30 Years Ago, Steve Jones Transformed the Marathon World record at Chicago in 1984 brought sustained aggression to the event. “Sometimes I thought it was the worst thing I ever did, breaking the world record that day in Chicago. But for the most part it was the best thing I ever did.” Its 30 years since Steve Jones ran 2:08:05 to break the world record at the 1984 Chicago Marathon. The running world was thrilled, jubilant and utterly stunned. Jones? Which Jones? From Wales? His first completed marathon? Against Carlos Lopes, the new Olympic champion? And world champion Rob De Castella, Boston champion Geoff Smith, the Kenyans? Where? Chicago!!?? Looking back, Jones, 59, says he was equally bemused. “I never wore a watch in races and I didnt know what the record was,” Jones says. “The splits didnt mean much. Early on it felt easy. After 19 miles I was out on my own. I remember Chris Brasher, the race director from London, was there, and at about 23 miles he shouted at me, Two more 5:00 miles and youll get the record! I thought he meant the course record. So I just kept my head down and carried on. The crowd was going crazy and people were jumping up and down but I wasnt sure what was going on. After the finish it was like being in a dream. Yes, that day in Chicago did change my life forever.” It also changed the marathon. Jones brought to the feared distance the fearlessness of a novice. But he was a novice with the rigorously honed fitness of a 10,000-meter Olympian (8th in Los Angeles two months earlier), and a mix of tough deep-down cussedness and a cross country runners freedom from constraint that is all his own. “You run fairly hard to the last 6 miles, and then you race. Its a long Sunday run and a hard 10K,” is how he described his tactics for the astounded post-race press conference. He found 48:48 at 10 miles so easy that he asked De Castella, “Have they got that wrong?” He stayed unobtrusive as Joseph Nzau, Geoff Smith, Gabriel Kamau and Simeon Kigen took turns trying to burn off the pack. At 17 miles, when Smith nearly fell at an aid station, Jones slipped a kindly supporting hand under his elbow. He was that poised. In the 20th mile, he made his move. It was as if they took the chains off. His next six miles transformed the sport. They averaged 4:46, some into a stiff wind. Mile 23 was 4:43. Thats a bit slower than world record holder Dennis Kimetto’s average pace, but it was off the charts in 1984. Its fair to say that the modern marathon, with sustained sub-4:50 miles the norm, began with Joness last six miles in 1984. He confirmed his seminal role a year later, leading out the 1985 Chicago Marathon at 4:44 pace, dropping in a bombshell 4:34 to kill off Kigen, and reaching halfway in 61:42, sub-4:43 average. He finished in 2:07:13, one second slower than the record Lopes had set that spring. “He took the marathon into a new era. The way he ran that day showed a total disregard for the marathon as an endurance event,” says De Castella. Thats exactly what everyone has been saying about Kenyans and Ethiopians since about 2004. Jones explains it in his usual unpretentious terms. “I was a fit athlete,” he says. “I was very fit at that time as a 10,000-meter runner. Thats all you need to be.” His training, long unmeasured repeat efforts on road or grass, plus high-quality long runs that we now call “tempo” was remarkably like Renato Canovas “extending specific endurance” principle thats so hot this year on all the websites. Work was the only Jones principle. “I dont think I had a great deal of talent. I started at the bottom and worked my way up,” he says. That work gave him an extraordinary four years of successes that included the two victories at Chicago, one at London (1985), one at New York (1988), second to Toshihiko Seko at Boston (1987), third at the world cross country championships (1984), and some phenomenally courageous track races (see this YouTube clip, for example). In 1984, Jones was a corporal in the British Royal Air Force, a fighter aircraft technician, a spare-time self-made runner whose career predated the beginnings of prize money. He had the simple integrity of the old-style amateur. When injury forced him to drop out of the 1983 Chicago Marathon, his first attempt at the distance, he offered to give back his per diem allowance. After an aimless boyhood as what he calls a “layabout,” and responsible now for his wife, Annette, and two small sons, Corporal Jones the world record breaker wasnt going to throw away the security he had found with the RAF for the high-risk life of a runner in that era of experimental professionalism. (In 1984 prize money still had to be kept in a “trust fund” held by the national federation.) “Some guy in the press conference asked was I going to be a professional runner,” Jones says. “I said no. Ive always said, Youre only a hamstring injury away from oblivion. So I stayed on with the RAF, even after I won Chicago again, in 1985. It was only after I won New York in 1988 that my Reebok contract was renewed and I decided to move with my family to Boulder.” That move, to a purist sports community at altitude, completed a contrast in location and lifestyles that could hardly be more extreme. Jones grew up in the rainy, smoke-blackened sprawl of coal mines and steel furnaces of Ebbw Vale, where his father was a steel worker, like 15,000 others at that date. Jones became a sewing machinist until the RAF gave him different horizons and encouraged him to run. In a transformation that must seem like fantasy, since 1988 he has been contracted with Reebok in a synergistic relationship that no one seems quite able to define. It involves appearances at every major marathon, signing a lot of posters, showing up at pre-race parties in a sharp suit or distinctive choice of leather jacket, busy Twitter activity of the one-liner Joneseyism kind, eluding media attention, some years as a good masters runner, and most important, an increasing role as a successful and much-loved coach. Shy, with a genuine humility concealing a blazing inner furnace of determination, Jones (though he would never claim it) has somehow become a coach to rival Alberto Salazar in charisma, while they are polar opposites in attitude and celebrity. “I make it simple,” Jones says. “No science, no heart monitors. None of it comes out of a book. Just running instinctively. I ran by the seat of my pants almost all the time, and you dont see that now. No worry about time. Competition was my clock.” Something no one ever mentions as a clue to Joness success in this transformed life is the way he has taken a valued place in Boulders vibrant running community. He has revealed a capacity for self-effacing leadership, as rare as it is paradoxical. Until 1984, he was at the deepest level a loyal club man for Newport Harriers. As for many British runners, the club gave a sense of belonging and shared purpose, as did the RAF. When he became an elite professional runner, that community was lost. In Boulder, he found, or created, a new one. When he was inducted last year into the Boulder Sports Hall of Fame, the response showed how respected and liked he is there. “Family, friend, and integrity are words that sum up Jones. He became one of the most popular runners of the modern era, and he remained true to his roots,” wrote local running writer Michael Sandrock. Always reluctant to talk about his achievements, Jones nevertheless remembers them vividly, and draws on them as a coach. “I remember the Chicago world record as if it was yesterday,” he says. “Every step. At 19 miles I was ready. You just go for broke.” Thats about as eloquent as Jones is ever willing to be about the day that changed his life, and he changed the marathon.
Posted on: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 21:56:26 +0000
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