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Outside Magazine July 2003

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Run For It (Cont.)


	Gill's calorie stash (Jake Chessum)

GILL ARRIVED AT SOUTH FORK in August 2001. That spring he'd secured a transfer from Snake River, where he had begun training on a cramped 200-meter track. (A standard oval is 400 meters.) He spent the summer battling wildfires at a prison firefighters' outpost in the Oregon woods, and at South Fork he settled into a daily regimen that mixed the routines of prison life with a grueling fitness program devised by him and Brown.

The South Fork wake-up bell rings every weekday morning at 5:30. Gill usually skips breakfast to sleep in, and makes his own meal inside the cabin with food purchased at the prison canteen. Downing a concoction of hot water, wheat germ, and honey, he slips into work boots and by 7 a.m. reluctantly piles into a white prison van with nine other convicts. For $1.50 a day, each inmate does seven hours of hard labor, pruning trees or trapping beavers for the Oregon Department of Forestry.

The van arrives back at South Fork around 3:15, and Gill's Olympic training begins. He sprints to the cabin to change

Gill's training regimen is insane: Every day he runs ten miles, pumps iron, and does 1,500 sit-ups. "When is everybody going to figure out," he says, "that it's all about hard work and desire?"

into the cheap $30 running shoes he buys at the canteen. Then he endlessly orbits the camp, running intervals, performing drills, or just logging ten solid miles before returning to his cabin at 4:30. At 5:30 he eats dinner in the dingy chow hall. Then, while the other convicts watch the hotties on Temptation Island, he does 1,500 sit-ups and pumps iron in a tiny weight room from 7:30 to 8:30. Finally, he jumps up and down on an 18-inch-high wooden box for an hour to strengthen his hip flexors, which aid in lifting a runner's legs.

When Gill finishes, he tiptoes past sleeping cabinmates and turns on a small light over his bunk. He looks at the clippings neatly taped to his closet door. There's an Abe Lincoln quote (don't count the days, make the days count), an action photo of El Guerrouj, and a picture of Greek ruins with a caption reading, clock ticking on athens. Then he turns out the light.

Because Gill's schedule changes with new labor assignments, Brown gives him general training guidelines rather than fixed routines. The coach's immediate goal for Gill, however, is clear-cut: Develop endurance. The better Gill's muscles become at synthesizing oxygen, the faster he'll be able to run in a 1,500-meter race before going all out at the finish. High-impact sprint training, Brown says, can wait until after Gill's release.

Most elite runners don't work nearly this hard. The typical training routine for a top distance athlete includes two daily runs, occasional weight workouts, some stretching, big naps around midday, and plenty of healthy food. The average Olympian would grumble over Gill's standard dinner fare—a skimpy 900-calorie veggie tray supplemented with all the ramen, sunflower seeds, jerky sticks, and spreadable cheese that he can afford to buy from the canteen.

Gill claims that the daily hardships galvanize both his mind and body. "If you think that lactic burn is the worst pain you can endure in life, you're wrong," he says. "There will never be a race as hard as some of the things that I have to deal with."

It all sounds appropriately Rocky-esque, but can it work? Nobody can predict that, but when I start telling people in the track world about Gill—none of them has ever heard of him—the response is nearly uniform. They admire the resolve, but they seriously doubt he'll get anywhere.

"Not enough sleep, no massages, cheap shoes—it all adds up," says Steve Holman, 33, the former U.S. 1,500-meter champ-ion. "Why doesn't he just use the running to help him straighten out his life?"

"Wishing is great, but this guy is old," says Brooks Johnson, 69, who's coached American runners at every Olympics since 1968. "I'd root for him, but you've got people just as talented as Jon but without the handicaps and in their biological prime."

Gill fires right back when he hears these assessments. He mentions the "old" track athlete Regina Jacobs, who at 39 recently set a world record in the women's 1,500. Meanwhile, he doesn't think much of his younger competition. He'll tell you that only one American, Jason Pyrah, reached the 1,500-meter final at Sydney, and that he finished at the back of the pack.

"When is everyone going to figure out that it's all about hard work and desire?" Gill says.

That sounds like Rocky again, but hard work has paid off for Kenyan runners, who credit much of their success to pure effort. One outsider who doesn't shrug off Gill's chances is Henry Rono, a 51-year-old Kenyan living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who broke four different world records in 1978, dominating everything from the 3,000 to the 10,000.

"I told people in 1971 that I was going to break records, and they thought I was crazy," says Rono. "But I was determined. Jon could be one who is so hungry."

Gill is definitely hungry. So hungry that he keeps running even after silver-dollar-size blisters bubble up on his feet. So hungry that he inspires admiration in the very prison population that he disdainfully refers to as "the lumpenproletariat."

"Many guys respect Jon and go out of their way to acknowledge him," says Dennis Harrison, a 53-year-old inmate who has befriended Gill. "The guys who don't like Jon are resentful. They can't be happy about someone trying to break free."

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