When most people see the name Jack Daniels, they picture a whiskey bottle. But runners will think about the renowned coach and exercise physiologist. At 81, Daniels has had a bigger influence on training-for-running than anyone.

Indeed, he might be considered the Albert Einstein of the sport. His 1998 book, Daniels' Running Formula, unlocked the mystery of appropriate training paces for runners of all abilities. His philosophy was simple: Do the minimum amount of work for the maximum payoff.

Daniels attended Sequoia Union High School in Redwood City, California, and found he was drawn to the school's competitive fitness programs. After a stint in the Army, and between two Olympic medals—silver and bronze—as a member of the men's U.S. modern pentathlon team, he attended a sports-coaching school in Sweden. He decided to make exercise physiology his career and returned to the States to write his Ph.D. thesis on exercise and altitude.

Thank goodness he did. When it was announced that Mexico City would host the 1968 Olympics, the first Summer Games to be held at altitude—7,350 feet above sea level—American runners needed a crash course. "Jack was the only one who knew anything about the physiology of altitude exercise," says the great American miler Jim Ryun. "Everyone else said the altitude was all in our heads. Without Jack, we couldn't have performed as well as we did." Ryun won silver in the 1500 meters.

Years later, Daniels was running a Nike research lab when a panicked Joan Benoit showed up. She'd just had arthroscopic knee surgery, couldn't put weight on the leg, and was worried about losing fitness before the 1984 Olympic Marathon Trials, just two weeks off.

Daniels told her to lie down on the lab treadmill, face up. He then suspended an exercise bike, upside down, from the ceiling, and told her to pedal it with her arms. "It didn't do her legs any good," he says, "but it got her heart rate up, and was mainly for her head." Benoit recovered to win both the Olympic Trials and the first women's Olympic Marathon.

It was in the 1980s that Daniels began a 17-year stretch of coaching and teaching at SUNY Cortland. His athletes won 130 Division III All-American awards. While he's continued working with elites, working with college kids has brought him as much or even more satisfaction. One of his runners, Vicki Mitchell, began her Cortland career as a 2:39 800-meter runner. By the end, she ran 2:31 for the last 800 of a 10,000-meter win in 33:01. "Runners with less talent have more room for improvement," says Daniels. "How much fun is that?" These days, he teaches online classes for A.T. Still University and coaches part time at Wells College in New York.

With his penchant for numbers, you might think Daniels is an aggressive taskmaster. Nope. He's soft-spoken, a gifted storyteller, and a believer that less often is more. "My runners are always telling me they can run faster than the paces I give them," he says. "I say, 'I know that, but we're not trying to run fast workouts. We're trying to run smart workouts that lead to fast races.'"

In September, two-time U.S. Olympic marathoner Ryan Hall announced he would be coached by Daniels. Hall hopes to bounce back from several sub-par years. "My dad and I first met Jack at a Jim Ryun Running Camp in 1999," says Hall. "The next year, with our new training knowledge, I dropped to 4:05 in the mile. I'm confident he can get me back as a runner."

How will Daniels do that? "The key is to help Ryan believe he still has the talent he's always had. My job is to provide an environment where we don't do anything stupid, and where we bring Ryan back to his full potential."

Don't do anything stupid. Wise words from running's Einstein.

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Read more inspiring stories from the runners who are changing the sport in the Heroes of Running: 2015.

And check out Amby Burfoot's 2011 one-on-one interivew with Daniels on everything from running form to lactate threshold:

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