For Schunk, the race of her life is already won

The odds against Sofie Schunk making the 2024 U.S. Olympic team might seem longer than the race in which she’s qualified for the Olympic Trials: the marathon.

The personal-best time with which she qualified, 2 hours, 36 minutes, 33 seconds, is some 18 minutes slower than that of the No. 1 qualifier.

Her time ranks 136th among the 173 qualifiers.

Many of her competitors in Orlando, Florida are full-time professional runners; Schunk, 31, slots in her training miles around a full-time job at Sandia Laboratories.

The women’s qualifying standard for the Olympics themselves, not the U.S. Trials, is 2:26:50 — almost 10 minutes faster than Schunk’s best.

Yet, all that aside, Schunk plans to be lined up when the starter’s gun goes off on Feb. 4 in Orlando.

And why not? In a very real sense, she’s already won.

Running long distances while living with Type 1 diabetes, no matter how long or how fast, has been a singular triumph.

Some 15 years ago, Schunk was a star soccer goal keeper and a promising quarter- and half-miler — she placed second in the 800 at the 2007 Class 5A state championships — for La Cueva. But then, her energy and stamina sapped by fluctuations in her blood-sugar level, diagnosed with Type 1, she abandoned track.

“I just couldn’t figure out running at all (at the time),” she said in a recent interview.

Her talents in goal, coupled with superb academics, led her to Marquette University in Milwaukee, where she played soccer for four years.

It was during her time at Marquette that endurance sports re-entered her life. She found role models, Type 1 diabetics like her, who had learned to manage their symptoms while running long distances.

“I started to figure out ways to effectively check my blood sugar, find the foods that worked best for me,” she said. “… Finding what to carry with you, different types of devices.

“Continuous glucose monitoring technology has completely improved since I’ve been diagnosed. I can get it to my phone, to my watch, every few minutes.”

By 2015, Schunk, then a biomedical engineering graduate student at Marquette, was doing triathlons. After earning her Master’s — the title of her thesis was “Integrating Meals and Exercise into Personalized Glucoregulation Models” — she took a job in San Diego at Dexcom, a firm that manufactures the continuous glucose monitoring device she still uses, and gave up triathlon to focus on distance running.

In 2019, she came home to Albuquerque. Her job at Sandia Labs, she said, involves “a completely different product but more or less a similar line of work. Just being innovative in what types of technology we can bring from industry to do things faster and more digital.”

Schunk has gotten faster on the roads, as well. She ran 2:52 at the Lakefront Marathon in Milwaukee in 2015; 2:49 at the 2019 California International Marathon in Sacramento, the same event at which she qualified for the Olympic Trials with a personal best four years later.

Her Trials qualifying time on Dec. 4 was just 27 seconds inside the cutoff mark of 2:37. She does not, though, recall glancing at her watch in anxiety as the finish line approached that day.

“It’s crazy,” she said, “because it’s a pattern that when I have my best races I’m not looking at my watch. I’m kind of more in the moment and racing.”

In Sacramento, with scores of runners looking to qualify for the Trials, Schunk fell in with several who were maintaining a pace she was comfortable with.

“… I was just focused on trusting the training, taking my fuel,” she said. “Then by the middle of the race I was glancing at my watch a bit just to make sure I was still just a bit on track.

“By mile 20 I felt pretty good and I was with a group of three or four, and we were all kind of working together. … I just kind of trusted it and went with it.”

Since qualifying, Schunk has continued to log the miles, often accompanied by Simcoe, her devoted, 3-year-old Blue Heeler/husky cross — so named because Simcoe is a brand associated with diabetes treatment and research.

She remains deeply involved in making endurance sports better and safer for herself and others who need to manage their diabetes.

“I work with a team called Diabetes Sports Project (of which she’s a founding member),” she said, “to help me manage the blood sugars during the race and giving me tips and tricks.”

Schunk is spending the holidays in Austin, Texas, with her sister, Hattie, a former La Cueva soccer and track athlete who ran track and cross country at Texas Tech. Though Sofie has other coaches — Jesse Armijo is her primary coach at Albuquerque’s Dukes Track Club — she counts her younger sister among them.

“We still share a lot of miles together when she comes back (to Albuquerque),” Sofie said. “We have a loop up in the hills we call ‘Sisters Loop’ that we always do together.”

As for the Trials, she said, come what may — with the miles logged and her diabetes controlled — “It’s just racing.”

And that’s something that, 15 years ago, she didn’t know she’d be doing now.