Historical. Unprecedented. Extraordinary.
All words that could be used to describe Susan Dunklee’s 2016-17 season. The Vermont native has her own way to describe it.
“I’m having a dream season,” she said.
Dunklee, 31, competes in one of the most difficult and draining sports in the world; biathlon. The sport combines cross-country skiing with target shooting, and is normally associated with and dominated by European countries.
Dunklee and the rest of the U.S. team have been working to change that perception this winter. The team has posted some of its best finishes ever in the World Cup, and Dunklee has led that charge. She’s been notching top-10 finishes all winter and just finished the season in 10th place in the International Biathlon Union World Cup standings.
The highlights? One was a silver-medal finish in the mass-start race at the World Championships in Hochfilzen, Austria, on Feb. 19. That silver is the first medal ever won by a U.S. woman at the biathlon World Championships.
She teamed up with Lowell Bailey, who had a historic season of his own, on March 12 to claim another silver in the mixed relay race in Kontiolahti, Finland. The medal was the first won by a U.S. relay team in 23 years.
“Great races are so much sweeter when you share that victory with a teammate,” Dunklee said.
Dunklee’s podium finishes this season may have made history, but she’s also been consistent. Consider this: She finished in the top 10 in 10 World Cup events and finished 10th overall in the season standings.
With the World Cup season over, Dunklee got to celebrate with a trip home. She returned to Vermont last weekend to compete in the U.S. Championships in Jericho.
Switching sports
Dunklee’s first passion was cross-country skiing. It was in her blood. Her parents met while ski racing at the University of Vermont, and her father and uncle both skied in cross-country events in the Winter Olympics in the 1970s and 1980s.
With a family history like that, it’s no surprise that Dunklee was touring the fields behind her Barton home “as soon as I could walk.” By the time she was 5, she was racing and quickly developed a friendly rivalry with Elsa and Ida Sargent of Barton and Hannah and Emily Dreissigacker of Morrisville, all of whom have impressive cross-country skiing resumes.
“We often trained together at Craftsbury after school,” Dunklee said.
Dunklee was one of the top high school cross-country skiers in the U.S. while she attended St. Johnsbury Academy, and she continued her skiing career at Dartmouth College.
Not until 2008 — in her final semester at Dartmouth, where she was a two-time All-American — did she consider taking up biathlon. That’s when the U.S. Biathlon Association invited her to try the sport.
“They had funding for a development team based in Lake Placid and they were recruiting top NCAA ski racers,” Dunklee said.
She’d never shot a gun in her life, but with no plans after college, Dunklee gave it a try. She fell in love with the sport immediately.
“I got hooked,” she said.
The world stage
After two years living and training in Lake Placid, Dunklee moved back to Vermont to join the Green Racing Project at the Craftsbury Outdoor Center.
Since then, she’s split her training between the two sites. She hit the World Cup tour in November 2011 and has raced a full circuit of over 30 races in every winter since.
“Typically I am on the road the entire winter between November and March,” she said.
By 2014, she was one of the best biathletes in the country and qualified to represent the U.S. at the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, where she racked up four top-15 finishes.
Since Sochi, she’s been back on the World Cup circuit, competing all over Europe every winter.
The sport is incredibly popular in Europe. It’s common for Dunklee to be racing and shooting in front of 30,000 spectators, and the races are broadcast on Eurosport — Europe’s version of ESPN — to millions of viewers.
She competes in as many of the different biathlon races as she can during each World Cup event, but Dunklee’s favorites are the ones where she is right in the thick of it and going head-to-head with other racers.
“Navigating a packed field of poles and elbows brings me into a Zen-like mental state with little active thinking, just reacting,” she said.
Training all year
Dunklee doesn’t get much time off when her World Cup season ends. She trains almost year-round, often with a morning and afternoon workout. That training can include a few hours of roller skiing, weightlifting and at least an hour of shooting practice. She also spends time hiking, mountain biking, running and even sculling. She often combines one of those endurance activities with shooting drills to simulate the conditions of a race, when biathletes have to shoot accurately with an elevated heart rate.
And Dunklee also has to carve out a few hours to relax “so that my body can recover.”
In a year, Dunklee estimates she spends 700 hours in physical training and shoots about 17,000 rounds of ammunition.
Lately she’s been concentrating even more on her shooting.
“Two years ago during my end-of-season evaluation, I recognized that I was one of the slowest shooters on the World Cup,” Dunklee said. She was losing nearly 30 seconds a race because of that, so she decided to focus on it and created a specific training plan.
It’s paid off this year and Dunklee is now one of the fastest shooters on the circuit.
“Seeing that work pay off has been incredibly satisfying,” she said.
Her fast and accurate shooting came into play during some of her best finishes. She hit all 20 targets in her silver-medal race at the World Championships in Austria. “Cleaning” — that is, hitting all five targets in a shooting stage — is one of the “best feelings” for Dunklee during a race. The reverse is also true; mentally having to overcome a poor shooting performance on the cross-country trails is one of the hardest things about the sport for her.
Difficulties like that are one reason Dunklee loves the sport so much.
“Challenge is the biggest driving force for me,” she said. The opportunity to compete in “one of the most difficult sports out there,” one that is both physically and mentally taxing. is the ultimate challenge.
“I take pride in being resilient and being able to get back up after failures,” she said.
Dunklee has no plans to slow down or step away from the challenges of biathlon after the U.S. Championships. She’ll be back training again this year for the upcoming season.
Along with the traditional race sites, there’s one extra stop that Dunklee wants to make in 2018: PyeongChang, South Korea, site of the 2018 Winter Olympics.
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