Jack Daniels has been called the world’s best running coach. He has more than 55 years of experience coaching and mentoring some of world’s top distance runners at both the collegiate and postcollegiate levels, including Jim Ryun, Penny Werthner, Ken Martin, Jerry Lawson, Alicia Shay, Peter Gilmore, Lisa Martin, Magdalena Lewy-Boulet, Anthony “Fam” Famiglietti, and Janet Cherobon-Bawcom. An elite athlete himself, he won two Olympic medals and one world championship medal in the men’s modern pentathlon.
Daniels has decades of experience as a track and cross country coach at institutions such as Oklahoma City University, the University of Texas, Brevard College, and the State University of New York at Cortland. Under his guidance, Cortland runners won eight NCAA Division III team national championships, 30 individual national titles, and more than 130 All-America awards. He was named NCAA Division III Women’s Cross Country Coach of the 20th Century.
For a number of years, Daniels was the national running coach advisor for the Leukemia/Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training program, which involved coaching thousands of marathon runners each year. He also enjoyed coaching members of the Nike Farm Team and the Chasquis, a group of Peruvian marathoners.
Daniels has logged years of graduate study and research on distance running in both the United States and Sweden. He holds a doctoral degree in physical education and physiology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and he studied exercise science at the Royal Gymnastics Central Institute in Stockholm under renowned sport scientist Per-Olof Åstrand. He was also an associate professor in the human movement program at A.T. Still University in Mesa, Arizona, in addition to coaching Olympic runners.
Of all his accomplishments, Daniels is most proud of his two daughters and being married to his wife, Nancy.
