Run For It (Cont.) | Outside Online

Outside Magazine July 2003

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Run For It (Cont.)


	Jon Gill at Oregon's Santiam Correctional Institution, January 2003 (Jake Chessum)

JONATHAN CHRISTOPHER GILL, Oregon inmate 12520672, never hesitates to tell you that the Olympics are his destiny. "I've always known that I'd be a great runner," he says, sitting across from me in the prison cafeteria. "I just had to do the work."

It's two hours after Gill's morning workout. Using his finger to draw an imaginary timeline on a tabletop, he's diagramming the beckoning path from prison cell to medal stand. First, he says, he'll keep training hard until his release in the summer of 2003. (His sentence is up August 14.) For the next 11 months, he'll compete in cross-country, road, and 1,500-meter events, culminating in the spring of '04, when he hopes to post a 3:39 at a major race like the Prefontaine Classic, in Eugene, Oregon. That time would qualify him for next July's Olympic Trials in Sacramento. There he'll finish in the top three, and a month later it's hello, Athens.

Gill connects the dots with an easy earnestness reflected in his schoolboyish face. His skin is line-free, his dark hair neatly combed, his brown eyes bright and eager. Six foot three and a trim, muscular 175 pounds, he sits straight as an I beam. Now he leans back confidently, cradling his head with interlaced fingers.

"I know when I get out and put that last year together," he says, "that I'm going to make history."

Could be. But, of course, the wiser bet is that he'll

Gill isn't just some con with a dream. He was a top high school runner, with a stride like a leopard's. But alcohol, anger, and petty crime derailed him. Now he's a two-time loser on the brink of middle age.

never make it. I discovered Gill by accident back in 2001 while researching a story about American distance running, and I was quickly impressed by the depth of his obsession, which is at once inspiring and more than a little frightening. It's one thing to think big, but can Gill possibly reach the Olympics? Just as important: What's going to happen to him if he fails?

The short answer to the first question is yes. Ex-convicts have gone to the Olympics before: The most recent was Michael Bennett, a boxer and onetime inmate in the Illinois state pen who competed as a heavyweight in the 2000 Sydney Games. And while no track athlete has come out of prison to run in the Games, track-and-field dark horses have made Olympic teams, and they have won medals.

As for Gill, he's not just some random con with a dream. He was born with loads of natural talent, and he used to be one of the nation's best high school runners, winning a Michigan state cross-country championship in 1987. He missed out on a college track career, but his current coach, 65-year-old Dick Brown—a Eugene-based track-and-field legend who has trained seven Olympians, including Mary Decker Slaney and Suzy Favor Hamilton—believes in him completely and is convinced that the lack of wear on Gill's legs will actually improve his chances. "This guy can do it," Brown insists. "We're saying, 'Let's get a medal.' "

When it comes to Gill making the team, it doesn't hurt that American middle-distance running stinks right now. From 1983 through 2000, U.S. male runners (excluding sprinters) won only 3.4 percent of the world championship and Olympic medals in their events. Most top American times in the 1,500 were set more than 15 years ago. So an Olympic berth is ripe for the taking.

Relatively. Gill still faces enormous obstacles. For starters, he's a recovering alcoholic, a repeat offender, and hovering on the brink of middle age. After escaping a rough upbringing outside Detroit and bolting west, Gill robbed a Gap in Pasadena in 1995. In 1997, he robbed a pizza parlor in Eugene, earning himself 70 months under Oregon's tough mandatory-sentencing laws.

As prisons go, the 180-man South Fork facility is benign: There are no guard towers, and inmates sleep in 12-man wooden cabins without bars. But Gill has to perform hard labor every day and then train on a rock-strewn path that's only a third of a mile long. He's been trying for months to get transferred to an Oregon prison with better training conditions, but he's gotten nowhere.

Meanwhile, Gill's American competition trains in optimal settings. Athletes like Seneca Lassiter, a former NCAA 1,500-meter champion who's almost a decade younger than Gill, and Alan Webb, a 20-year-old phenom who set a new high school record in the 1,500 in 2001, are still developing their talent. And if Gill does reach the Olympics, he'll compete against international superstars like Kenya's Bernard Lagat, and the great El Guerrouj. Both are capable of running the 1,500 in 3:26; Gill's best timed mile, as a high school junior, was 4:17, which converts to a 1,500-meter time of four minutes.

Gill's iffy chances for success led me to the second, more worrisome question: Is he prepared for failure? That one's easy. No.

After months of conversations with Gill and people who know him, dozens of exchanged letters, and a hundred collect calls from jail, I've found Gill to be funny, inquisitive, and articulate. He's also arrogant—he tends to look down on his fellow prisoners—and he gets lost in grandiose fantasies of success that make him oblivious to the need for solid contingency plans. His attitude, which combines self-help themes with a strange sort of will to power, can be inspiring, but also dispiriting—especially when he starts in on complaints about corrections officers, who Gill seems to think are always conspiring to thwart him.

"In this bellicose environment I have never known fear," he wrote me early on. "[The guards] hate my audacity to shoot for the stars. Just remember in time I'll be doing interviews on Good Morning America and living the hero's life."

In the end, Gill's Olympic dream could save him, or it could just add velocity to his downfall. Many convicts, overwhelmed by the outside world's pressures and stereotypes, lapse back into substance abuse or commit new crimes. Gill might easily slide back into his old ways, and his safety nets are flimsy.

Brown argues that Gill's tunnel vision is precisely what will get him to the starting line in Athens. He says that typical American distance runners, who tend to be college grads with multiple options, lack the single-minded hunger that drives their usually superior African counterparts. Now look at Gill. Aside from his friendship with Brown, who's stood behind him for the past seven years, and his relationship with two loving sisters, Gill is focused on one thing only: the 1,500.

"When Jonathan steps up to that line, he'll look at the competition and think, They haven't had to do what I've had to do to get here," says Brown. "And he'll think, They're not going to take it away from me."

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