From Elite Running Career to Coaching Fast Athletes

Photography by Simon DesRochers

Clothing courtesy Saucony

Jon Brown is taking his running career the full distance. While he ran his final international marathon in Japan last December, he isn’t so much retiring from the world of elite distance running as he is moving into the next phase of his career: coaching. It’s a transition that draws on his knowledge and experience of racing, but it also requires approaching the sport from a different perspective.

Brown, 39, has raced at the world’s top level for the better part of 25 years. Competing for Britain, he attended the Atlanta, Sydney and Athens Olympics, twice placing fourth in the men’s marathon and once taking 10th spot in the 10,000 metres. He placed in the Top 20 five times in the World Cross Country Championships, and held the European Cross Country champion title.

Brown, with his smooth running style, has become a familiar face on the trails around Victoria, B.C., where he now runs a coaching business, Run by Common Sense. He moved there in 1996 with his wife Martina, and they have two children — son Dylan, 12, and daughter Rosa, 9.

Brown adopted Canadian citizenship and began competing for Canada in 2007, after his British lottery funding was cut. It could be argued that he is Canada’s fastest marathoner. His personal best marathon time 2:09:32, set at the London Marathon in 2005 while running for Britain — beats Canada’s official marathon record of 2:10:09 set in 1975 by Jerome Drayton at the Fukuoka Marathon.

Groin and hip problems prevented him from competing for Canada at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Does he have one more Olympics in him?

“No. I probably could, but I just don’t feel that I’m really competitive to the level that I’d like to be,” Brown said. “I’ve been to three Olympics. I don’t want to do another just for the sake of it. I’m not going to be competing internationally anymore. ­The Fukuoka Marathon (in Japan) was always going to be my last international event.”

He placed 23rd, with a time of 2:21:41. It was far off his time at the same race in 2008, when he placed ninth in 2:12:27.

Brown isn’t ready to stop running entirely, and he will remain a force on the Canadian scene.

“I still enjoy competing. I think nationally I’m still very competitive. It’s just a matter of maintaining motivation, which I think gets harder as you get older,” he said. “For me, I started at a very early age. I’ve been competing for more than 25 years. I think you realize that you can’t do the same kind of workouts that you used to be able to do as you get older. You’re not going to improve anymore.”

Brown is looking forward to running shorter distances, concentrating on half-marathons and 10Ks.

“You can do more of them,” he said. “With the marathon, you’re only racing twice a year. I found that kind of difficult when I put so much into two races.”

This spring he will be competing in the Canada Running Series — he ranked third in the open elite category last year — starting with Harry’s Spring Run-Off in Toronto in early April.

Running to Catch Up

Canada has some work to do to catch up to the elite international level of running, and Brown has some ideas on what can be done to boost results.

“Globally, the competition is very high. Canada has fallen behind because of a lack of exposure to that real world,” he said.

In the past 18 months, Brown has established a regular training group in Victoria. About a dozen runners — men and women in their 20s to 40s — meet three times a week.

“Th­ere’s talk of expanding that and having a Western Canadian distance running training group to attract athletes from all over the country,” he said. “­There’s a good group in Guelph (Ont.), but something is lacking here.”

It’s a plan that would require significant funding to support athletes to live in Victoria and to travel internationally to compete. Brown’s observation of Canadian runners is that they need to start looking beyond their immediate neighbourhoods for competition.

“I’ve helped a number of athletes get invitations to foreign events, to get people to expand their horizons,” he said. “People don’t seem to want to race outside their regional area. Partly, I think, they don’t feel they’re competitive, and partly they’re scared of the bigger world.”

Brown is working with Athletics Canada to develop opportunities for training and travel. He says many countries’ athletic federations look at distance running as events that they may have a low probability of winning and so they don’t invest in it.

“But now in Europe, they are looking at that,” Brown said. “­The whole point of funding sport is to entice the population to be more healthy. So maybe there’s some hope for better provincial-level sport. It’s the number of provincial-level athletes that’s struggling (in Canada). Recreational numbers are great, but it’s how to connect the recreational to the competitive sport that’s important.”

Posting Results

Brown still crosses finish lines in first place, and his athletes are showing similar results. On home turf in November, he took gold in the half-marathon at the Royal Victoria Marathon (1:04:57). Two of his athletes placed in their events — Marilyn Arsenault won the women’s half-marathon in 1:15:39, and Katherine Moore took second place in the women’s marathon in 2:47:25.

Arsenault, 42, is a classically trained singer who lives in Victoria. As soon as she learned Brown was starting to coach, she called him.

“I’m a singer. If Pavarotti were still alive and living here in Victoria, he’d be the one I’d want to get information out of because he’s somebody who has lived the dream and done about as much as he can do in the career,” she said. “­That’s how I think. If you can get the information from someone who’s been at the highest echelon of the activity, then sign me up!”

It’s not just Brown’s international billing that connects with Arsenault. “A lot about coaching is not just the experience, but you have to be able to relay the information, as well,” she said. “He has that ability to pass on that information.”

And is it working?

“Th­is past year, he’s had me setting personal bests in all my distances, from 5K to half-marathon,” she said.

Moore, 32, a Vancouver runner and yoga teacher, tried Brown’s coaching because she was feeling tired all the time with the training she was doing.

­The change is proving positive.

“I took seven minutes off my time and was not sore” after the Royal Victoria marathon, Moore said.

David Jackson, 32, came to running after a university basketball career. He now lives in Victoria, where he is starting his teaching career. One of Brown’s first coaching clients, both happened to be training for their respective marathons in the summer of 2008.

“He was able to do some of my training runs with me,” Jackson said. “Of course, he’s faster than me, but it was a huge bonus.” Jackson was a national team member at the 2009 Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon, where he was the first Canadian (14th overall).

“It’s like people who play basketball and imagine they’re playing basketball with Michael Jordan,” Jackson said.

Coaching Style

From the age of 21, Brown was coached by George Gandy, of the United Kingdom. Gandy is an accomplished coach, and counts Brown among his most successful athletes. Gandy trained Lord Seb Coe, who won two Olympic gold medals and broke world records, European 5,000-metre champion Jack Buckner, as well as Lisa Dobrinskey, who won silver at the  World Athletic Championships in Berlin.

Unlike many of his running peers, Brown only met with Gandy twice a year to set training goals. ­They talked on the phone or by email the rest of the time, following detailed plans leading up to big events.

But Gandy’s style fit with Brown, and it’s an approach Brown takes with his athletes.

“Fortunately, it worked,” he said. “(Gandy)’s very much wanting to develop independence in the athletes. It’s important for athletes to make decisions themselves.”

What made Brown a strong, competitive athlete, Gandy said in a recent interview, was his combination of “inherent talent, single-mindedness, self-belief and total commitment.” ­That, and the trust they built up over time, made long-distance coaching successful. Likewise, Brown wants to build that kind of relationship with the runners he coaches.

“I do want the people I coach to be more independent and make good decisions for themselves, especially in terms of how to approach workouts and the effort they put into workouts,” he said. “­The role of a coach is to help prevent mistakes.”

Arsenault describes his coaching style as logical and cautious. “He had a long career and wants others to enjoy theirs as long as they can,” she said. “­There’s a confidence I feel when he says something.”

The key to coaching is putting the athlete first by helping them stay in the right mental environment, Brown said.

“You can make changes to training to increase enjoyment,” he said. “You’ve got to change it to create the right balance and stimulation.”

Athletes can be moody, Brown noted. A coach needs to celebrate the highs, but be ready to help in the moments when athletes struggle with a poor result, and to change things up when training is becoming monotonous or stale.

In for the Long Haul

Although Brown has only had his Run by Common Sense shingle out for less than two years, his expertise is beginning to draw runners. Coaching is a little like distance running, in that a strong relationship requires commitment for the long haul. He has taken a page from Gandy’s book and builds his relationships with his athletes based on trust and mutual respect.

“To make it onto a big team, it’s many years of commitment,” Brown said. “I coach a number of people who have that kind of commitment. As a coach, you have to support an athlete for a long time, and see them through a lot more lows than highs.”

Competing at the Olympics is what many athletes strive for. But, Brown said, “Not many athletes really appreciate what that involves. It’s not just a couple of years. It’s a very long commitment to something.”

Perhaps the best endorsement of Brown’s potential as a coach comes from one who fully knows what it takes — Gandy, who is now director of athletics at Loughborough University’s Sports Development Centre and a member of the UK Coaching Hall of Fame.

“If I was a talented young endurance athlete, I would be very confident of success if I was coached by Jon,” Gandy said.

While Brown may be done with competing at the Olympics, it is yet to be seen if the Olympics are finished with him. With all the characteristics that helped him with such a successful competitive career, he may yet be cheering on his athletes as they compete at this level.