A former Rumson-Fair Haven running star guides his high school teammate to the podium in one of the world’s largest triathlons
By Blair Kamin
This is a story of two Rumson-Fair Haven Regional High School cross-country runners – 1970s teammates who scattered to faraway dots on the map, then improbably reconnected nearly 50 years later for a quest that would culminate in a spot on the podium in one of the world’s largest triathlons.
It is a story of bonds that endure despite the passage of time and the separation of distance. It also shows how older athletes can participate in the rigorous sport of triathlon by following a training routine that reduces their chance of injury and doesn’t monopolize their time.
One of the runners is an Asbury Park Press athlete of the week, a state 2-mile champion and a 2:18 marathoner who qualified for the Olympic trials. He won countless triathlons, including some of the first swim-bike-run races ever held.
The other is a high school co-valedictorian and a mediocre cross-country runner who put the mantra “Run your own race” to good use in a prize-winning career as a Chicago architecture critic.
In short, these two are the odd couple – the jock and the nerd. Besides RFH and Bruce Springsteen’s aptly-titled “Born to Run,” what could unite them?
Here’s what: Three words that mean two very different things in the worlds of triathlon and architecture: Less is more.
To the jock, Russ Jones, a 1973 RFH graduate, “less is more” is a training philosophy that departs from conventional “pile on the miles” thinking. There’s no need for athletes in their 50s and 60s, especially those whose knees and hips have been punished by decades of pounding the pavement, to do 10-mile runs that would inflict more harm. Quality beats quantity, reasons Jones, now a triathlon coach based in San Juan Capistrano, California, about 55 miles south of Los Angeles.
To the nerd – me, RFH Class of 1975 and the Chicago Tribune’s architecture critic from 1992 to 2021 – “less is more” is an aesthetic philosophy associated with one of the 20th century’s great architects, the German-American modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
To Mies, “less is more” meant expressing a building’s most essential characteristic, its structure, rather than gussying it up with decoration. He raised this approach to crisp perfection in such masterpieces as the Chicago residential high-rises at 860 and 880 North Lake Shore Drive.
As I biked past those steel-and-glass towers near the end of the second leg of this year’s Chicago Triathlon, I was more than six minutes behind the guy who was then in third place in our 65-69 age group.
Conditions were hardly ideal for a comeback. It was nearly 90 degrees and muggy. Worse, my back, which had undergone herniated disc surgery in 2002, was telling me that I was a fool to be hunched over in an aerodynamic position on my road bike, which was no match for competitors’ triathlon bikes that cost nearly as much as a small car.
How could I ever catch up?
After decades of being out of touch, Russ and I reconnected following a 2021 Turkey Trot in Chicago. Post-race, I wrote on Facebook that I was thrilled to be running again nearly 20 years after back surgery. To my astonishment, one of the comments was from Russ. He knew in his gut where I was coming from, as I would soon discover.
I still had vivid memories of Russ from high school: His muscular, medium-sized frame (5-feet-7-inches) filling out our team’s white and purple cross-country uniform; his face grim with determination; his blonde mop flying; his elbows pumping; his victories coming one after another.
After practice, we took the same yellow school bus home, from affluent Rumson, its mansions guarded by tall, clipped hedges, to Fair Haven, then more of a middle-class town than it is today. But Russ was going places I could never dream of.
In 1979, he qualified for the U.S. Olympic trials in the marathon. An injury prevented him from racing in the trials, but even if he’d finished in the top three, he wouldn’t have run in the Moscow 1980 Summer Olympics. Earlier that year, then-President Jimmy Carter ordered an American boycott of those Games to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
A horrible car accident followed that disappointment. One day in 1983, as Russ was running to his job as a South Jersey postman, a car smashed into him. Among his injuries, a right thigh ripped open to the bone. The doctors told him he’d probably never run again. His response, as he told The New York Times when it profiled him in 1989: “No way.”
Russ eventually returned to marathons, yet as age took its inevitable toll, he wisely concluded that he should shift to shorter, multisport races that would be easier on his body.
The move also led him to develop his “less is more” training regimen, which, in truth, had nothing to do with Mies. Russ simply plucked the phrase, which by then had passed from Mies into widespread use, out of thin air.
There may be other coaches with a similar strategy, but Russ has it down pat. His training regimen involves running fewer than 10 miles a week in addition to swimming and biking workouts. You progress in increments rather than great leaps forward. Above all, you try to stay healthy. As Russ is fond of saying, “If you can’t beat ’em, outlive ’em.”
This version of “less is more” turned out to be the perfect match for me and my bad back as I made my way into sprint triathlons.
These “sprint” races, consisting of a 750-meter swim, a 20-kilometer bike leg and a 5,000-meter run, are typically half as long as the full-distance Olympic, or international, triathlon. I did a couple of them after taking buyout from the Chicago Tribune in 2021, but my times were nothing to brag about.
I finished the sprint version of the 2021 Chicago Triathlon in 2:09.53, 30th of 43 competitors in the 60-64 age group. The run leg of my race wasn’t even a run. I speed-walked because of a right-calf injury.
Enter Russ.
Over the next eight months, after he became my coach, I realized that we had much more than a typical coach-athlete relationship. Even though we were only communicating through FaceTime, email and texts (he listed my workouts on weekly PDFs), we had a deep frame of reference.
It’s different when you ran on the same high school team and on the same cinder track. We could reminisce about our teammates, including Andy Sheehan, whose father was the Rumson-based running guru Dr. George Sheehan. We could laugh about past races and competitors, which made it easier to communicate in the present.
Russ also provided a much-needed link to Fair Haven and the Jersey Shore, a connection I valued highly because both my parents – Arthur Kamin, once the editor of The Daily Register in Shrewsbury, and Virginia Kamin, a former schoolteacher in Fair Haven – had died, my mother less than a year earlier.
Whenever I visit the Shore, I’m drawn to its special places, from the carnivalesque boardwalk at Asbury Park to the sublime northern tip of Sandy Hook and its majestic view of the lower Manhattan skyline. Without a family connection to those anchors, I felt adrift. Russ at least reminded me of them – and of home.
Such nostalgia would be no help on the last leg of the Chicago Triathlon.
I was spent after biking into a Windy City headwind that slowed riders on the second half of the extra-long, 24-kilometer (15-mile) bike leg. On the 5k run, all I could do was gut it out.
I felt like anything but a winner as I crossed the finish line in 1:45.09, five minutes slower than my race goal. But, it turned out, I’d had racing luck.
I’d finished third, more than a minute ahead of the guy who’d been so far ahead of me. I’d averaged 9:11 per mile in the 5k—slow by my standards, but the second-fastest run time in my age group. It didn’t hurt that the fellow I was chasing was running ultra-slow, 11:40 miles. I hadn’t so much run him down as he’d fallen back to me.
No matter. I was, incredibly, on the podium. From 30th to 3rd in a single year.
Without Russ, my bridge back to the Jersey Shore and the “less is more” architect of my transformation, it never would have happened.
Blair Kamin, formerly the Chicago Tribune’s architecture critic, won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1999. He lives in Wilmette, Illinois, about 15 miles north of Chicago.
The article originally appeared in the October 20 – 26, 2022 print edition of The Two River Times.
