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After the Beijing Olympics, This Biathlete Is Retiring and Returning to Her Running Roots

She’ll hang up her rifle and skis to be the new running director of the Craftsbury Outdoor Center in Vermont.

The 2022 Winter Games will be the last time three-time Olympian Susan Dunklee competes for Team USA; the 35-year-old professional biathlete has announced that she will retire after Beijing. But the end of her career, highlighted by two world championship medals and several World Cup podium finishes, marks the beginning of a new chapter that’s familiar territory for the Craftsbury, Vermont native.

This spring, Dunklee will hang up her rifle and skis to assume a full-time role as the running director for the Craftsbury Outdoor Center. She’ll be leading a program that’s supporting future generations of elite runners, while promoting sustainability in the same community that helped her develop into a dynamic athlete.

In an interview with Runner’s World, Dunklee shared how running continues to fuel her love for exploration and why she’s looking forward to supporting fellow athletes in their Olympic pursuits.

“I’ve been so immersed in biathlon for a long time, but running is really the place that I started out when I was younger and meant a lot to me for a very formative part of my life,” Dunklee said. “And I’m really excited to get back into it.”

Finding the Crossover Between Skiing and Running

While growing up in Barton, Vermont, Dunklee picked up skiing shortly after she learned how to walk, thanks to her family. Her dad, Stan Dunklee, competed in cross-country skiing at the 1976 and 1980 Olympic Games and now coaches cross-country skiing and track and field at the high school level.

At 5 years old, Dunklee started competing in cross-country ski races in Barton, which is known for producing top winter athletics talent, including Olympic cross-country skier Ida Sargent and Olympic biathlete Hannah Dreissigacker. Dunklee also thrived in that high level athletic environment.

“Sometimes you get these pockets of talent where kids are just doing something because it’s fun and it’s social, but you have enough of a group in one place that you have this threshold of momentum, and it just builds, you know?” Dunklee said. “You push each other, you train with each other, you have fun with it, you feel motivated, and it can take you places.”

When she was in first grade, Dunklee started tagging along on trail runs with her dad’s high school track team and loved the experience of exploring terrain on foot. “I remember the older high-school kids teaching me how to run down a mountain and just trying to learn how to bounce off the rocks and roll with gravity,” Dunklee recalled.

In high school, Dunklee shifted her primary athletic focus from skiing to running, because she enjoyed the traditions and atmosphere of running cross-country at the state level in Vermont. She appreciated how her St. Johnsbury Academy high-school coach worked to instill a level of commitment and consistency in the team’s training, and she felt that many of the cross-country courses where she races, which were “gnarly” and filled with hills, provided a unique “crossover between skiing and running.”

“Vermont cross-country really helped make me tough and resilient, so that was pretty cool,” she said.

In 2004, Dunklee was recruited to run for the cross country and track team at Dartmouth College. She embraced the opportunity because she wanted to compete in running and skiing at the NCAA level—and Dartmouth offers both athletic programs.

In the fall, she trained with the cross-country team in season, and would also jump into the ski team’s workouts once a week, which provided a unique cross-training dynamic. For example, she’d join the ski team on roller skis for an “over-distance” workout of 3-4 hours in the nearby Adirondacks or the White Mountains, a training session that remains her favorite form of exercise. In the winter, she trained full-time with the ski team in its NCAA season.

“It’s so empowering to feel like you could just keep going forever and to be up in these beautiful places, just really peaceful and nice,” she said.

Learning a New Sport

During her senior year, Dunklee received an email from U.S. Biathlon—the governing body for the sport that combines cross-country skiing and rifle shooting—in an attempt to recruit her. Her college ski teammate made the transition to biathlon after she graduated, so Dunklee was somewhat familiar with the sport, but she hadn’t participated in it before. The invitation also came at an ideal moment for the senior, who, like millions of other college students at the time, was facing the challenge of graduating during the Great Recession.

“It was hard to find jobs, and I still loved skiing and wasn’t quite ready to be done with it,” she said.

Growing up as the daughter of an Olympic cross-country skier, Dunklee also liked the idea of choosing her own journey in a new sport she could call her own. “There was something appealing about learning how to shoot and learning a new element that he had never done and had no experience with because I wasn’t just following in his footsteps,” she said. “I was going one step further and finding my own path.”

In the summer of 2008, she moved to Lake Placid, New York and jumped into U.S. Biathlon’s development program. However, learning a new sport that requires high levels of mental and physical focus wasn’t an easy task. Shooting was completely new to Dunklee and created a “fascinating challenge” that forced her to hone different strengths. She explained that athletes need to be disciplined with their pacing in order to have enough energy and focus to shoot accurately.

“I’ve always been one of those athletes who could just dig incredibly deep, push myself into the pain cave, and just fight through a race and gut it out. I’m scrappy, I’m tough, but with biathlon, to be able to shoot well, it’s a very different skillset,” she said. “I had to learn a little bit more discipline with that, but also the element of shooting itself requires this amazing ability to control your emotions.”

Dunklee has since become the most successful U.S. female biathlete in history, according to NBC Sports. She is the only American female biathlete with an individual world championships medal (silver in 2017 and 2020). So far at the Olympics, her best individual finish is 11th in the mass start at the 2014 Sochi Winter Games.

Returning to Running

Throughout her biathlon career, Dunklee kept running. During the height of the pandemic lockdowns in 2020, she ran every road in Craftsbury, where she’s been living and training since 2010, as a personal challenge. She still runs for an hour or two at a time three or four times a week, a routine that’s kept her balanced, she said.

“I see so many young athletes burning out, getting too specialized at too young of an age and investing too much of that identity just on one aspect of who they are,” Dunklee said. “And I'm just really glad that I didn't burn myself out as a young skier. And part of that was because I had this passion for running.”

In August 2021, after spending a decade as a member of Craftsbury’s Green Racing Project biathlon team, Dunklee was named running director of the Craftsbury Outdoor Center, an outdoor nonprofit organization and sportscenter for the local community with running, sculling, skiing, biathlon, and cycling programs.

Now she’s leading the running program, which includes annual camps, community running events, races, weekly track workouts, and fundraisers for local nonprofits, among other offerings. Recently, the organization formed a new team of elite runners for the Green Racing Project. In the remote-based club program, post-collegiate runners who compete in events ranging from the 800 meters to ultra races are provided with individualized coaching, gear, on-site training camps, and travel support, among other services, with Craftsbury as the primary sponsor.

“Now I get to stay at the outdoor center in a different role and also help really shape this new program we have … which is still very Craftsbury,” Dunklee said. “It has that same spirit of Craftsbury of being an athlete, reaching a high level, but also contributing to your community and promoting sustainability in lifelong sport.”

Looking ahead to Beijing as her final Olympics—the biathlon competition kicks off on February 5—Dunklee is at peace with closing this final chapter of her biathlon career in favor of starting the next phase of her life. After catching the flu upon arrival at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games and experiencing disappointment in her performances as a result, Dunklee said she realized that you can spend a lifetime preparing for a big moment, but there will always be factors outside of your control and it’s important to accept it in order to move forward.

“This time I just want to be able to go and try to stay focused on my process and take it all in, be flexible and see what happens,” she said. “I mean, I think I still have the capacity if I hit the peak fitness right, and I get a little bit lucky with how the wind is on the range when I come in and how other people do, I can still have a top result. But I don’t need to have that top result to validate my career.”

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