February 2024 ~
One minute you're a 10-year-old budding distance runner asking your dad about a track event you've never heard of, the next you’re performing that very event alongside Bryan Cranston in front of a network TV audience.
Sure, there’s a little journalistic license at work here. In reality, that time span for Philip Dunn (Lincoln, 1989) was several years rather than one minute to the next. But that’s a relatively minor point used to illustrate a major point, which is how serendipity can sometimes play such a significant role in one’s life.
Who knows how Dunn’s life would have played out had he not seen that schedule poster listing that previously unheard-of event in a Salem track meet back in the day? But it’s a good bet he wouldn’t have earned a spot on three U.S. Olympics teams and a decent amount of airtime on an episode of “Malcolm in the Middle,” the popular series from the early 2000s. More on that later, but first, about that event...
“I had just finished my event, the 1,500 meters, when I saw this thing on the schedule called a racewalk,” Dunn remembers. “I asked my dad what it was, and he actually had a friend who had done it. So, he showed me the basics of it, and I went and raced against a bunch of other 10-year-olds who didn’t really know what they were doing, either. I won and was hooked.”
As sporting events go, racewalking is sort of in a league of its own. Sports commentator Bob Costas once compared it to “a contest to see who can whisper the loudest.”
Unsurprisingly, not a lot of kids grow up with posters of racewalking champions on their bedroom walls or dreams of racewalking stardom in their heads. For one, very few high schools in America compete in the sport. For another, racewalking isn’t exactly considered the ballet-equivalent of sports.
That’s mostly owing to the way its athletes must almost contort their bodies to ensure they optimize their performance without breaking the rules. There are only two of them, but they are highly technical. The first is, the athlete's back toe cannot leave the ground until the heel of the front foot has touched. The second rule requires that the supporting leg must straighten from the point of contact with the ground and remain straightened until the body passes directly over it. (For more information about the origins of the sport, those rules, how racers can be disqualified, etc., here’s a fun video overview.)
Even Dunn admits, “If you’ve seen racewalking, you can’t pretend it doesn’t look funny.”
But, to him, that was part of the allure. “When I was a kid, I enjoyed doing things that were a little off beat,” he says. “And the fact that I was good at it was cool.”
Dunn was born in Eugene, the son of two University of Oregon graduate students. After earning their degrees, his parents moved him and his identical twin brother to Walla Walla, where Dunn’s father taught for a brief time at Whitman College. The family settled in Portland when Dunn was 5, after his father joined the Lewis and Clark College faculty.
Dunn’s initial interest in track came from his father, and at an early age he excelled at cross-country and long-distance racing. That’s what led him to that Salem meet and the discovery of a new racing obsession.
“Every year after I did my first racewalk competition, I would do a couple more of them,” Dunn says. “When I turned 12, I remember thinking, OK, I’m 12 now, I’m going to train for four weeks to prepare for the state championship. Then when I turned 13, I told myself I was going to train for five whole weeks. It was like, I am committed now. I’m all in.”
Dunn laughs at that memory, but his training regimen either worked or got a lot more intense after age 13. Because by the time he was 17, he would finish second in the 10,000-meter racewalking event at the Junior Olympics National Championships. A year later, he won the event.
Meanwhile at Lincoln, Dunn was collecting letters annually in three sports. Since he couldn’t racewalk in high school, Dunn ran both cross country, earning team champion titles as a freshman and sophomore and 1st Team All-PIL as a senior, and track, claiming the PIL 3,000-meter championship and taking sixth in state as a senior.
Dunn also earned four letters in swimming but says his best high school memories were made during cross country season.
“Cross country was the be all, end all for me,” he says. “I loved being part of a team. Training together, hanging out, busing to meets, slipping in the mud. Some of my best friends were on the team, and our coach, Dave Bailey, was a great role model.”
Despite his athletic success at Lincoln, his greatest athletic achievements would come after graduation and in the sport he had to pursue outside of high school.
“I think if it were up to me, I would have chosen to be a world-class runner,” Dunn says. “But I went to the Olympics as a racewalker, so it’s kind of ridiculous to wish that.”
Dunn continued to compete in “extracurricular” racewalking events while attending Carlton College in Northfield, Minn., where he also continued to compete in cross country and track, winning the conference indoor 1,500-meters championship. He began competing in national and international racewalks, and it was a trip to the 1990 World Junior Championships in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, that led Dunn to believe he might have a future in the sport beyond college.
“I finished 16th there and that might have been the trip when I first realized that maybe I could make the Olympic team,” he says.
Another trip the summer between Dunn’s junior and senior years at Carlton took him one funny-looking step closer to going all-in on an attempt to earn some red, white and blue swag.
“That summer, I studied abroad in Dublin, where I met some racewalkers on the Irish National Team. We developed a real camaraderie. It was really cool and another eye opener that got me thinking, Maybe this can be something bigger if I take it more seriously.”
Besides, what else is a guy going to do after he earns his college degree?
“It was the classic college graduate dilemma – now what?” Dunn says. “Do I get a job? Do I go to grad school? “
Dunn chose option C, which was to devote the next year of his life to seeing how far his potential would take him. He started training full-time with a friend from Lincoln named Andrew Herman, who after learning from Dunn how to racewalk, had gone on to compete in it at Willamette University. They both moved to Lake Placid, N.Y., where they had access to a renowned coach and the Olympics training facility.
“That was the summer of 1993. I was going to train until the next summer and just see how it went,” Dunn says.
The extra training started paying off quickly. By the end of that first summer, both Dunn and Herman qualified for the Senior National Championships, where they finished fourth and fifth, respectively.
“It was super exciting; suddenly I was ranked fourth in the United States,” Dunn says.
It was also the start of an even deeper commitment to his specialty that, Dunn says, “started as a one-year thing out of college and turned into about 15 years, three Olympic teams, eight national championships and traveling the world to 30-plus countries. It was an amazing adventure.”
Dunn failed to make the Olympic team on his first attempt, in 1996. By then he was competing in 20-kilometer races, twice the distance he was racing in junior events, yet still a far cry from the 50-kilometers that would become his specialty in Olympic and other competitions. That’s 31 miles, or 125 trips around the oval, for those keeping score at home.
Not making the Olympic team only made Dunn more determined to keep training for another attempt in 2000. He moved to San Diego, started a new training group and was off and...walking. But rapidly.
He made the 2000 U.S. team and finished 28th out of 60 competitors in the Sydney Olympics.
With all those years of training behind him and what he had once considered a pipe dream now fulfilled, Dunn felt ready to retire after Sydney. Four years later he felt the same way after placing 35th in Athens. It wasn’t until after the 2008 games in Beijing, where he placed 39th, that Dunn actually started winding down for good.
“My last real race was at the 2009 national championships,” Dunn says. “By then I had a one-and-a-half-year-old son and I was a stay-at-home dad. I needed to focus on that, so I pretty much hung it up.”
Dunn’s career includes those three Olympics teams and eight 50-kilometer U.S. National Championships, as well as a bronze medal in the 1999 Pan America Games 50-kilometers and silver medal in the 2003 Pan-Am Racewalk Cup 50-k. He was named U.S.A. Racewalker of the Year four times during his career.
And while he never brought it up, it sure looked like Dunn could have beaten Hal with ease in the Malcolm in the Middle episode had the show chosen authenticity over ratings. (See for yourself. Look for Dunn in the black shorts and long-sleeved T-shirt.)
In the episode, Hal becomes obsessed with the sport after Dunn’s racewalking group, whose members served as technical advisers to the show, passes him in a park (“It’s like watching the Gods returning to Olympus,” he marvels). He takes up the sport to expose his local park rival as “nothing but a common jogger” by proving that both of his feet leave the ground once every fourth step.
“When people ask me who the most famous racewalker ever is, I tell them Bryan Cranston,” Dunn says slyly.
Dunn still lives in San Diego, where he’s involved in a range of activities. “I got really good at walking around in circles; it was time to try something else,” he says.
He stayed a stay-at-home dad until his two children entered school. Now, he serves as head cross-country coach at San Diego Community College and works for a company that designs and installs rain-water systems.
He does some coaching and private training, is into beekeeping and, until recently, served on the board of directors for the United States Anti-Doping Agency.
Dunn says his induction into the PIL Hall of Fame in 2016 caught him by surprise, all things considered.
“Since I did most of my racewalking after I left Lincoln, I wasn't sure I would even be considered,” he says. “I did fairly well at Lincoln as a runner but was much better as a racewalker. The Hall of Fame ceremony was really cool, especially because my coach, Dave Bailey, was also getting inducted. So, he was there, my folks were able to come. It was really neat.”
It was also proof that Dunn had come a very long way since that Salem track meet. It was a trip he made not all that slowly, but definitely surely and just a little bit quirkily.
Do you know Philip Dunn? He can be reached at [email protected]
Photo Note: Click on a photo to see its caption. For more photos, please visit: https://racewalk.com/PhotoStory2008OlympicTrials50km/200850KOT_PhilipDunn.php
~ Profile written by Dick Baltus (Wilson, 1973)
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