Jeff Johnson is writing a book
For now, you should spend some time on the website that has grown around his excellence
"To empower a person, you show them what to do, you teach them how to do it, then you enlist them in the doing while you fade stupidly into the background. A person once empowered is a person forever empowered."
— Jeff Johnson
Jeff Johnson may not be a familiar name to running’s Twitter-and-podcast set, but he is known among old-timers as one of the sport’s most quietly influential and enduring figures. Given the unlikely range and depth of his contributions, and his longtime involvement in both the literal business of running and the on-the-ground craft of athlete development, Johnson is arguably the leading architect of modern distance running. He is also one of its most skilled navigators and convincing, bare-bones philosophers.
Johnson’s note-card biography: He is Nike’s first-ever employee, colloquially Employee Number One, opening a store selling Nike shoes called Blue Ribbon Sports in 1967 in Santa Monica, California. A 1963 graduate of Stanford University, he coached the Palo Alto-based Nike Farm Team, the predecessor of today’s Eugene-based Oregon Track Club (OTC) Elite club, from 1994 through the 2000 U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials.
When tasked with expanding the brand in the eastern U.S., Johnson’s travels took him to Exeter, New Hampshire in the mid-1970s. Not only did he open a store there, but it wasn’t long before a small manufacturing plant opened in town, too. That space ultimately became a research-and-development facility. Before it closed its doors in 1983 as part of a company-wide reorganization—Beaverton was by then calling all significant hands to the West Coast deck—this facility saw a number of notable legs subjected to the gadgetries within, among them those of future two-time U.S. Olympic Marathoner Pete Pfitzinger (later my coach) and nine-time U.S. Cross-Country champion Lynn Jennings.
When the R-&-D operation shuttered, Johnson took an early retirement from Nike, eventually settling in the Upper Valley of New Hampshire. Thanks to his persistent ties to the Granite State, he has graciously—and I’m being serious, as he could be charging a lot of money for the outrageous store of digestible wisdom and perspectives in his head—offered some of his quotes and ideas for distribution on the New Hampshire Track and Field Coaches Association website. From his home page there, you can access Johnson’s “quotes of the week” (which idea he probably stole and adapted from Letsrun.com, but nobody’s perfect), his advice for coaches, and his communiques to the Nike Farm Team.
If you ever get tired of reading slop, including this, and want a thorough motivational or organizational pick-me-up, just do some wandering through those pages. A lot of the stuff there is handwritten. If you ever get sent to prison and are allowed to bring one Internet document with you, take this one.
Johnson is also working on a book, titled In Other Words: Things I Think I Said When I Was Trying to Think of Something to Say. Some, maybe all, of the quotes of the week will appear in this volume, plus other words, not one of which will be wasted.
I have not met Jeff Johnson, but my impression from his writing alone, augmented by what others have said about him, is that he is track and field’s version of Jon Krakauer. That he is the consummate professional bleeds from every deliberately chosen word he says. He doesn’t expect perfection from himself or the world; he merely believes in it.
I’ve skipped over a lot of things Johnson has done in his supposedly idle years, because the principles he espouses and insists on really do speak for themselves. As he would surely have it. (Okay, he basically discovered Andrew Wheating in the wilderness of Vermont. Imagine the last decade of track without that lanky character in it.)
"To make a decision is an experience of personal empowerment. To live with the consequences of a decision is an experience of personal humility. You will find that, going forward, events mostly proceed without you."
— Jeff Johnson