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Outside Magazine July 2003

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Run For It (Cont.)


	"While I breathe, I hope": Gill on the track at Santiam (Jake Chessum)

TRACK DOWN PIZZA, located across the street from the University of Oregon at Eugene, is a shrine to track-and-field. Many of the photos covering the walls, of great runners like Steve Prefontaine and Alberto Salazar, were shot at the U of O's Hayward Field, the sport's Yankee Stadium. Gill believes he'll earn a place on the photo wall, but don't count on seeing his face up there. Track Town was the site of the 1997 holdup that sent him to prison.

"He probably sat over there before robbing the place," says Dick Brown, nodding toward one end of the restaurant. "Or maybe it was over there."

It's a day after my visit to South Fork, and Brown, sitting with a huge veggie slice in front of him, is recalling memories—both good and bad—of Gill's life in Eugene.

"Jonathan entered a local 800, and I watched him from the stands. Even though he was a drunk and out of shape, I'd seen enough runners to know he could be great," Brown says. "Jonathan's really straight when he runs—his torso is directly underneath him for superior leg lift and leverage. He's also got minimal foot-on-the-ground time. His foot is like a paw that goes whoosh, moving back smooth and quick. It's how a leopard runs."

There weren't many bright spots in Eugene, though. During Gill's year there, he kept drinking and once even attempted suicide, swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills. Brown tried to help. He got Gill jobs, sent him to AA, and called 911 for the emergency stomach pump that saved Gill's life. But nothing set him straight.

At six foot five, with huge forearms and long legs, Brown looks like a bruiser, but he's actually a big softy, both on and off the track. His partner, Marlene Wellborn, whom Brown calls his "shit detector," thought he was nuts for endlessly propping up Gill. But Brown believed he could gently turn him around. He'd gotten great performances from the oft injured and mercurial Mary Decker Slaney, who won two world championships while working with Brown, and he'd sent an extraordinary 23 athletes to the 1984 L.A. Olympics as director of the Athletics West running team. In Gill, Brown saw similarities to Steve Scott, a big, strong middle-distance runner who powered his way past wispier athletes and onto three Olympic teams in the eighties and nineties.

Gill knew Brown was a potential savior; he just couldn't respond. "Train all day and then work a job was a whole new concept to me," says Gill. "I thought nighttime was for Michelob."

Drunk and wearing a Detroit Lions cap when he walked into Track Town in the early hours of October 4, 1997, Gill rested a backpack on the countertop, with his hand inside. "I've got you covered," he said to the kid behind the register. "Open the till." He walked away with $225 and was arrested several days later.

When Gill got an unexpectedly harsh sentence of nearly six years for armed robbery—he wasn't armed, but pretending to have a gun counts the same—Brown reassured him that the dream could live on. "I won't give up on you until you give up on yourself," the coach said.

It took 14 months for Gill to bottom out. He spent six months in Lane County Jail, near Eugene, and then got transferred to eastern Oregon's harsh Snake River Correctional Institution, where he squabbled with guards and fought with other convicts. One day, he refused to enter his cell and was slapped with a 120-day sentence in solitary confinement. Around the time of his 30th birthday, sitting alone in an eight-by-ten-foot concrete cage, Gill meditated on Brown's faith in him—and on his own unrealized potential.

"I thought, You're either going to take a hard look at yourself now or you never will," he says. "You're going to come out of the hole an athlete or you're going to quit promising this to yourself, because it's tearing you up. If you commit, that means you've got to do everything."

Gill decided to commit. He performed endless push-ups and squats in his cell, swore off drinking, and started reading about people like Muhammad Ali and Jesse Owens, "free thinkers like myself, since I'll go from being a convict to an Olympian." In time Gill would get a letter from a half sister, Jessica Brown, who lives outside Chicago, and a note from Robin, who had ended up in the Bay Area. He replied with news of his fresh start, and the supportive mail kept coming.

A few days after his big epiphany, Gill stepped into a snow-covered pen enclosed by 30-foot concrete walls for one of his few weekly exercise breaks. Dressed in an orange jumpsuit and blue rubber slippers, he started running. The cage was three strides wide, eight strides long.

"Envision!" Gill thought to himself. He imagined hearing a coach shout times as he ran: "Fifty-six for the quarter-mile." Adding speed, Gill grooved a path and practically bounced off the walls. Soon the skin on his feet cracked, and blood from his cuts turned the snow pale crimson.

But Gill wouldn't stop. "Fifty-six!" he heard, and then said to himself, "I'm on pace! I'm on pace!"

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