CATCHING UP WITH JIM SPIVEY:
LEGENDARY MILER LEAVES MARK ON
by Dave Milner – Editor of
I am riding shotgun in Jim Spivey’s car, a white Volkswagen Passat in whose back window one of this three son’s has fingered
the message ‘Clean Me.’ The rear seat is chock-full of Asics uniforms bound for
local high school cross-country runners. Attached to the rear view mirror is a
stopwatch. Spivey uses it to take splits. Not his running splits,
or anyone else’s for that matter. He uses it to note his driving splits.
This
is a man who is, by all accounts, obsessed with times, positions, and
statistics; a man so meticuluous in nature that he is
rumored to time himself mowing the lawn. Ask him how long it takes to drive
from, say, Nashville to Chattanooga, and, rather than give you a guesstimate,
Jim will give you his PR to the minute, and if you exhibit enough interest, you
might get his intermediate splits at the Murfreesboro and Monteagle
exits too! For almost a quarter-century, Spivey kept detailed training logs
with splits to the tenth of a second. Pick a day - any day - between 1977 and
2000 and Jim can tell you where, how far, and how fast he ran, who accompanied
him, and what the weather was like that day. But it is this attention to
detail, this meticulousness, this obsession with time that contributed to such
a lengthy and successful world class running career.
Pop quiz time. Who was the last American
male distance runner - at 1500 meters and up - to medal on the track at a major
outdoor championship? Yep. That’s right, the gray-haired fella
in the ballcap here; the one holding the stopwatch;
the one that, until a few months ago, lived right here in
Jim Spivey is, by any objective measure, one of the best middle distance
runners that the
In World Championship competition, he won the bronze medal in 1987 and
was fifth in 1993. He has run 3:31.01 for 1500 meters - the third fastest
all-time by an American, 3:49.80 for the Mile - good for 6th on the all-time
list, and he still holds the U.S. record at 2000 meters.
Until recently moving back to his hometown of Chicago, Jim lived in
Brentwood, just south of Nashville, from 2001 until this fall, and until
December 2005, was the head cross-country and assistant track coach at
Vanderbilt University. He is now working for Asics, the shoe company with whom
he has had a long-standing relationship as an athlete, a coach, and now as a
corporate employee.
When I began working on this story, Jim and his wife, Cindy had just sold their
house to one of the athletes he coaches in the Jim Spivey Running Club, a
program he started in 1990. In September, Jim returned to the western suburbs
of
James Calvin Spivey was born on March 7, 1960 in Schiller Park, Illinois,
a western suburb of
Jim takes up the story: “That was on a Tuesday. I got my physical that
night, ran 2 miles Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and then on Saturday ran a
19:05 for 3 miles in my first cross-country meet, in Keds.
The following Saturday, I ran 17:27, and the following Tuesday, I ran 16:48. By
the end of the season, I ran 15:41, which was the fastest a sophomore had ever
run in
Too short and too skinny for basketball, the pencil-thin Spivey had found
his calling, it seemed, as a distance runner. He
quickly realized that there was a direct correlation between the quality of
training done and subsequent performance in competition.
So in the summer of ‘76, preparing for his junior year of cross-country,
young Spivey upped the ante. “Between June 1 and August 31, I ran 1000 miles
that summer.” Why 1000 miles? York High School was 3 miles up the road and the
York runners, guided by legendary coach Joe Newton, ran 1000-mile summers.
“Coach Kurtz said he would buy a long-sleeve ‘1000 mile club’ t-shirt to anyone
who achieved this goal. I wore this shirt in almost every race under my
uniform, even during the indoor season. I was proud of the work I’d put in that
summer. The fact that it went a long way to hiding my 5’10”, 100-pound frame,
might have been a factor too.” Jim, years later, went back and re-measured
those courses in his car and discovered they were all about 20-25% off, so he
really only ran between 750-800 miles. But, hey, he got a solid summer base in
and he got the shirt.
Jim tried out for basketball again as a junior, but it just wasn’t the
same. In basketball, he had to rely on someone else giving him the ball before
he could perform. But with running, he saw the rewards for his own hard work,
and he was reliant on no one but himself.
Initially, his parents were less than enthusiastic about their son’s
running. “I remember going to buy my first pair of running shoes,” Spivey
recalls. “They were Adidas Countrys. My mom really
didn’t want to spend $35. She thought it was a lot of money and couldn’t see
why we couldn’t just go to K-Mart and buy three pairs of Keds
for at ten dollars a piece.” They started to take him more seriously when he
finished second at the state meet, behind Tom Graves of Carl Sandberg High. The
following spring, Jim clocked an eye-opening 9:00.5 for 2 miles in finishing
second at the state meet, behind
In his senior year, after finishing second again in the state cross-country
meet, Jim and Coach Kurtz switched focus, from the 2-mile, to the 880 and mile.
Jim’s splits at the previous fall’s state cross-country meet
were 4:38, 4:38, and 4:44, while his nemesis, Graves, went 4:38, 4:28 (9:06 for
2 miles), and 4:50.
The emphasis on the shorter stuff sat well with Jim, whose rail-thin
frame belied a wealth of fast twitch muscle fibers. He ran 1:57 indoors on what
is essentially a square track, and knew he could run a lot faster outdoors. He
developed great leg speed to match his strength. At his conference meet that
spring, he won the 400 in 49.8 and, just eight minutes later, clocked 4:13.5 to
win the mile. At the state meet,
Not surprisingly, a runner with Jim’s ability and range was heavily
recruited, but Spivey quickly drew up a very short list of schools at which he
thought his running could be taken to the next level, and “had it down to five
schools,” he remembers.
He visited
Dellinger asked Jim how many miles a week he ran. “I have no idea,” he
responded. Dellinger pulled out a sheet of paper and jotted down more numbers
while Jim went through a typical training week. Dellinger figured Jim was
running about 39 miles a week, on average. “If you get that up to 55, you’ll
beat Tom Graves, [who went on to attend
“Eventually,” Spivey recalls, “it came down to two schools:
He arrived in
That sub-4 came a week after coming agonizingly close to the barrier in
At IU, Jim was twice an NCAA Champion, winning the 1 mile indoors (‘81)
and 1500m outdoors in ‘82. He even earned all-American status at cross-country,
finishing 20th
in 1981, and finally got revenge over a certain Tom Graves from
Spivey graduated in May 1983 with a business degree. While at IU he and
Coach Bell chiseled down his PRs to 1:46.5 (800m),
3:37.25 (1500m), 3:55.55 (1 mile), and 13:33 (5000m). A few months after
collecting his diploma, he was on his way to
That year he also moved to Indianapolis to work for the Indiana Pacers,
where, for two years he sold magazine and radio ads, and then worked for
Network Indiana, selling more radio ads before deciding to concentrate
full-time on running in 1985.
But before that, in 1984, Spivey, just 24, won the 1500 at the U.S
Championships, which incorporated the Olympic Trials, beating pre-meet favorite
Steve Scott, with a blistering 53.3 last lap. It was his first senior national
title. And a 2:52.2 1200-meter time trial three weeks before the
With hindsight, he thinks he was fortunate to have made the final. “From
January of ‘84 to the
That fall, he and Cindy Moyer, who met while undergrads at IU, married.
Cindy would teach French at high school while Jim began thinking that being a
full-time athlete was probably the route he needed to go if he was to catch up
with the Brits.
In 1985, he was crowned U.S 1500m champion again, and but was not ranked
in the world’s top 10 by Track & Field News. He was holding his own, and
doing okay financially, but was still a good way from earning a medal on the
world stage.
But just six years after cracking 4 minutes for the mile, the following year,
1986, saw Jim take his running to a new level. Steve Scott, the U.S. record
holder at the mile, won the U.S. 1500m championships in Eugene, but when Jim
went over to Europe for his summer track campaign, he set his sights on breaching
another huge barrier.
Held in Oslo, Norway, The Dream Mile, the blue ribbon
event of the prestigious Bislett Games track meet,
was, twenty years ago, and arguably still is, the highlight of the European
season for any world class miler. The world record had twice been set there, including the previous year’s 3:46.32 clocking by
“It feels like the crowd is right on top of you,” Jim says. A 4-feet wall
separates them from the runners. Metal billboards hang on the front of these
walls, colored with advertisers’ logos and products. Children lean over the
walls and use their hands to bang out a metronomic rhythm as the runners go by.
Parents, behind, them play back-up percussion, clapping at a steady rate. “It
is so loud,” Spivey recalls, “that you cannot hear yourself think or breathe
when you race.”
The race starts late, at 11:15pm, to accommodate live TV viewers in the
Spivey remembers the race very vividly. “My game plan consisted of
starting fast, so as not to get left in the heavy traffic at the rear of the
pack.” With a swift opening half-lap, Spivey moved into fifth position, out of
trouble. “Coming up on the first lap, the rabbit pulled us through a 55-second
opening 400. Down the backstretch we flew, the crowd urging us on by increasing
their clapping rate as we went by. We came through the 800-meter mark in 1:54,
close to world record pace.” At that point,
“I could hear the crowd’s claps begin to diminish as I went by, because I
was still in fifth place. The claps were following the leader, not me. I knew I
had to move up, not only to close the gap on Steve, but also to stay in the
applause vacuum.” The visualization of effortlessness running in this space
gave Jim the motivation to move up. “I moved into 2nd with 700 meters to go. Again,
down the back stretch we flew. Glancing to my right, the crowd whizzed by,
faces a blur. Truly, it felt like flying. No pain, just
effortless running.”
Around the turn and into the next straightaway, the gun sounded,
indicating the final circuit was about to be completed. Jim’s three-quarters
split was 2:53.2, his fastest ever in a race. Through the curve the crowd
roared with approval. “On the back stretch, I felt myself closing in on Cram,
and the adrenaline began to rise. ‘I can win this race!’ I thought to myself,
and then cautioned myself: Don’t get too excited. You need to maintain form and
relax!’”
With 200 meters to go, Jim felt someone nearby on his inside. Steve Scott
went by. “I put my head down and tried to go with Scottie, but he continued in
his mad pursuit of Cram.” The Brit was fading from his long drive for victory.
“A hundred meters to go, and my body was losing oxygen rapidly. I looked up the
straight. I could hear nothing but the crowd. I was becoming disoriented, and
had tunnel vision. Only my lane, lane two, and the two lanes on either side,
were clear; everything else was a blur. I kept telling myself, ‘Hold the form!’
‘Keep your feet straight.’ The finish line is quickly approaching... oh come
on, come on! Finally, a quick lean and it was over.”
He walked a few strides past the finish line, with fifty or sixty kids jumping
all over him to get his autograph. Slowly, his senses began to normalize, but
his mind and legs were still swimming in lactic acid. “It really hurt,” he
remembers. “It must have been under 3:50, because this is how it should feel,”
he figured. But did he? Did he break 3:50 for the mile? His PR was 3:50.59. He
was having problems signing my name, his brain still lacking oxygen. “I signed
each one, very slowly. I’m sure the kids must have thought I was never taught
how to write.”
Jim found his sweats and jogged off to cool down alone. About a half-mile
later he came to a halt. “I went down to one knee, tears streaming down my
face. I looked at my watch. 12:30am. The practice
track was almost deserted. I asked, “Lord, what did I do to receive such
wonderful talents?” The tears fell heavier now. I thanked Him many times.” Jim
knew he had run the race of my life, but the question resurfaced in his clearing
mind: What was the time? Jim picked himself back up, smiling now, and finished
his jog.
Back at the hotel, the results were posted. He quickly scanned down to
third place. He saw the first two digits – a three and then, after the colon, a
four. He didn’t need to know the next number. He had run under 3:50! He looked
skyward, said a ‘thank you’ and then looked at the results a second time. His
time was 3:49.80. He had sliced three quarters of a second off his PR, and had
become the 13th man in history under 3:50, and the 3rd fastest American of
all-time. “Even today,” he says, “I can remember that feeling of kneeling on
the warm-up track at Bislett, and my eyes get moist.”
Jim wrapped up that ‘86 campaign with a 3:52 mile in
After the 1986 season, Jim made some big changes. He switched coaches,
from Sam Bell to two-time Olympian Mike Durkin, changed agents and began
working with a new agent, the late Kim McDonald. He and Cindy also moved house,
to
Durkin, who made the Olympic team at 1500 meters in 1976 and 1980, began
writing Jim’s daily training in March, and Ken Popejoy,
a former
Under Coach Bell, Jim had relied far more heavily on his speed and,
remarkably, Jim had never run over sixty minutes before, in his life. Durkin
wanted him to run ninety. “I didn’t like it,” Jim recalls. “The first time I
tried to run 90 minutes, I got to 60 and couldn’t believe that I would have to
keep on running for another 30 minutes.”
He got used to it, though, and having Ken run with him, relating stories of
when he was ranked ninth in the U.S at the mile, of when he roomed with Prefontaine, and of his adventures at Michigan State, helped
Jim get through those long runs on the Illinois Prairie Path in the cold
Chicago winter. “It certainly helped having a rabbit and training partner,” Jim
recalls, “and also made me better at being on time!”
The track workouts were different too. Under
A steady diet of 70-mile weeks in the first half of ‘87 saw Jim stronger
than ever, and a 38.9 closing 300 to win the U.S Championships 1500 over Scott
in June in San Jose indicated he wasn’t lacking in the speed department either.
At the Pan-Am games he won a silver medal in the 1500 meters, being beaten only
by Brazilian Joaquim Cruz, the reigning Olympic
800-meter champ.
In 
“Mike had said to be with the leaders with 300 to go, no matter what,”
Jim recalls. From 500 to go to 300, the leading trio of
Shortly after the 1500-meter final in
If he could have had his time over again, Jim says he would’ve switched
coaches sooner, maybe right after the L.A Olympics. “At age 25, you need
someone watching you. At age 31, either you do it or you go home.” And he
should have changed agents earlier, he concedes. “In ’85 Kim [McDonald]
approached me about being my agent, and I said ‘no, I’m with Pete Peterson’ (of
Nike). But a year later, when I approached him, he said ‘let me think about
it.’” In the span of a year, McDonald had gone from being a rookie, scraping
together a living while working out of a tiny room above the Sweat Shop, a
specialist running store in southwest
1988 rolled around and the 3:49 miler, World Championship medalist, and
U.S record holder over five laps, was licking his chops at the prospect of
getting an Olympic medal in
Just a week after nailing one of his best ever workouts in April - 9 x 800
meters in 2:02-2:07-Jim noticed a sharp, localized pain in his shin. He was
diagnosed with a stress fracture in his left fibula. It would be the only
stress fracture he would get in his life, but the timing could hardly have been
worse. Just as he was about to start adding speedwork
to a fantastic aerobic base, he was sidelined.
Jim was told to train 4 weeks in the pool; unable to run until May 27.
That left just six weeks of running until the trials. The first week, he was so
despondent, that he didn’t go to the pool at all. The next week he went every
other day. The third week he went twice a day, trying to play catch-up,
fighting a losing battle against the calendar. “I should have been in the pool
from Day one,” he admits, “but I was discouraged and, looking back, depressed.”
When Jim was finally able to start running, he felt like all the fitness he had
attained over the winter and early Spring had just
evaporated. “I came back out and couldn’t break 37 seconds for 200 meters.”
Worse still: after 3 or 4 days of running that same lower leg started bothering
him again. “I remember limping back from a run literally close to tears and
sitting on the stairs up to my front porch. I took off my shoes and looked at
my left shoe and realized the air pocket had blown out at the side. It was a
defective shoe, and I wondered how long had it been like that. That’s how I got
hurt.” Jim was discouraged, but at least he had an answer. He got out some new
shoes and set about what he knew would be an uphill battle against time to even
get to
Figuring the aerobic miles were still in the bank, Durkin had him do a
series of hard 600 meters time trials to assess his charge’s anaerobic shape.
Five weeks before the trial, Jim ran a pedestrian 1:42. It felt flat out! He
went home exhausted, telling Cindy “it’s never gonna happen.” Five days later, he clocked a 1:31, and
another five days later he coasted to a 1:25, feeling great, like his old self.
As the summer season began to unfold in Europe, Seb
Coe had yet to show any form (and would, in a highly controversial decision, be
left off the team for
Jim hopped over to
“When I got to the trials, physically I was ready, but mentally I wasn’t. I
doubted my shape.” Jim made the final without incident, but didn’t feel good
after the semi-final race. In a sit ‘n’ kick affair, the searing last lap had
sapped his legs and he was feeling tired going into the final the next day.
In the final too, the early pace was pedestrian opening up the race to
anyone with a decent kick. An even-paced, fast run would have left Jim with few
serious rivals, but the opening half was practically glacial, and Durkin and
Spivey never really had a pre-race game plan for if that happened. They were
too busy trying to get Jim to the starting line in one piece, physicall and mentally.
With 500m to go, Spivey was free on the outside, perfectly positioned to cover
anyone’s move, but as they approached the bell, he tripped. Either on Tim
Hacker’s or Jeff Atkinson’s foot; he’s not sure. But he stumbled, and dropped
back to 8th place before regaining his rhythm; still close but no longer in a
poised striking position. And when everyone started kicking on the last
circuit, Jim had to kick even harder just to get back in the race. He went from
8th to 3rd down the back stretch. With 200m to go Jim had an Olympic berth
seemingly locked up, but halfway down the home stretch, it became apparent his
big move just to get back in the race had left him with no gas in the tank as
they came off the last turn, and another former Indiana Hoosier, Mark Deady came past him, nabbing third 0.24 seconds ahead of
Jim. Ahead of them, new kid on the block, Jeff Atkinson, was a surprise winner,
with Jim’s perennial rival Steve Scott in second. Deady
didn’t have an Olympic qualifying time, so there was still a chance Spivey
could make it to Seoul, but Deady went over to Europe
and punched his ticket for Korea, hitting the standard (3:38.50) in Hengelo.
Jim Spivey would not be going to
All that remained for Jim - ironically, Deady’s
landlord at the time - was the opportunity to race the clock, take some scalps,
and make some dough in what remained of the European racing season.
Not making it to Seoul was painful enough for Spivey, but when began to
round into extraordinary shape in the late summer, it added salt to that wound.On August 28th, in Koblenz, Germany, Spivey lined up
for a 1500 meters. There were two rabbits in the field: Lewis Johnson (he of
Olympic commentary fame) was slated to rabbit for the first two laps, with Ken
Washington (now an agent) taking over. In Johnson’s slipstream, with
When he approached 1100 (2:35), Jim was thinking to himself, he was going to
let it rip, “but as soon as I entered the last circuit,” he recalls, “I heard a
voice from the inside.” He fakes an English accent – “Jim, just relax!” It was
2-time Olympic 1500-meter champion, Sebastian Coe (who had already won the 800m
earlier in the night, clocking 1:43). “I remember thinking ‘he’s been here
before. He knows what this is like.’ If it was my coach, I wouldn’t have
listened, but he knows that this is what I have to do. So I relaxed, instead of
tightening up, and I ended up clocking 42 seconds for the final 300m.” Spivey
clocked a jaw-dropping 3:31.01, shattering his PR and topping the world list
for the year. Jim celebrated by getting personalized license plates for his
Nissan 300ZX that read ‘JCS 331’
Despite the 3:31 clocking, Nike, who had been Jim’s shoe sponsor since
1984, when they gave him a $12,000 per year initial deal, told him they were
essentially dropping him at the end of the year. It wasn’t good news, and Jim
was upset. Nike offered Jim a contract, but it was 83% less than the previous
year’s deal. “If that’s all I’m worth to you,” he told Nike, “I’ll go to ASICS
[who had earlier courted him] for no money.” ASICS had already offered Jim a
contract after the U.S Champs the previous year, but Jim told them he was still
under contract with Nike until the end of ’88.
“We can talk then,” he told them. “With hindsight, it probably wasn’t a very
smart decision,” he says. “When you’re hot, you make the pancakes, but I felt a
loyalty to Nike.” But when his contract was up, Jim wrote a letter (this was
before faxes were widely used and way before e-mail) to the man in
Eventually, he did get a response, but ASICS were now reluctant to speak
with him – after all he hadn’t even made the Olympic team! They offered him a
deal with no money, and limited equipment. The silver lining was that, whereas
with Nike there had been a different boss controlling the budgets and writing
the shoe contracts each year, with Asics, Jim had the same go-to person, Jan
Lester, year after year. There was stability, and Jim needed some of that,
because the next few years were going to be a rough ride, economically, for an
aging miler who had failed to get to the last Olympiad.
In 1988, despite not making the games, Jim made well over $100,000
between his Nike deal and racing, and commanded $5,000 in appearance money at
some of
But in 1989, still with a gear-only deal at ASICS, Jim made just $16,000
racing. He ran a 3:34 1500 in
In an injury-plagued 1990, still with no green from ASICS, and not much more
from racing, Jim needed another income source, but wanted to remain involved in
the sport. He and friend Kevin Moore created the Jim Spivey Running Club (JSRC)
in
1991 was a rough year too. Jim only finished 4th at the U.S Championships
1500, 
won
by Terrence Herrington, but made the team for the World Championships in
Spivey proved that he was on the right track during a five-race tear
through Europe, which included a couple of sub-3:37 1500 clockings
to warm up, and then a 3:49.83 (just 0.03 seconds off his PR) in the Dream Mile
at Oslo. He finished 3rd, splitting 3:33.7 for 1500 en route, and was closing
fast at the finish on the the winner, Britain’s Peter
Elliott, and Wilfred Kirochi of Kenya, but ran out of
track.
And in
“No world record is easy to get,” he told Bondy.
“But I’ve run three races at a 3:50 pace within a week. I’m at one plateau now,
and I think I can go to the next level and drop three or four seconds by
September.”
Steve Scott’s 9-year-old
“It was very disappointing,” he says. “The only good thing that came out
it was that I started base training for the following year earlier, and so went
into the ‘92 season really strong.” When the season was over, Nike asked him to
return in ’92, and offered him a 3-year lucrative, incentive-laden contract.
Asics had only offered him a far lower 1-year contact. He went back to Jan
Lester and asked if they could match it. They couldn’t, or wouldn’t, match it,
but they did offer Jim a much improved package with a 3-year deal.
Back on a financial even keel, Jim set his sights on the 1992
The 1500m heats were on Monday, the semi-finals on Friday, and the final on
Sunday. Plenty of time to recover between rounds. The
problem with being in the hotel with all the other athletes during the week,
though, was that the ones that returned to eat at the hotel were the ones that
had failed to make the team. Those who had made the team were out celebrating
with friends and family. The ones returning were people like Dan O’Brien, the
favorite for the Olympic decathlon gold, who no-heighted
in the pole vault. The restaurant in the hotel was awash with negative vibes. Just what he didn’t need.
Jim decided to focus on what he could control, and used visualization of
recent workouts, which had gone very well, anytime he became nervous. He and Durkin
decided to make it a race where you had to be strong, leaving the sit ‘n’ kick
runners out of the equations. They would not make the same mistake they had
made four years earlier. “The night before the final,” Jim recalls, “Mike told
me: follow to half a mile to go. Run the next quarter in 56. And then with 200m
to go, I want you to 
visualize
people breaking into you home, and their names are Steve Scott, Joe Falcon, and
Terrence Herrington. What are you gonna do? Are you
going to let these people come in and steal everything out of your house, or
are you going to defend what’s your’s?”
So Jim visualized. The pace wasn’t ball-breaking, but at least it was
respectable. A 1:58 opening half still saw the pack in tact, but a 57-second
third circuit (2:55.1 at 1200m) saw the contenders – Spivey, Falcon, Scott, Herrington - file out like pearls on a string. And then with
200m to go, Jim thought about people breaking into his home. He got angry,
fired up. He pulled away. It was working. “I tried it in other races, and it
never worked,” Jim says, “but that day I literally saw people breaking into my
home. I was ready for a fist-fight. And I finished with one gear left unused.”
After crossing the line, he sank to his knees and cried on the track
while on all fours, the hardest he can ever remember crying. The pain of not
qualifying four years ago had been dealt with, so he thought, but in reality it
was just swept away into a corner, out of immediate recall. But in
In
Making the Olympic final would have netted Jim a lot of money with Nike, but he
has no regrets about signing with ASICS, a company with whom he now has a
16-year relationship, “It’s been great. Actually, I have always thought that it
was a smart business decision for Nike to drop me at the end of ‘88. I was 28
years old and I didn’t make the Olympic team. I mean, at 32, are you going to
make an Olympic team and medal? Probably not. Why not
go with Atkinson, the Trials champion?”
“Strictly from a business perspective, I agreed. But if we’re talking loyalty
and length of wearing and supporting the product (since being first approached
by Nike in 1978 when Geoff Hollister asked him to run for Nike while a freshmen
in college), I disagreed. But In the end, it has been the best outcome. I am
still with ASICS today, and am able to help other college teams with purchasing
ASICS product.”
In 1993, the Spiveys’ second son, Samuel, was born.Jim was third in a slow U.S. Championships 1500 in
Eugene, won by Bill Burke, as the top four all finished within a quarter of a
second, but got rolling later on in Europe, clocking 3:52.37 in the Dream Mile,
a 7:37.07 3000m in Cologne, his liftetime PR and the
6th fastest of all-time by an American, and then a 3:34.67 1500 in finishing
9th at the Weltklasse meet in Zurich. And at the
World Championships in
In 1994, when the
As the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta drew closer, Jim realized that, at 36, he no
longer had the speed to fare well in championship metric miling
and if he wanted to make his third Olympic team he’d better move up to 5K. “I
moved up because I knew I just couldn’t run fast enough anymore over 1500,
especially with the way the races were being run,” he explains.
In 1995, aged 35, Jim finished 4th in the 5000 at the U.S Championships in a
race dominated by fellow IU grad, Bob Kennedy, but then, a week later in Paris,
clocked an eye-opening 4:59.19 2000, at the time the fastest ever 2000 for a
runner 35 or over, as Morceli broke the world record,
clocking 4:47.88.
In 96, despite only finishing 4th again at the U.S. Championships, Jim
made the Olympic team at 5000m, after clocking 13:24 in Stockholm, but he was
eliminated after running poorly in his preliminary heat. It was disappointing
and Jim thought about hanging up the spikes, but didn’t; he just found some new
training partners.
In the fall of ‘96, Jim began helping out coach Al Carius
at North Central College, an NCAA Division III powerhouse in Naperville,
Illinois. He was making a segue into a coaching career but continued to train,
and was 4th at the U.S. Championships the following spring, finishing just 1.18
seconds behind winner Seneca Lassiter.
But at the end of the 1997 track season, Jim realized that as far as being a
world class distance runner was concerned, the jig was up, and it was time to
hang ‘em up. His season’s best? 3:40.09
over 1500. Not too shabby for age 37. But “there comes a point where you
train hard, and say you are the 4th best runner in the
“I remember Coe saying when you’ve been a WR holder, ‘why would you train
to run slower than that?’ I never thought that, but realized that if I went
over to
In September of 1997, Jim was hired as the distance coach at the
In 1998, Cindy gave birth to the Spiveys’ third son,
Simon. Jim was rounding into good shape by the fall of 1998, winning the open
section at the Notre Dame Cross-Country Invitational, but a persistant
calf injury kept punctuating his training with forced time off, and a bout of
testicular cancer derailed Scott’s masters sub-4
campaign.
The next year, having hung up his spikes for real now, Jim began carving
out national championships for
The secret behind fresh, Echols explains, is that it’s not necessarily
slow; you don’t want to psychologically overpower your body about its speed;
you give your mind a break and let the body do what feels natural. This means
you could actually run faster than you would if you were trying to force your
speed when your body wasn’t ready for it. And it means that your body has the
chance to utilize the strength that it has built and is naturally ready to use,
while never over-stressing.
“Of course, there were other levels of effort, such as good and very good, and
once or twice a season we had to do some intervals hard,” Echols recalls, “but
every workout incorporated fresh intervals and set the mood to let your body
have some fun out there.”
“Spivey created very calculated plans for the build-up of each athlete’s
strength and endurance, so that we would peak for the day of the most important
race. This he did every year without fail,” Echols says. Indeed, under Spivey UC’s women qualified for the NCAAA Division III
cross-country championships for the first time in the school’s history. “He
went so above-and-beyond as a person and coach,”
Echols says. “He would sit and chat while I jogged in place for an hour in the
pool when injured; he coached me through mental blocks and frustrations; he decided
to look toward a future and a long life of health rather than pushing us into
unhealthy overtraining; he invited the whole team to his home for the first
long run at the end of the summer; he remembered every split time of every
workout for each year of training. His ability in this regard was uncanny.”
“He devoted his life, his energy, his thought and all his available time
to the team, and he dealt well with some of the hard issues of coaching women,
and took it all to heart.” After taking the job at UC, he quipped to Runner’s
World, “I maight not coach any futire
Olympians here, but I may well coach a future Nobel prize
winner.” During his tenure at UC, twelve athletes were named All-Americans.
That’s no laughing matter.
In the summer of 2001, though, he moved to Brentwood, just south of
In his first year coaching the Lady Commodores, the Spivey-led harriers tied
their highest ever placing (5th) at the NCAA Regional meet. And the following
spring Kylene Kwonurko won
the 2002 SEC 3000-meter Steeplechase title, the first SEC title ever for a Vandy distance runner. More importantly, though, nearly
every team member established a PR during that first track season under Spivey.
The following year, Erika Schneble won the SEC
outdoor 5,000-meter title, clocked an outstanding 16:08 (a still-standing
school record), and became the school’s first ever distance runner to garner
NCAA All-American on the track, and that fall Ashleigh Wetzel recorded the
highest ever individual placing (5th) by a Lady Commodore at the SEC
Cross-Country Championships.
And he started a Nashville-based Jim Spivey Running Club (more about that
overleaf). As in Chicago, local aspiring runners were eager to be guided by a
track legend, and Jim could be found ecah Wednesday
evening, juggling splits on half a dozen stopwatches, yelling encouragement
from the trackside, and hard-wiring the concept of fresh running into his proteges.
Jim thoroughly enjoyed his coaching stint at Vandy,
but in December 2005, he left to take a full-time position with ASICS. And in
August of 2006, he, Cindy, Seb, Sammy and Simon
returned to the
Despite having moved away, though, Jim’s influence as a coach remains strong in
middle
Since Jim’s retirement from competitive running, only one American-born runner
has broken 3:50 for the mile (Alan Webb 3:48.38 in 2005) and it took seven
years for that to happen. Aside from Webb and naturalized citizen Bernard Lagat, no other U.S miler has even broken 3:53. Jim’s
retirement has certainly left a gaping hole on the American miling
landscape. But does he know how to help fill it?
“To run 3:50,” he says, “you have to train at that pace. Not 3:40-pace!
3:50 is 57.5 per quarter, so you need to be able to float at that pace.
Training at 53 or 55 pace does not help on the 3rd lap when you get tired.” Aah, floating at 57-per-lap pace. It’s a nice image, isn’t
it? Gliding along, smooth as silk, at almost 16 miles per
hour. Jim is so matter-of-fact about it, that he almost makes it sound
possible for mere mortals like you and me. It isn’t. But the principle is
sound. “You have to put in numerous workouts at the desired and attainable race
pace,” he says. “And keep a training log.”
Jim may no longer be living in Tennessee, but this legendary miler has
certainly left his mark - a very positive one - on the Volunteer state. Many
former world class runners, when they can no longer perform on the big oval
stages, remove themselves almost completely from the sport, but Spivey gives
back to the sport with a seemingly limitless passion, helping runners of all levels.
And, like many, I feel fortunate to have known him. As far as milers are
concerned, Seb Coe remains my hero. But Jim? He’s a very close second
TR EDITOR/PUBLISHER DAVE MILNER has known Jim Spivey for 19 years. He has
kept training journals in Spivey-esque detail for the
last 20 years but, running-wise, that is where the similarities end. His goal
for 2006 is to lower his mile PR to within 30 seconds of Jim’s!