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Outside Magazine July 2003

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Run For It (Cont.)


	(Photograph Jake Chessum)

GILL STARTED RUNNING partly to get away from his family. Growing up in Detroit in the 1970s, he preferred racing around school playgrounds to facing a largely miserable cast of characters as he pinballed from home to home. There was Gill's stint with his gypsy drunk of a mother, Mary, who disappeared when he was six, and then time spent with her alcoholic parents. There were Gill's two years under the watch of his wealthy paternal grandparents, in suburban Detroit, where he didn't fit in, and the high school days spent with an ambivalent father. Along the way Gill also lived with various half sisters and step-siblings, and sometimes he met members of his extended family, whom he recalls with fond nicknames like Uncle Drunky and Uncle Beat.

Gill did enjoy being with his sister, Robin, and bonded with her in the wake of their parents' 1972 divorce. Three years younger than Gill, Robin lived in Detroit with her maternal grandparents, the Birons. In elementary school, Gill lived with them, too. He and Robin did fun stuff—making up songs, throwing a football. But Gill paid a price, as his abusive grandmother, who reportedly also beat Mary as a child, knocked some of the happiness right out of him.

"There was a lot of taunting and name-calling," says 31-year-old Robin, who, after years of being estranged from her brother, now lives in Portland and visits Gill weekly. "After my grandma beat him, Jon sounded like a wounded animal. To this day, the thought of that sound and how Jon must've been affected gets me."

When Gill was 14, he moved in with his dad, Chris Gill, an industrial engineer living in the Detroit suburb of Ferndale. Jon lost contact with Robin, who moved to northern Michigan with the Birons. Chris had remarried, and Gill felt like a fifth wheel while living with him, his new wife, and his two stepchildren. Gill blew off house chores and says his dad smacked him. Chris, who still lives in Ferndale, admits that he sometimes struck Jon for disciplinary reasons but denies any pattern of abuse.

"Jon was always thinking, I'm going to keep pushing buttons to see if I can get him to hit me," he says. "Obviously, he succeeded. But it wasn't my standard form of justice."

By the time Gill got to Ferndale High, in the fall of 1984, everything exploded at once—his natural running ability, his anger, and his own bad attitude. Gill pulled C's and battled with Ferndale's running coach, Phil Premo, who had good reason to try and look past Gill's temperament. He'd never seen a kid with such talent.

"If I could have figured out how to get inside Jon's head in a positive way, he could have been an Olympian," says the 57-year-old Premo, who left Ferndale in 1992. "I'm not saying there was a possibility. That's a guarantee."

Premo didn't really know how to train or control Gill, who ended up calling his own shots, turning on the juice whenever he felt like it. On several occasions, Gill infuriated Premo by building huge leads in mile races, only to turn around and taunt the field as he coasted backward to victory. (Gill denies doing this.) Premo complained that Gill simply mailed in the 4:17 mile he posted as a junior and then, during cross-country season in his senior year, came in a disappointing third at the state championships.

But Gill followed that with a performance at a state all-star meet that reminded everybody of what he could do. In a 5,000-meter race lasting some 15 minutes, he purposely dropped behind the entire field at the start before screaming, "I'll show you who's state champion!" Then he sprinted into the lead and won, leaving the other coaches stunned. Three weeks later, at a six-state regional meet, Gill finished a close third behind a victorious Bob Kennedy, who later competed in the 5,000 at the 1992 and 1996 Olympics.

In the eyes of most collegiate coaches, Gill's impressive wheels couldn't make up for his crummy GPA and unruly behavior. He accepted the only scholarship offer he got, from Ranger College, a two-year school near Dallas that Kenya's Ibrahim Hussein had attended before winning the 1987 New York City Marathon. When Gill arrived, in 1988, he discovered that Ranger's running program was a joke, overseen by the football coach. He left after a semester and bounced around tiny colleges in Michigan and Florida for a couple of years while missing competitions because of injuries and eligibility snags. One day in 1991, while attending community college in Gainesville, he just gave up.

"I drank a 40-ouncer and said fuck running," Gill says. "I'm drinking beer, hanging out with chicks, and getting laid. It's so much easier."

Gill ratcheted up the social boozing that had started in college. He lit out for Los Angeles, where he stayed with an old high school buddy. He worked mindless jobs and pickled his ambitions with vodka, a pattern that would continue for the next five years.

Sometimes Gill tried to break out of it. In 1992, he contacted Randy Huntington, an elite track coach living in Fresno, and moved north to train. But Huntington's expertise was with sprinters and jumpers, and Gill spent more time bartending and partying than exercising.

On December 20, 1995—the eve of his 27th birthday—Gill was in Southern California visiting friends when he walked into a Gap in Pasadena. Blitzed and depressed, he selected $500 worth of clothes and then told the clerk to empty the register. The police found him wobbling on the sidewalk with two stuffed Gap bags and $287. When he came to in the Los Angeles County Jail, where he eventually served six months, Gill couldn't believe how low he'd sunk. "I knew what I was doing wasn't what I was supposed to do with my life," he recalls. "I had this gift and I wasn't using it."

Penniless, Gill made his way back to Fresno in mid-1996. Huntington was tired of the Gill soap opera, but he called an old friend in Eugene, a patient track coach named Dick Brown, who agreed to take him on. Gill didn't know much about Brown except that he'd trained a bunch of Olympians. The night before leaving, he was so thrilled that he toasted his good fortune. And toasted, and toasted. With Absolut, all night long.

"I figured, Well, you're going to Oregon to train, you're finally going to become that great runner you always knew you'd become," recalls Gill. "You'd better get it out of your system."

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