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Outside Magazine July 2003

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Run For It (Cont.)

THE CONCERTINA WIRE sparkles in the Oregon rain. It's March 2003, and Gill's legs churn through the heavy air as he runs on the track at Santiam. The circuit is far from perfect—more rectangular than oval. Unfazed by the tight turns, Gill sails past a few joggers en route to another speedy lap. He calls Santiam his "East German training compound." The dream has never shined brighter.

"Whether it was luck or serendipity, I'm here. Actually, in my mind I believe it's destiny," he told me after first arriving at Santiam. "There was a Berlin Wall that I had to go through, and I went through it. I'm finally where I want to be."

Just now, I'm with two other observers—Guy Hall, the prison's warden, and Dick Brown—watching Gill run.

When Gill first came to Santiam, in the spring of 2002, he saw Hall in the rec yard. "Gill walked up to me and said, 'You don't know me, but my name is Jonathan Gill and I'm a runner, and I've got this dream and this coach,' " says Hall, pushing back the hood on his jacket. "This was all in the first 30 seconds. First thing that pops into my mind? Classic manipulator. But when I checked him out, he was sincere."

Hall, a trim 51-year-old fitness buff, appreciated Gill's goal. He started a prison running club to get other inmates exercising, and made Gill secretary, which still leaves him eight hours a day to train. When Gill isn't running, he's answering members' questions or writing thank-you notes to guest speakers—among them, Dick Brown. Brown drives from Eugene to Salem every month to talk to the 30-man group and watch them run. Just now he's watching Gill. This is the first time in years that he's had a chance to see a healthy, fit Gill burn rubber.

"His hips aren't sagging. He's up nice and straight," Brown says with enthusiasm. "His feet pop."

Gill slows to a stop in front of his coach.

"What'd you think?"

"You had good turnover. But you need to work on your arms."

"Really..."

The discussion continues from there, and I think about how, very soon, it'll move 60 miles south to the track at Hayward Field, which will be Gill's home turf.

After his release, Gill will build up his speed in the late summer and maybe trot through a 5K. He'll enter fall cross-country and winter indoor-track events—Brown calls them "experience races"—just to get a feeling for competition. Come 2004, Gill will try to qualify for the Olympic Trials at Stanford's Cardinal Invitational or the Prefontaine Classic. There he'll face some of the nation's best, runners like Alan Webb, although Gill expects Webb to continue to crater in the wake of a brief and disappointing college career.

"I'll go on record as saying that for Alan Webb, his high school years were as good as it's going to get," says Gill.

In the Olympic Trials, Gill predicts that he'll run under 3:35. At the Olympics, he'll boldly move to the front, where he couldn't care less about the clock. "I'm not running for a time in Athens," says Gill. "I'm running to win."

There's no point underestimating a man who's convinced he has incredible powers. All you can do is acknowledge his dreams, stand back, cross your fingers, and wonder if the rest of us get stuck too easily in our mundane grasp of reality.

"Maybe we can't fathom the human limits," Gill once told me. "Maybe—and this sounds out there—but who's to say that we can't telecommunicate? It might be feasible. Instead of saying, 'The whole world is just like this,' why not think the other way around? Why not believe that nothing is impossible?"

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