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Nate Jenkins en route to a seventh-place finish at the 2008 U.S. Olympic Team Trials - Men's Marathon held on November 3, 2007 in New York City's Central Park.

Nate Jenkins sees immediate return on Roads Scholarship

Posted on November 6, 2007, Interview conducted November 3, 2007

By Parker Morse

It's fair to ask, after seeing the top 10 finishers at the U.S. Olympic Team Trials — Men's Marathon, "Who is Nate Jenkins?" Jenkins, after all, earned his qualifier in his marathon debut at the 2006 Freescale Austin Marathon more than a year and a half ago, then didn't run another marathon until the Trials. Aside from his Austin run, one of a number of good performances at that race in 2006, Jenkins hasn't done a whole lot to bring himself to the attention of the wider running community. Until the Trials.

Jenkins, 27, a volunteer assistant coach at his alma mater, Division II UMass-Lowell, has been a full-time athlete since winning an RRCA "Roads Scholarship" grant earlier this year. "I still work about one day a month in the running store I used to work at," Jenkins admits, and goes on to explain that he doesn't do much coaching, either: "I drive the van, sometimes."

Jenkins started out running at Naragansett Regional High School in southeastern Massachusetts, where his best cross country performance was a 10th place at the Divison 2 state meet. By senior year, he trimmed his two-mile time down to 9:47, "Not too good, but not that bad, either," he says. "It was easy for me to be a big fish in a small pond. I didn't really realize what the real national class runners were doing."

At Lowell, Jenkins saw improvement when he shifted from the interval-based program he ran in high school to a more solid mileage-based program. "It was good for me," he said, "but I was stubborn about not wanting to rest." Jenkins only competed in two of the first nine seasons he was at Lowell due to a series of injuries. "I was running well when I was running," he says, "so I could see that I was improving."

In his senior year and first year of graduate school at Lowell, Jenkins finally put together two solid years of collegiate competition, running 14:31 for 5,000m on the track and winning the 2004 Division II Northeast Regional at Franklin Park. "The improvement in those two years meant that I left with a feeling that there was more to come," Jenkins recalls.

After finishing out his eligibility, Jenkins spent his second year of graduate school racing locally but not, as he puts it, "really breaking through." Then, a year and a half after finishing school, Jenkins changed his training again, "stealing stuff," he explains, "from Renato Canova and Stefano Baldini," training programs and advice published online. In 2006, Jenkins went to Austin for the 3M Half Marathon, and while the course turned out to be slightly short, Jenkins ran a high 1:03, worth, he estimates, a low 1:04 on a certified course. "That was a huge breakthrough for me," he says.

He returned to Austin several weeks later for the 2006 Freescale Austin Marathon, where he was one of several men to produce Olympic Trials qualifiers on a stellar day for marathoning. Jenkins' debut marathon was 2:15:28, and it turned out to be the only one he would run before the Trials.

"I was training for Chicago in 2006, but then I had a small injury shortly before the race. I only lost about four days of training, but it was enough to knock me out of the race. Then, this past winter, I was getting ready for a spring marathon, and I got mono." The mononucleosis arrived almost simultaneously with the announcement of Jenkins' RRCA Roads Scholarship.

The Roads Scholarships is an RRCA program open to U.S. road racers who "expect to earn less than $30,000 from all sources during the calendar year." The $5,000 grants are intended to allow athletes to make ends meet while dedicating time to their training. Two of the earliest Roads Scholars recipients, Olympians Deena Kastor and Dan Browne, are now on the committee which selects the grant recipients.

Since the spring, then, Jenkins has been a full-time athlete, and for almost all of that time, he's been waiting for the real breakthrough. "I've been in the kind of shape I'm in now since around January," he explains. "I just didn't get the chance to run on it."

With his uneven racing and long gap between marathons, Jenkins arrived at the Trials unsure of what to expect. "I set a lot of different goals, A, B, C and D goals. A top-10 finish was an 'A' goal for me, the biggest success I could imagine. There were a lot of guys in that race who've tried the marathon and failed [to meet their potential]. Look at Jason Hartmann; his time [today] would probably represent a two-and-a-half minute PR over his Chicago time. I was thinking that top 20 would make me happy."

Instead, Jenkins found himself catching and passing the likes of 2004 Olympic silver medalist Meb Keflezighi, while other proven marathoners like Alan Culpepper simply dropped out. "Passing Meb was neat. I could see him at 24 miles, and I knew if I could see him, he'd come off the lead pack. That meant he had to be hurting. It invigorated me. I was having some cramps, but you don't get a shot at Meb very often. It took me a mile to work up to him, and another 400m after the 25-mile marker to pass him. Then he passed me back, but I passed him again with 800m to go."

"This came after I'd dropped athletes like Josh Rohatinsky, an NCAA champion, and Matt Downin, a Foot Locker champion. It was a horrible day for Meb, but for me, it was a neat thing."

With relatively little time after the race to absorb his success, Jenkins was still unsure what it would mean. "As a borderline guy, it should make it so much easier for me to get into races. I'm not sure what the prize money is [$8,000] but the way I'm living now, I can probably live on it for six or seven months, if not a year. My contract with Saucony comes up this month, but I don't know what will happen there. I don't have an agent, and I don't know anyone else who does."

"In terms of recognition, this is great. I'm really in it to find out how good I can be. A race like this, and the success that Brian Sell had today, tells me that if I work hard enough and long enough, it can happen. And it's nice to have people, other athletes, coming up to me to say, 'You really hit it today.' Everybody I know is calling me. I usually get one phone call a day, but just now I talked to a friend who told me my voicemail was full."

[Editor's note: Jenkins' training blog can be found here, with his previous training here .]