Blue Devil Weekly Olympics Feature: Curt Clausen

By John Roth

When Curt Clausen competed at the Centennial Olympics in 1996, he was one of those athletes who was just happy to be there. His 50th-place finish in the 20-kilometer race walk was not so much a disappointment as it was a reflection of his life at the time - an elite athlete who had to balance his training with real-world responsibilities away from sports.

Clausen will bring a totally different mindset to the starting line for his return engagement at the Olympics later this month. After revamping his priorities and dedicating himself to his sport for the past three years, the 1990 Duke graduate aims to earn a medal in the 50-kilometer race walk set for Sept. 29 in Sydney.

"That's really been my only focus since June of 1997," says Clausen.

"I know there are about 20 guys with the talent and capability to win the race and I'm one of them. Going into it, every week I'm feeling stronger so I'm real confident about my chances of being competitive. I just want to be there with 10k to go with that opportunity to snag a medal, and I'm real confident I will be."

International tunnel vision
Clausen has been interested in race-walking for about 20 years, since his junior high days in Stevens Point, Wisc. At Duke he was on the cross country and track teams primarily to build endurance for summer race-walk events, and in 1988 he won the national championship at the 40-kilometer distance to earn his first berth in an Olympic Trials, where he placed 15th. Through the early 1990s he continued to train and compete at the national level, leading to a first-place finish at the 1996 Olympic Trials and his ticket to Atlanta.

But race-walking was not his only focus during those developmental years. In the early 1990s he had to schedule his training around his postgraduate degree program at N.C. State, abstaining from competition for the 1992 season entirely. After that, in the years leading up to the 96 Games, his athletic pursuits had to mesh with his job as an administrative analyst for the Town of Chapel Hill.

After finishing 50th in Atlanta, Clausen realized he was not quite at the world-class level. About a month after the Games he decided he wanted to give it another shot, but only if he could train and prepare like most of his rivals - as a full-time athlete. "I knew if I pursued another Olympics, I wanted to pursue it with the opportunity to maximize my athletic potential and be competitive," he says.

So Clausen spent the next six months saving as much money as he could, then quit his job in June of '97 and moved to the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, Calif. He's been there ever since, evolving into the world-class athlete who won USA Outdoor championships in 1997, 1998 and 1999, twice broke the American record in the 50k and placed fourth at the World Championships in 1999.

It's no coincidence that those results have corresponded with Clausen's change of life. Before 97 he was mostly self-coached and self-financed. The 2000 Clausen model, however, is blessed with an excellent coach in Enrique Pena, who coached 1996 Olympic gold medalist Jefferson Perez. He also has an agent, several sponsors, even a website.

Cutting-edge training
And his training incorporates all the latest scientific advances. Virtually every workout is heart-rate monitored, with testing every four to six weeks to correlate the heart rates. "The intensity of training is a lot higher than it used to be because I'm able to tell exactly where my threshold is and I'm hitting that every hard workout," he explains. Clausen takes dietary supplements like many athletes do. But unlike in the past, when he would simply use multi-vitamins, he now has complete blood workups every few months to adjust the supplement routine to fit exactly what his body needs.

For the past year, Clausen also has been sleeping in a hypoxic tent, a portable pup-tent-like apparatus that fits over his bed and can be used to simulate various altitude environments. Rather than spend the last few weeks training at high altitude in Mexico and then heading to Sydney at the last minute, Clausen dials in a low oxygen level for his hypoxic tent every night and sleeps in a simulated high altitude. "The goal is to elicit a natural physiological response from the body to produce more red blood cells, which are a limiting factor in endurance events," he says. Since he's able to take his altitude on the road in the form of his "portable mountain," Clausen has been training in Australia since Aug. 21 and won't have to worry about his body needing any time-zone adjustments when it comes time to compete.

"I've been trying to complete the full package with my training," he says.

"It's cutting-edge scientific to maximize performance and that's what I've been trying to do the last three years, hit every angle to maximize performance, because it really comes down to such a competitive race. Any little thing that might help can be the difference in winning or losing, or between placing fourth and 12th."

Clausen's comprehensive training regimen also has enhanced his medal hopes by enabling him to focus more on the 50-kilometer race. At 31 miles it's longer than the marathon run and he feels more suited to its endurance aspects, as opposed to the quickness element required for the 20k that he performed in Atlanta. Clausen's personal best in the 50k is three hours and 48 minutes, and he suspects a time in the 3:40s will be needed to win in Sydney. To prepare, his normal week includes training sessions every day, with two workouts on five of the seven days. There are usually three grueling workouts - a long walk of 25 to 40 kilometers and two tough days of intervals. Last week is was a 4x5000 meter track circuit one day and a 7x3000 meter road circuit on another day. There are also recovery workouts, weight-lifting and technique sessions. He averages about 100 miles of walking a week. Over the past three years, Clausen has claimed two national championships at the 20-kilometer distance and two at 50k, winning both in 1999. His real breakthrough internationally was placing fourth at the 99 Worlds, because that proved to him that his dedication to training full-time was paying off at the world-class level. Despite knee surgery on July 11 to fix a torn meniscus, he feels fit and ready to go for his impending Olympic moment.

Family of fans
Before the 1996 Olympics, Sports Illustrated ran an item in which Clausen mentioned that he hoped his visibility as an Olympian would help him locate his biological parents, who put him up for adoption when he was an infant. Since then, he's located a half-sister, Lisa, and the two have made some progress in tracking down their birth mother, though not enough to make contact. He's had no luck finding his birth father. Lisa plans to be in Clausen's cheering section in Sydney, along with his adoptive mother and sister Jodi. There will be plenty of people following his progress back home in Wisconsin, as the family he grew up in includes 36 cousins.

They probably will not be watching Clausen's last international race. He thinks he'll remain in the sport at least another year, pointing toward next year's World Championship in Canada. "That seems like it might be a natural conclusion to things, but I've really been so focused on Sydney that I haven't thought about it all that much," he says. "I enjoy what I'm doing so I may stick with it, but probably not for more than another year at the same level I've been at the for the past three years.

"When I quit work in '97 I had no clue how far up in the world ranks I could go. I had a suspicion that the rest of the world wasn't really that much more talented, just merely better-trained. So it was nice to have a breakthrough last year and show that win, lose or draw this year, it's paid off and I've established myself as an international-ranked athlete able to compete at the highest level."

Blue Devil Weekly Olympics Feature: Curt Clausen

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