A life in running.

A runner first

I grew up in Castle Rock, Colorado. My favorite school day of the year was always Field Day, and I was very proud of these ribbons. 😂

In high school, I was hoping to be a college basketball player, but I was much better at running. It wasn't until my junior track season that I decided I wanted to try to run in college.

Running at the University of Colorado

I ran cross country and track at the University of Colorado for Mark Wetmore and I was part of the 1998 team Chris Lear followed for a season in Running with the Buffaloes.

My best accomplishment as an athlete was scoring 13 points at the 1999 Big 12 Indoor Championships, where I was second in the 5K and fourth in the 3K. My teammate and friend Mike Friedberg passed me in the last 20m of that race to win. Twenty-five-plus years later, he still reminds me...every time I see him...that if I had just been patient and made my move a little later, I could have been the Big 12 champion. 😂

The photograph below gives you a pretty good idea of where I was as a college runner. Steve Slattery is well up front, Chris Lear is a step ahead of me, and I’m the Colorado runner at the far left edge, barely in the frame. I finished my collegiate career with modest PRs of 3:49.51, 8:20, 14:20, and 30:15.

barely in the frame

M.S. in Kinesiology and Applied Physiology

I'm among the last generations of coaches for whom it was extremely helpful to have a master's degree to get hired. Perhaps surprisingly, it didn't matter what the degree was in, but I wanted to better understand how the human body worked so I got mine in kinesiology and applied physiology.

I was working on that degree in my fifth year of eligibility, and that spring I was named CU's male scholar-athlete for the athletic department. I got my master's degree a year later.

Head coach at 24

In May 2000, I became the head men’s and women’s cross country and track coach at Pratt Community College in Kansas. I was 24 years old.

Those two years were extremely challenging and extremely rewarding. Looking back, I feel so lucky I had the responsibility of being a head coach that young.

Back to Boulder

In 2002, I returned to CU Boulder. I was the middle distance coach, an assistant cross country coach, and the recruiting coordinator. Recruiting meant getting to know high school runners and their families as they decided where to go to college. I worked extremely hard on those first recruiting classes.

During those six years, the cross country teams won four national championships and the men’s team won the 2008 Big 12 Outdoor Championships. The male distance runners on that team came from the first two recruiting classes I helped Coach Wetmore bring to CU. That was extremely rewarding. It was a really special group of athletes.

Coaching professional runners

I resigned from CU in 2008 and started coaching professional runners, including Brent Vaughn, Renee Metivier Baillie, and Fernando Cabada. I’d recruited Brent and Sara Vaughn to Colorado and later coached them both after college. (Two decades later, our kids are battling it out on the anchor leg of the 4 x 800m at the state meet. How great is that?!)

Brent won the U.S. Cross Country Championships in 2011. That’s him leading in the photo. Renee won the USATF Indoor 3,000-meter title, and Fernando won the U.S. 25K championship. Those wins belong to them.

Nike, Myrtl, and Mike Smith

I did contract work here and there for Nike from 2008 to 2014. I wrote a biweekly column for them as “Coach Jay” and shot videos, including the Myrtl routine. I was also on the staff for the first two Nike Elite camps. Looking back, it was neat to be part of that project and to see it’s still going strong years later.

The Myrtl routine, SAM, and the post-run work I teach today have roots in a visit to Mike Smith at Kansas State. I wanted to understand what he was doing with his middle distance runners. Those conversations led us to film Building a Better Runner: Building from the Ground Up.

Camps and clinics

I started Boulder Running Camps during my years coaching at CU in 2003 and continued as the camp director through 2019.

Boulder Running Clinics is a conference for high school cross country coaches every MLK weekend in Boulder. I’m proud of the clinics and grateful for the more than 200 coaches who attend each year. Today, The Film Room makes selected clinic presentations available online.