He finished the year ranked as the No. 1 male triathlete in the country and is ranked No. 9 in the International Triathlon Union (ITU) world rankings.

Kemper, who trains at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Spring, Colo., chatted with usolympicteam.com about Krispy Kremes, qualifying for the Olympics, and his toughest triathlon moment.

Q1: You ran your first triathlon when you were ten years old, growing up in Florida. Why did you gravitate towards triathlon as opposed to say, Little League or kiddie soccer?

HUNTER KEMPER: I was doing those other sports as well. I was playing soccer, tennis, baseball, and I was also swimming. Some swimming friends of mine were doing triathlons, and they invited me to do one. Its not like it was a super-far distance -- it was a 100-meter swim, a 5-kilometer bike ride and a 1-kilometer run, so the whole thing took about 17 or 18 minutes. I actually won my first race and beat my two buddies who had asked me to come out. So it was fun, I had a good time doing it, and there was a National Championship for the IronKids series in St. Petersburg [Fla.] and I did that and beat all the other ten year-olds in the country, so I thought that was cool.

Q2: When did you switch to doing exclusively triathlons?

HUNTER KEMPER: After college, triathlon was all I did. In high school I kind of cut back, I wasn’t doing baseball or soccer anymore. I was running cross country and track, which go hand in hand with triathlon, and I was also swimming. And then I went to college and I just ran at Wake Forest. I knew that I was a good amateur triathlete in high school and running was my weakest event. I wanted to come out and be a professional triathlete, I just thought that would be a cool thing to do after college, so I knew that I’d have to get my running better and I was a little burned out on swimming. So in college I only did triathlons during the summer. I got a ton better as far as my running is concerned. I think if I hadn’t gone that direction, I wouldn’t be nearly the triathlete I am today. I kind of stunk my freshman year and sophomore year but by the time I was a senior I was All-ACC in the 10,000-meters.

Q3: If you weren’t running triathlons, what would you want to do?

HUNTER KEMPER: I was a general business major in school. I think it would be doing something in the business field – I really enjoy that. I also like to work with children. But whether it would be starting up my own company, doing something in the marketing area, I don’t really know. That’s kind of one of the reasons I’ve been doing triathlons for so long, because I really don’t know what I’d be doing in the “real world.” I hope that triathlon opens doors for me to go into another field, that the companies I work with might say, “Hey, do you want to come on board and help us out with this area,” or whatever. Eventually I want to go back and get my MBA, I’ve always wanted to do that.

Q4: International Triathlon Union events are often in really cool places. What is your favorite triathlon to participate in?

HUNTER KEMPER: I have lots of favorites. I did a lot of races over in Europe this year, and there was a race in Nice that was really enjoyable just because of that location. It is pretty awesome – some of the locations are pretty far out and crazy. I did a race this year in the Honduras in this area called the Bay Islands. It was very tropical and very beautiful -- it was unbelievable. But the thing about all these triathlons is that you don’t get to see a whole lot of the area. I don’t really hang out afterwards that much, except for this year at the World Championships I’ll hang around New Zealand for a little bit. But you get to see only enough to say, “Okay, this is an awesome spot to go back when I’m not doing triathlons, just for a vacation.”

Q5: Olympic qualification is based entirely on three races next spring – the World Championships Qualifier in April, the World Championships in May, and another race in June. How do you prepare for races that are so big and important?

HUNTER KEMPER: It's tough because anything can happen on that day. I think our sport is very different. It's not like track and field – like Marion Jones, if she’s in the 100-meters, she’s by far the favorite. A bad race for her would be like getting silver, and that would be horrible to her. Whereas with us, you could put 10 or 15 guys’ names in a hat and jumble them around and pick one out, and that could be the guy that wins. There’s almost a different winner every week.

As the American that’s ranked No. 1, it would be nice to have one spot where the top-ranked guy automatically went [to the Olympics] to ensure that some of your best racers are on the team, but that’s not really the American way. It’s all about how you’re going to do on that one day. My goal is to qualify as early as possible. I don’t want to wait until June to know whether I made the Olympic team. So all my focus will be strictly on April, it’ll be almost as if I don’t have any other races next year. That will be the race for me, and if it doesn’t go well there, three weeks later I’ll be in that second race, so I’ll just have to gear back up again and try to refocus for that one.

Q6: Do you have a routine that you follow to mentally prepare yourself pre-race?

HUNTER KEMPER: I think the main thing for me is not to get too nervous, not to get too caught up in it. Just to be aware if you have some self doubts or some negative self-talk, to be aware of those thoughts if you start to get a little bit nervous. I work a lot with a sports psychologist on [the U.S. Olympic Training Center] complex. I’ve found that I tend now not to get nervous until the day of the race, or even the hour before. The main thing is to be casual and carefree and just go there and enjoy it and to have fun. For me, I don’t like to necessarily be talking about triathlons all the time, so I like to have people around me where we’re not always talking about the race coming up or the race we’re at. We’re talking about what’s going on back home and stuff like that.

Q7: Which is the more important transition for you in a race – swim to bike or bike to run?

HUNTER KEMPER: I would say the bike to run, just because if you’re coming in on the bike in like a pack of 20 and you’re in the back, the guys who were in the front have their shoes on and they’re already leaving before you even get to your rack. That’s a huge disadvantage because the hardest part of the run is the first mile. Everyone takes it out so fast, they’re almost running above their heads, faster than they can run the whole 10 kilometers. So if you start the run 10 seconds down, you have to somehow make up that 10 seconds and run even faster than them. Its almost a mental thing – you have to challenge yourself to say, “Okay, I’m going to be in the front of this pack so I’m one of the first ones off the bike.” And then if you’re running and guys pass you, you can tag on to them.

Q8: What is the most difficult situation you have faced during a race and how did you deal with it?

HUNTER KEMPER: I lost a shoe at the World Championships last year in Cancun. My fitness level was so high and I was so pumped. I was thinking, I’m going to do so well at these Worlds. I had a great swim, I got out of the water in ninth. I’m running my bike about 40 or 50 meters through the transition area and when I went to mount my bike – your shoes are already attached to the bike -- one of my shoes was gone. I didn’t think I had time to go all the way back to get it, I thought my race would have been done. But really quickly I realized that was my only option. So I had to run with my bike back. I’m running back through everyone, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, my race is just totally bombing before my eyes.” I lost 40 seconds and I finally made the third biking group, which usually means you’re out of the race. So I just calmly was like, “Okay, let’s see what I can do from here. How am I going to be able to make this up?” I ended up really killing myself over the first 20 kilometers and made it up to the front group, which was pretty awesome.

I ended up finishing 12th. At first I was pretty disappointed because I wanted to be top five, but it was so much of a victory in itself, looking back, because I so easily could have given up.

Q9: How much time do you devote to training in a typical week?

HUNTER KEMPER: I do about 30 hours of total training in a typical week during racing season. And that would be about 12 hours on the bike, maybe 10 hours of swimming, and six or seven hours running. I would say I run about 60 to 65 miles a week.

Those are some fast miles …

HUNTER KEMPER: Yeah, definitely! On an easy day I’d run about a 6:45 mile – that’s about the slowest I’ll go. And then a lot of times on my runs I’ll be doing a 6-minute pace, like on an easy tempo run.

Q10: I hear you love junk food. What are some of your Olympic Training Center cafeteria favorites?

HUNTER KEMPER: I love the breakfast food at the OTC. Breakfast is a huge meal for us because we usually swim in the morning. I love it when they have biscuits and gravy. I get an omelet like every day, I think all of the triathletes do. I recently got married and my wife and I live off-complex, so I’m not around much for lunch and dinner anymore, but I used to love Mexican Day. I’m a huge fan of that when I’m there.

I do love junk food. But to become the complete triathlete – to become a World Champion, which is what I want to do, and to be in the top five in the world rankings, which I think I’m close to – I think I’ll eventually have to modify my diet. I especially like junk food after races. The week leading up to a race I try to be somewhat good about my diet, and afterwards its like your body just craves fat. I love pizza -- if you could only have one food to eat for the rest of your life, pizza would probably be it for me. I’m a Krispy Kreme nut, like I love Krispy Kreme donuts. That’s probably not good.