Jack Tupper Daniels: An Appreciation

In the 1990s, when I was executive editor of Runner’s World magazine, we named Jack Daniels “the world’s best running coach.”

I believed that then, and I still believe it today. His legacy lives on, even though Jack Tupper Daniels, 92, passed away peacefully on September 12 at his home in Cortland, New York.

Daniels was the smartest, most analytical, most helpful running expert I’ve ever met. He’s perhaps best remembered for the minor miracle he performed on Joan Benoit’s behalf in 1984. 

With little more than two weeks remaining before the historic first U.S. Women’s Marathon Trials, a desperate Benoit had undergone surgery on a knee. She couldn’t run afterwards, but wanted some exercise for its physical and emotional release.

Inside a Nike lab, Daniels hung a bicycle upside down from the ceiling. Then he positioned Benoit on a bench below the bicycle, so she could hand cycle the bike’s pedals. Today, thousands of gyms have seated hand-cycle machines. Daniels might have been the inventor of these machines.

Benoit took readily to Daniels’s device, stayed in shape while recovering from surgery, and won both the Marathon Trials and the Los Angeles Women’s Olympic Marathon.

Daniels’s Book Changed Running Forever

Benoit was not the only elite marathon runner to succeed with Daniels’s help. Ken Martin and Jerry Lawson are not well-remembered today, but both ran super-fast marathons decades ago under Daniels’s coaching.

Martin finished second in 2:09:38 at the 1989 NYC Marathon, while Lawson ran 2:09:35 at Chicago in 1997. Give them two more minutes (for the super shoes they didn’t have), and they become 2:07 runners–nearly equal to today’s best American men. Another Daniels runner, Magdalena Boulet, finished second in the 2008 U.S. Olympic Marathon team, earning a trip to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Daniels’s best-selling 1998 book, Daniels Running Formula, forever changed American running. Before it, coaches and runners didn’t know how fast they should run certain types of workouts. 

Untold numbers of coaches, particularly at the high school level, pushed their runners too hard, because they had no handy guidelines to follow. For example, when coaches had a 12-minute two-miler, they frequently told these runners to log more miles at 6:00 minute/mile pace. It seemed to make sense that the runners could improve their endurance by running more miles at their best pace.

However, the tables in Daniels Running Formula told a different story. A 12-minute two-miler was more likely to improve by running miles much slower than 6:00 minute pace. Training to run suddenly became both more humane and more productive.

Two years later, Dathan Ritzenhein, Alan Webb, and Ryan Hall ran some of the best U.S. high school races ever seen. Coincidence? Yes, probably.

But Hall and his father-coach followed Daniels’s prescriptions closely, and many others did the same.

How To Train Optimally

American high school running has been on an upward trajectory ever since DRF was published. What was its primary message? Through the years, Daniels repeated over and over again: “The goal of training is to obtain the best results possible with the least amount of work.”

If this maxim doesn’t belong on every runner’s refrigerator door, I don’t know what other should be there instead.

Daniels had another favorite way of saying essentially the same: “The most popular training method in America is overtraining.”

DRF included 12 principles of running that Daniels adjusted slightly with each new edition of the book. These would make fine refrigerator magnets as well. I particularly liked this one: “A good run or race is never a fluke.”

In other words, you can’t fake a good race. Whatever you achieve on one day, you’re capable of achieving another day. Forget about your bad days; everyone has them. Focus on the real you–your good days.

Daniels was an exquisite physiologist who always sought hard numbers to underpin his coaching-training philosophy. But he never forgot that a runner’s mind was more important than his/her VO2 max.

“Jack Daniels paved the way for the rest of us as both a scientist and coach,” notes Steve Magness, a top present-day science-based running coach and book author.

“We all owe him a debt of gratitude. Without his intrepid early work on the physiology of running, and his later work on translating that to the masses to improve coaching, I don’t know where either field would be today. It’s hard to overestimate the impact he has had on the sport. He was a giant.”

College Coach Of The Century

Daniels coached a modest number of elites at Nike and as an independent coach, but he always cared as much or more about average talent runners. During his 17-year coaching  tenure at Division 3 college SUNY-Cortland, his team won eight team championships.

It’s said that one year his 7 runners trailed at the very back of the field for the first 400 meters. Other coaches believed that cross-country races demanded a fast start. 

Daniels warned that this could produce extreme oxygen debt, and poor performance. His slow-starting girls listened closely, and won the title. In 2000, Daniels was voted the NCAA Division III Women’s Cross Country Coach of the Century.

Long before writing DRF, Daniels self-published Oxygen Power with Jimmy Gilbert in 1979. I remember trembling with excitement the first time I thumbed through its105 pages–basically a print version of a gigantic Excel spreadsheet. Oxygen Power presented equivalent performance efforts at distances from 800 meters to the marathon, and introduced the VDOT system that underlies many Internet calculators today.

Of Stride Rates, Running Form, and 5 x 1-Mile Workouts

Daniels leaves behind many more landmark running insights. Perhaps you’ve heard that you should aim to run with about 180 strides per minute. That came from him and his wife, Nancy, who sat in the stands at the 1984 Olympics, and counted the stride rates of many top runners. (If you’re not an Olympian, you’ll probably have trouble reaching 180, but the higher is better rule has been verified by much subsequent research.)

Daniels once asked a group of top national runners to name a few favorite, highly productive workouts. Every one of them listed: 5 x 1-mile, with a one lap jog recovery between. 

On another occasion, he asked a group of coaches to assess the running form of runners he had filmed and physiologically tested in the lab. He asked the coaches to view the film clips and name the most economical runners. 

The coaches failed dismally. They couldn’t match a runner’s form with his/her lab-measured running economy. 

Message: Don’t worry too much about your running form, but remember that 5 x 1-mile workout. It could come in handy.

How Daniels Contributed To The Super Shoe Revolution

Veteran Boston runner Tom Derderian says there’s a direct link between Daniels and today’s super shoes. Derderian eventually became best-known as author of the definitive Boston Marathon history book, but in the early 1980s he was head of Nike’s “Advanced Design Group” in Exeter, New Hampshire. He and Daniels worked side by side.

Derderian’s job title meant that he was supposed to design faster shoes. But he soon ran into a significant obstacle. “We didn’t have any way to know if one shoe was faster than another,” he remembers.

Enter Daniels, who began measuring the expired oxygen of runners on the treadmill in different pairs of shoes. If the runner consumed less oxygen in shoe X than in shoe Y, it meant that shoe X was faster.

“It was basically the same running economy system you read about today when you hear about 2 percent shoes, 4 percent shoes, and the like,” says Derderian. 

Interesting footnote: Derderian and Daniels put carbon fiber plates into some test shoes in the early 1980s. But they ran into a problem. The midsole foams of that era weren’t light enough and strong enough to contain flexible carbon fiber.

“The midsoles basically exploded after about 10 seconds of running in them,” Derderian says. “We had carbon fiber a long time ago, but it took 30 years before the foams were good enough to contain the plates.”

Joan Benoit Samuelson has few days when she doesn’t remember the soul-wrenching post-surgery despair of 1984, or the magnificent triumphs that followed. 

“Jack’s contributions to running were many and varied,” she says. “His Daniels Running Formula book became a go-to text for many coaches and runners. He thought outside the box in a lot of scientific and quirky ways. Jack was a huge contributor to our sport, for which he had great passion.”