.

Uhlaender, 24, who finished sixth in skeleton in the 2006 Winter Olympics, was third in the 2007 world championships and second in the 2008 worlds. This is her last full season to close in on gold medal contention before the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver.

"I just told her, 'Don't worry about me. Go ahead and do your thing,'" her dad says.

A family of athletes

He will be doing what he can for another chance to watch her compete. He took a significant step Tuesday, leaving the hospital to stay at a friend's house nearby.

He has been with her at every world championships she's raced. Afterward, they always take a trip.

Worlds will be in Lake Placid, N.Y., this season, Feb. 22-28. He is hoping to have medical clearance to travel. His immune system must rebuild itself before doctors will let him go.

"We're both on separate missions right now, but we're coming together in the end," Katie says. "That's what I'm hoping for."

When her dad, 68, arrived at worlds last season in February in Altenberg, Germany, she noticed something was wrong with his left eye. He told her he had fallen, which he had, on a patch of ice.

He didn't tell her immediately what the X-rays showed or that he got the sobering diagnosis the day before he left for Germany.

Myeloma is incurable but treatable.

"It was kind of, 'Should we go, or shouldn't we go?'" says Katie's mom, Karen. "But we went anyway. Life is short."

Katie pushed her parents to find out what was wrong. They finally relented. She won a silver medal the next day.

"I was thinking this could be one of the last times my dad gets to see me at a world championships," she says.

Afterward, they all went to Prague, Czech Republic. Daughter and father stayed out at discos until 2a.m. It was his favorite trip with her, he says.

He traveled plenty as a major league player, but he had not been to Europe until his daughter began competing.

He hit .263 with 36 home runs and 285 RBI in 898 games with the Minnesota Twins , Cleveland Indians and Cincinnati from 1965 to 1972. He stood out with speed and defense, reaching double digits in stolen bases three times and committing fewer than three errors in five of the seasons he played.

Katie didn't know him as an athlete but rather as a Baseball scout and coach (he coached first base for the Indians in 2000-01) and as a man who loves to be on his Kansas farm, tending to cows, fixing fences and digging ditches.

When she was young, she shunned softball for Baseball. When she began accruing prize money from World Cup wins, she took her dad's advice and bought 13 cows for the family farm.

"Good thing she didn't invest in the stock market," he says.

She inherited a love for winter sports from her mom, a ski instructor for more than 30 years. Karen skied moguls when she was pregnant with Katie, which calmed the kicking baby inside.

In 2002, Katie met bobsledder Sara Sprung while working out at a rec center near her family's home in Parshall, Colo. Sprung introduced her to sliding sports.

At 5-3, 141 pounds, Uhlaender believed she was too small for bobsled. She preferred skeleton, in which helmet-clad athletes navigate the same icy tracks used for bobsled while riding headfirst on small sleds with no brakes.

"I thought she was crazy," her dad says. "She's always been just like that."

He rues that his parents did not live to see Katie compete in an Olympics.

Life-long sports fans who met on a coed softball team, they went to every Games they could. In her room in Colorado, Katie has a display of all the Olympic pins they collected.

"I really didn't have an Olympic dream, but I had the Olympic spirit because of them," she says.

Fast ascent

A year after taking up skeleton, Uhlaender won the 2003 junior and senior national titles. She won her first World Cup medal in 2005.

Like her dad, she has a speed advantage.

"She's probably the strongest and most powerful female athlete on the skeleton tour," says Greg Sand, an assistant coach for the U.S. team. "That generally translates into pretty fast starts."

Uhlaender's fast rise in the sport branded her a medal contender at the 2006 Games, even though it was her second major international competition (she finished seventh in the 2005 worlds). As she headed to the start, 2002 skeleton gold medalist Jimmy Shea shouted encouragement.

"He snapped me out of my zone," she says. "I was like, 'I'm at the Olympics.' I didn't really realize it until that point. Then I got really nervous and kind of freaked out."

Her dad understood her disappointment at finishing sixth. He also understands big-stage jitters. He has told her about his first game at Yankee Stadium in 1965.

"I was just out of high school," he says. "You take a look over, and there's Mickey Mantle standing there. Whitey Ford, Elston Howard, all those guys; I had their Baseball cards in my pocket. I was going to New York, I wanted to take those cards with me and try to get them signed.

"It was hard for me to put myself on the same level, in my own mind. That's the hardest part."

With two consecutive World Cup titles, Uhlaender has proved she belongs at skeleton's top level.

The hardest part this season might be pushing aside thoughts of her dad.

"I'm still working on it," she says. "I'm just trying really hard to be strong for him."

Her family's strength already has been steeled.

A decade ago, her mom, now 55, was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and given 1 in 10 odds to live five years.

In February2007, her younger brother, William, hit a tree while skiing. He was wearing a helmet, but his face took the force of the collision. It took 60 screws and 12 plates to repair the damage.

"The doctor said to me, 'I don't usually operate on people that have this fracture, because usually they're dead,'" Karen says.

William, 22, was skiing again by the next season, just as his mom was skiing two months after having part of her esophagus and stomach removed during her cancer treatment.

"It's all a learning experience," Karen says. "If you look at it any other way, it would drive you crazy.

"Our souls are here to learn."

While Ted rested in a chair by his hospital bed one recent morning, his phone rang. Katie had programmed The Good, the Bad and the Ugly opening theme as his ringtone. On the line was someone from the San Francisco Giants front office, for whom Ted still works as a special assistant in player personnel.

He handed the phone to his wife. She said to the caller, "I think it's time -- you know, get his head back in gear," as she took down a list of names. They were players the Giants are considering acquiring. They wanted Uhlaender to rank them.

In this, perhaps, his daughter can take some comfort. As she does her thing, he will continue doing his.

They will keep up the routines that can lead to extraordinary moments in sports.

They will look toward the moment when they can meet again at the bottom of a world championship or Olympic run.

"He's given me the tools and the pieces," Uhlaender says of her dad. "They're there.

"I just have to trust myself and trust that I know what I'm doing."