DAY JOBS
JARED WARD
MARATHON, USA, PROFESSOR
Sometimes it takes leaving your home
and coming back to realise
how beautiful you have it around you.
All it takes is getting on a trail
next to a lake or getting up in the mountains for a run.
Being out there just me and the sound of my feet
against the gravel.
It can remind me that, this is why I love running.
My name is Jared Ward,
I teach school at Brigham University
and I am an Olympic marathoner.
SALT LAKE CITY, USA
It is easier to juggle a lot of things going on in life
when you love all of them.
Who is going to say the prayer today?
I couldn't be more blessed than to have the family that I have.
What do you remember about the story?
His other brothers don't even listen to anything.
My ecclesiastical life is very important to me too
and I love that and I am grateful
for the spiritual connection
that I feel like I have with my God.
I love the academic side and I love helping students
and I love doing research and I love running.
Oftentimes there is a lot going on.
So, sometimes it feels like a balancing act,
sometimes it just feels like I am blessed with a day
full of things that I love.
08.02
I would say I was drawn to Brigham Young university
as an athlete.
I wanted to be a part of an incredible programme
that was a national powerhouse.
Being realistic, I knew that I needed to get an education
for the future.
In my early years I liked maths
and so when I went to BYU
they required I put down what my major was going
to be as an athlete.
I said, "Well, let's just put statistics
"and see what happens."
It was about a month after I graduated
the statistics department approached me and said,
"Would you be willing to teach a course or two for us
"as part-time faculty?"
I said, "Yes, I'd love to, it sounds amazing."
I liked teaching even more than I thought I would.
All right, so my research was done on data
taken from the St George marathon and we
09:14
looked at pacing profiles across a variety of runners.
Now my two worlds - the athletic and the academic
have very much combined.
And they're finishing faster relative to their pace
for the average runners.
So, these splits are standardised for each athlete.
The decisions that I make, how I train and race strategies
the numbers really play a big part into the running as well.
We are going to get these post-area distributions
that fill out what is the effect for age
and what is the effect for being male versus female
on this four dimensional response.
I can definitely see how his running
STUDENT
comes into the classroom.
He is all about getting to the finish, you know, getting an A,
finishing strong cos, you know,
he likes to finish strong as well.
Ready, go.
11.15
This is a workout where you need speed
and you can kind of raise that ceiling
but you can work the breadth
and the efficiency of it as well.
Here we go, guys. Relax and roll, this is good.
I would describe Jared as someone who is sincere
and genuine.
Ever since I've been on the team I was freshman,
he had just graduated, he was just starting
his professional running career
and he made me feel like I was special.
STUDENT
I was going to be great like him.
He does look good.
12.36
To have the coaching staff at BYU has been unbelievable.
Having incredible facilities and resources
makes a huge difference
and the right people especially running those facilities.
A little bit more force on the left side than the right.
Seems like your left leg is more powerful.
Is that a similar...
Where Ian is at, he has all the resources
to analyse our biomechanics and to help us learn
what our body is doing
and how we are moving and maybe give us pointers
on different muscle groups that we can strengthen
to potentially make our movement
a little bit more efficient
which is critical as a marathon runner.
A little, then you sprint off.
When I was an athlete at BYU running on the track,
Coach Eyestone had talked to me
about how I looked like an efficient runner to him.
I think Coach Eyestone always had a vision of the marathon
for me in the long run, long before I did
and that was an intimidating thought to me.
The marathon was four times the distance
that I had ever raced.
And that first marathon was hard.
I hit the end you know two miles to go.
My peripheral vision started to go.
And I got to the finish line
and I remember them putting me in a wheelchair.
I realised that the marathon is hard.
It's the long ways and I learnt some things about fuelling,
I learnt some things about pacing,
so I could go into the next marathon
and try to learn a few more things.
United States of America.
The Olympics was an incredible experience
and I was blessed to be a part of some awesome scenes.
The race morning in Rio
was wet and a little bit chilly.
It had been raining through the night
so there were puddles everywhere
and I just remember more cameras than athletes
and the helicopters in the air,
up in front of us ready to record
as soon as the race started,
looked like swarm of bees.
It was finally go time.
RIO 2016
Coach and I really had agreed
that we should be very pleased with a top ten finish.
When I came round that corner
I knew I was in the top ten
and then with about three or four hundred metres to go
I thought I ought to run it as fast as I can
and I dug down and I ran as fast as I could
for that line
and when I hit that line it was incredible.
I remember talking to media shortly after
and they were giving me you know
kind of poking fun at me
for being the most excited sixth place finisher
they'd seen at the Olympics.
Certainly looking forward
to vying for another Olympic team
come 2020 in Tokyo.
I'd like to have road stops on the way to help me get there.
Hopefully just get better year after year.
So, that come 2020,
I am a better marathoner than I am now
and try to do it all over again.
I wake up in the morning excited,
excited to run, excited to study,
excited to teach, excited for everything.