It’s Not a Dunn Deal : Despite Injuries, CSUN Javelin Thrower Sticks With It

There must be times when Kristin Dunn of Cal State Northridge wonders how much further she might be able to throw the javelin had she been injury-free during her college career.

Dunn placed third in last year’s NCAA championships and ranks fifth this season with a school record of 176 feet 4 inches, yet she has been hampered by injuries throughout her five years at Northridge.

After missing the 1991 season with a bad back, she battled a variety of nagging injuries in 1992 and ’93. Last year, she competed all season with a torn patellar tendon in her left knee and this year, she’s throwing with a stress fracture in her left--throwing--elbow.

Though the stress fracture is painful, Dunn isn’t complaining. She’s able to take part in one or two throwing sessions a week, which is a vast improvement over last season, when the pain in her knee sometimes prevented her from training at all.

“There were times when I wondered if I was going to be able to make it to the end of the season,” Dunn said. “But once I got to a certain point, I felt like there was no turning back. I’d come too far to stop.”

Dunn hoped that her injury woes were behind her after undergoing reconstructive knee surgery following the NCAA championships. She began rehabilitation toward the end of summer and looked forward to some high-quality training in the fall. But when the stress fracture was diagnosed in her elbow, the senior from Mission Viejo High nearly reached her breaking point.

“There came a point in the fall when I sat back, cried, and said, ‘Why do I do this?’ ” Dunn said. “ ‘Why, with all the injuries I’ve had, and all the problems, why do I continue to do what I do?’ I took a second look and I said, ‘You know what? It’s because I’m a competitor. I love competition. I love being out there with the other people trying to see who’s better.’ ”

That competitiveness has had few outlets this season. Dunn has thrown in only four meets, mostly due to the condition of her elbow, and has not been seriously challenged in any of them.

She was expected to be pushed by Stanford’s Sami Jo Small in the California-Nevada championships in Fresno on Sunday, but Dunn’s 165-5 effort left her well ahead of Small at 146-3. Small threw a career-best of 175-11 in March.

“I was feeling good, but I never really hit it,” Dunn said. “I just never felt like I went all out, like I chased the javelin. It was more or less like I walked through it and just went through the motions. I think that deep down inside, I knew that I had the meet won and I just lost some motivation because of that.”

A letdown could prove disastrous against defending champion Valerie Tulloch (who has a best of 198-9) of Rice and several other 170-foot throwers at the NCAA championships in Knoxville, Tenn., May 31-June 3, but Northridge assistant Candy Roberts doesn’t expect that to happen.

Roberts said Dunn competes best when facing competition that is at or above her level. Her protege agreed.

“I love going into a competition where someone is throwing where I’m throwing or they’re throwing above what I am,” Dunn said. “I love trying to better their mark.”

Dunn, 22, has been trying to better opponents’ marks since the seventh grade, but it used to be in the shotput and discus, not the javelin, which is not contested at the high school level in California.

She had personal bests of 42-1 in the shotput and 131-2 in the discus at Mission Viejo and placed second and fifth in those events in the 1990 Southern Section 4-A Division championships.

Northridge recruited her as a shotputter-discus thrower, but after a redshirt season in 1991, then-Northridge throws coach John Frazier suggested she try the javelin.

Dunn figured she wouldn’t be too adept in the event, but after a few throws, she was hooked.

“Right away, it just kind of clicked, more automatically than anything I think I’ve ever done,” Dunn said. “A few months later, I said, ‘John, can I give up the shotput and discus? The javelin is my event.’ ”

Dunn raised her personal best to 153-2 by the end of the season and improved to 164-0 in 1993 and 174-9 last year.

Despite her success, she developed a bad habit that contributed to her knee and elbow problems.

“The reason she injured her knee and her elbow is because she was a sidearm thrower all those years,” said Roberts, a 181-3 discus performer for UCLA last year. “It’s no wonder that she fractured her elbow. She’s lucky that she didn’t tear tendons and ligaments and all that other good stuff.”

In an effort to combat Dunn’s sidearm delivery, Roberts has spent much of the season altering Dunn’s throwing path from the side of the body to over the top of her shoulder. That followed a fall program in which Dunn worked on nothing but the lower-body mechanics of throwing the javelin.

Not throwing in the fall and taking more days off than usual had Dunn questioning Roberts’ training regimen at first. Now she says she’s a believer, although Roberts says she has “had to fight (Kristin) all the way.”

“(Candy) kept telling me, ‘You need to be patient. It’s going to happen, it’s going to come. Don’t worry,’ ” Dunn said. “She made me realize that taking time off and allowing my body time to heal was only going to benefit me in the long run. She made me realize that I don’t need to throw every day and to train every day to be a good athlete.”

That last statement is a 180-degree turnaround for the energetic Dunn, who always figured more was better when it came to training and whose intense work habits have contributed to her injuries over the years.

“She still thinks that if she is not working 110% all the time that she is behind everybody else,” Roberts said. “In the javelin, that’s not always the case. Sometimes, the less you work, the fresher you are, and the more flexible you get and that helps you in the javelin. If your arm is fresh, you’re going to have the whip to throw far.”

Roberts says that Dunn’s biggest strength is an “incredible” natural ability to throw the javelin, but Dunn is still trying to combined the proper upper- and lower-body mechanics in the heat of competition.

“She has the two pieces, but she hasn’t been able to put them together successfully yet,” Roberts said.

“She either has the legs but not the arms or the arms but not the legs. . . . When she figures out how to put those two together and we get some timing, then she’s going to do some damage.”

Dunn, who will graduate with a degree in child development later this month, hopes to wreak some havoc in the NCAA championships.

Even if she doesn’t, she plans to train with Roberts through at least the 1996 season in hopes of making the Olympic team.

Dunn might compete for another decade after that, too, as most world-class javelin throwers don’t reach their peak competitive years until their late 20s or early 30s.

“My all-time lifetime goal is 200 feet,” Dunn said of a mark that only seven U.S. women have reached.

“I honestly believe that given time, and given a healthy body and working with Candy, that is completely attainable.”