Jack Daniels, a two-time Olympic medalist in the modern pentathlon and an exercise physiologist who was once described by Runner’s World magazine as “the world’s best running coach,” died on Sept. 12 at his home in Cortland, N.Y. He was 92.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Nancy Daniels.
Over seven decades, Daniels, armed with a Ph.D. in the subject, researched the physiology of running and coached Olympians and elite college athletes, as well as recreational runners. Perhaps his greatest contribution was to simplify and make accessible to coaches and runners of all levels — from the high school history teacher who doubles as a track coach to the world-class marathoner — the complicated science of human performance.
A runner or coach does not have to wade into the weeds trying to understand the nuances of Daniels’s measure of running fitness, which is based on the amount of oxygen consumption and goes by the acronym VDOT.
The only thing required is the numerical time it took to finish an all-out race — say, a 5K. That time can be plugged into an online calculator or compared with charts that Daniels and Jimmy Gilbert, a mathematician, devised in the 1970s; Daniels published it in 1998 as “Daniels’ Running Formula.”
The formula predicts an individual’s time in races of various distances, such as a 10-kilometer, a half-marathon and a marathon. It also establishes optimum paces for training runs of varying levels of intensity.
Daniels proposed individualized workouts for a runner to obtain the best possible results with the least amount of effort. A runner should not run too far or too fast, he suggested, and should avoid so-called junk, or unnecessary, miles.
“Before Jack, nobody knew how fast or slow they should go in training,” said Amby Burfoot, the winner of the 1968 Boston Marathon and a former executive editor of Runner’s World; it was Burfoot who gave Dr. Daniels the best-coach appellation in the 1990s.
Critics said Daniels’s formula did not account sufficiently for individual variation. But others, like Mike Smith, the former head coach at Northern Arizona University, who now trains Olympic-caliber runners, described it as “shockingly accurate.”
The criticism hasn’t diminished the formula’s popularity. This year, the VDOT online calculator averaged more than a million computations a month from users in more than 100 countries, said Brian Rosetti, who helped create the calculator and a coaching app with Daniels.
A coach and scientist of boundless curiosity, Daniels was responsible for other innovations as well. In the early 1980s, he helped figure out which running shoes were the fastest by determining that adding 100 grams (about 3½ ounces) to the weight of a pair of racing shoes increased the aerobic demand of running by about 1 percent — the equivalent of an extra minute in completing the 26.2 miles of a marathon.
And when Joan Benoit Samuelson, the winner of the first women’s Olympic marathon at the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, had arthroscopic knee surgery 17 days before the U.S. Olympic trials — a setback that could have kept her from qualifying — Daniels came up with a workaround. At a Nike lab in Eugene, Ore., he rigged a bicycle so that she could sit beneath it and pedal with her hands and arms, keeping her heart rate and her confidence elevated until she got back on her feet to win the trials and an eventual gold medal.
During the track competition at the Olympics that year, Daniels and Nancy Scardina, a former elite runner whom he married in 1985, counted the strides of 50 Olympians in events from 800 meters to the marathon. They calculated that roughly 180 steps per minute — with each foot strike landing toward the runner’s center of gravity, creating a flowing or rolling motion over the body — was optimal because it minimized the time the body spent in the air and reduced the shock of the landing force.
“He was one to think out of the box at all times,” Benoit Samuelson said in an interview. “He was really ahead of his time.”
Jack Tupper Daniels was born on April 26, 1933, in Detroit, one of five sons of Robert Daniels, who installed telephone switchboards on military bases, and Louise (Giblet) Daniels, who ran the household. The family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area when Jack was six weeks old.
He attended the University of Montana, earning a bachelor’s degree in physical education and mathematics in 1955. In college, he was a standout member of the rifle and swim teams, experiences that served him well when he joined the Army following graduation and won a silver medal in the modern pentathlon team competition at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. At the 1960 Olympics in Rome, he won a bronze medal in the team event.
The pentathlon, meant to recreate a soldier’s challenges on the battlefield, involves shooting, swimming, fencing, horseback riding and running. But as Daniels wrote in his memoir, “Luck of the Draw” (2019), he received no expert coaching in how to train for and run a race during his Olympic preparation. He came to realize that it was counterproductive to run as fast as possible all the time — that every workout must have a specific purpose, and that training needed to be balanced with rest.
He went on to earn a master’s degree in physical education and exercise physiology from the University of Oklahoma in 1965 and a Ph.D in exercise physiology from the University of Wisconsin in 1969.
Ahead of the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, held at an altitude of 7,300 feet, he and his colleagues conducted tests on the effects of running in thin air. During training in high-altitude areas like Alamosa, Colo., Daniels would sit on the hood of a car as it drove slowly around a track alongside runners, like the star miler Jim Ryun, and would use meteorological balloons to collect samples of air that they breathed into tubes.
Daniels held roughly a dozen coaching jobs over his career, but his greatest achievement as a coach came at the State University of New York at Cortland (now SUNY Cortland), where he guided the women’s cross-country team to seven N.C.A.A. Division III national championships and the women’s indoor track team to one national title between 1989 and 1997.
In the summer of 1988, he helped a relay team of Cortland runners set a national record by running roughly 3,000 miles across the country in 13 days and 18 hours, he wrote in his memoir.
The 10 men and five women were divided into three groups, each group racing in four-hour shifts, said one of the runners, Judy Sparks Arlington. Daniels, she explained, devised a strategy for runners to alternate every 400 meters. This enabled them to run faster on each leg of the race than if they had been running a mile or more.
“Absolutely, it was Jack’s brainchild how we did it,” Sparks Arlington said.
In 2000, the N.C.A.A. named Daniels the top Division III women’s cross country coach of the 20th century.
In addition to his wife, a registered nurse, he is survived by their daughters, Audra and Sarah Daniels.
In the last week of his life, Daniels wrote a children’s book to encourage families to walk and jog together.
“Jack’s goal was to get America fit, the world fit,” Nancy Daniels said. “He wanted every kid to love to exercise.”
Jeré Longman is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk who writes the occasional sports-related story.
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