Bucknell University Athletics
Dugan Jumps from Skiing to Running
9/29/2014 9:17:00 AM | Men's Cross Country
Like many collegiate distance runners, Bucknell senior John Dugan's initial introduction to the sport came in the form of cross-training for another activity. But unlike most of his peers, Dugan started running to stay fit for his competitive freestyle skiing season in the winter.
Dugan's hometown of Ramsey, New Jersey, located in the northeast corner of the state not far from New York City, is not exactly a hotbed for alpine skiers. But his parents, John and Bobbie, were avid skiers and spent the weekends working at Mount Snow in Vermont. Throughout the winter months, the Dugan weekend routine started after school on Friday with a three-hour trek up the New York Thruway, followed by two solid days on the slopes and then a late-night return home on Sunday.
Dugan thinks he put on skis for the first time around the age of three or four, and by age eight he was entering – and winning – some youth races. Eventually he transitioned over to freestyle skiing, primarily moguls, aerials and slopestyle, which are all now featured in the Olympics and Winter X Games. Dugan competed for the Mount Snow Ski Team at events spanning New England, and he really fell for the sport despite the long hours in the car.
“We would travel all over the place, depending on where the circuit was on a particular weekend,” Dugan recalls. “My parents were really supportive, and I am so grateful for that. I had to go up to Maine one year for our regional championship, and it was like a 12-hour drive. They were always willing to do it. It was very competitive, and last year at the Olympics I knew many of the freestyle skiers and had even competed against some of them. It was cool seeing them on that stage.”
During the summer, Dugan would cross-train at the Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid or out on one of the glaciers at Mount Hood in Oregon. Distance running was part of that training, and as he entered Ramsey High School, he decided to join some friends who were going out for the cross country team.
“It was great, because everyone is kind of doing the same thing, and out on our runs there was plenty of time for everyone to get to know each other,” Dugan reflects on his early cross country days. “It's different from other sports. I really enjoyed it.”
Eventually Dugan progressed enough where he had to make some tough time-management choices between competitive running, skiing, and one of his other loves, baseball.
“I qualified for the Eastern Championships in skiing, which happened to be the same day as high school baseball tryouts, so I had to make a choice,” says Dugan. “Since I had already done cross country, I decided that I could continue to ski, and then do track and field in the spring. I wasn't very good at all as a freshman, but I enjoyed it. I liked that I was improving and that I could see measurable gains in my performance pretty much every week. I stuck with it, and by my junior year I had improved a lot and was really invested into it.”
On the spectrum of dangerous sports, freestyle skiing trends toward the north end, and sure enough in the first competition of his junior season Dugan took a fall and broke his arm. That meant enduring a large cast during indoor track and field season. By that point, Dugan's times on the track were good enough to consider running in college, so in another difficult decision, he scaled back on the skiing and focused all of his training in running.
In high school, Dugan served as team captain in cross country, indoor and outdoor track and field. He was a six-time First Team All-League selection, and twice he was named First Team All-State in cross country. Dugan was the New Jersey Group 2 Section I champion and was also medalist at the New Jersey Meet of Champions and the Eastern States Championships.
Also a terrific student in high school, Dugan's college search primarily focused on Patriot League and Ivy League schools. He took an official visit to Bucknell, and it was the program's “team first” reputation that ultimately drew him to Lewisburg.
“I just felt that Bucknell had the best combination of the education and the quality of the team,” Dugan says. “And the biggest thing was that Coach [Kevin] Donner really convinced me that this is more than just an individualistic program. That's something that I really wanted, because my high school team was very close. I had heard from my coaches and some former teammates who had gone on to run in college that it gets much more individual at that level, and I really wanted to be in a program that had defined team goals. Something that everyone is working toward that I can contribute to. I felt that I could make a difference here, but also that I would be challenged in a lot of different ways.”
It did not take long for Dugan to impact the Bison squad. In his first cross country season he earned All-Patriot League and Rookie of the Year honors after finishing 13th overall at the Patriot League Championship. That spring, he scored at the league outdoor meet with a fifth-place finish in the steeplechase while qualifying for the IC4A Championships in that event.
Dugan improved yet again as a sophomore, finishing third at the Patriot League Cross Country Championship. He was Bucknell's top finisher in five of the team's six meets, he earned his first career victory at the Detroit Titan Invitational, and he capped off a phenomenal cross country season with a 20th-place finish and All-Region honors at the NCAA Mid-Atlantic Regional Championship. In the spring, he won the Patriot League silver medal in the steeplechase, helping the Bison men to their fourth consecutive outdoor team title.
Dugan returned for his junior year as one of the favorites to win the Patriot League cross country title, but disaster struck. He started experiencing leg pain, and two meets into the season he was shut down with a stress fracture in his femur. Dugan went four months without running at all, and when he was cleared to compete again during outdoor season in the spring, his fitness level was not where it needed to be to compete for league championships.
“It was a very dramatic swing of the pendulum to go from having a pretty good season the year before and finishing near the top of the Patriot League, and then missing a year entirely,” Dugan offers. “I really felt like I let our team down through cross country and indoor track not being able to run at all, and then in outdoor track not being able to perform at the level that I expected from myself.”
But Dugan placed his faith in the hands of the Bucknell athletic training staff, and now the injury has fully healed.
“I'm really grateful for the resources we have here at Bucknell,” Dugan says. “I put my trust in Mark Keppler and Paul Secondi and the entire training staff, as well as our coaching staff. They really helped me so much along the way. When I got discouraged, they reminded me that it's a long process. I just stuck to what they told me to do, and it's great when you can place your trust in people who you know are looking out for your best interests.”
Dugan was not the only Bison runner bitten by the injury bug in 2013. With several key performers out of the lineup, the team finished sixth at the Patriot League Championship. This year, Dugan says that the team's chief goal is being healthy for the league race on Nov. 1 at Lehigh.
“We feel confident that if we can get everyone to the line healthy on November 1 at Patriot Leagues, that we will have a really good chance to win,” he says. “So our coaches have been really flexible with our training, and when some guys have had some minor things flare up they have dealt with it. Coach Donner went back and looked at years of his training regimens to see what has worked and what hasn't. He and I met and went through all of the detailed logs of my training, to see what, if anything, has been in common leading up to periods of injury.
“The hardest thing about training in our sport is the line between being ambitious and trying to maximize everything you possibly can, and then maybe taking it a step too far and ultimately having to face the consequences. Sometimes your ambition, which I believe is one of the best characteristics that drives you toward success and achieving for the team, can also be your worst enemy. You have to find that line and appreciate the gains you make along the way without trying to do too much all at once.”
In his return to the cross country circuit for the first time in a year, Dugan was runner-up at the Detroit Titan Invitational on Sept. 6 and led Bucknell to the team title. He was back in action yesterday at the Panorama Farms Invitational at the University of Virginia, a high-level national meet.
While he is looking to bounce back with a big senior year, Dugan also has the added responsibility of being a team captain, a member of the Bucknell Bison Leadership Academy, and a rare double-major in biology and economics.
Dugan is leaning towards medical school after graduation, but his economics curriculum has opened some other doors.
“I basically did [the double major] out of interest, to be honest,” says Dugan, who is a member of the Patriot League Academic Honor Roll. “I'm really interested in the sciences and that's where my main focus is, but I thought that economics would be beneficial because it would give me a good background in business so that if I ever want to open a private practice it would help me manage my own network of care. Or ultimately after working in primary care for a while, I could possibly enter healthcare administration as a secondary career later on. So I figured it would give me a good business background and also help me think critically about things a little bit differently than the science side.
“I'm also really interested in public policy and finance. So I figured this would be a good degree to get because it's so flexible. I am still planning to go to medical school, but right now I am also looking at one-year biotechnology programs. I've been looking into working in medicine while also working in the medical industry in development. I work in Dr. [Morgan] Benowitz-Fredericks' research lab on campus, and I've really enjoyed the research side of it too, so that's something else to consider as a possible career option. We are studying the effects of prenatal testosterone on developing chickens. Basically hormone exposure during the incubation period. We have a couple of different studies going on at once. She's been really supportive and has taught me a ton. So my current plan is to do a one-year program in biotech, and then I am applying to medical school as well.”
For a young man who spent many of his formative years flying upside down, Dugan is another prime example of a Bucknell student-athlete with his feet firmly on the ground and headed in the right direction.
Note: This story appeared in a recent edition of the Bucknell Football Gameday Program and was written by Jon Terry of the Bucknell Athletic Communications Office.
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