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.
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