Errol 'Rocket' Jones on pacing, patience and thirty years on the trail

Some people are known in ultrarunning for their results. Errol Jones is known for turning up. Thirty years in the Northern California scene, at races, at aid stations, and — most often — a few paces behind somebody having the hardest night of their life.

He was 62 at the time of this recording and showing no sign of stopping.

Pacing Ann Trason

The centre of the episode is his time pacing Ann Trason during the years when she was the most dominant ultrarunner in the world — fourteen Western States wins, course records that stood for decades. Pacing at that level is not encouragement. It is calorie management, split arithmetic, knowing which questions to ask and, mostly, knowing when to say nothing at all.

The episode is one of the better available accounts of what a pacer actually does, largely because it is unsentimental about it. The pacer’s job is to be useful to a runner whose judgement is degrading in predictable ways, and the skill is in noticing the degradation before the runner does.

What changed after 1982

The other thread is the long view. Jones started running ultras when the sport was small, unsponsored, and organised around a handful of races on the West Coast. By 2012 it had shoe contracts, live coverage, lotteries and a growth problem.

He is neither nostalgic nor dismissive about that. Bigger fields mean more people get to do this; they also mean a runner can now complete a hundred-miler without ever meeting the person who marked the course. Both things are true, and the episode lets them sit next to each other rather than resolving them.

The nickname

The obvious question gets asked and answered. As with most good ultrarunning nicknames, the story is better than the name.

The long view

Interviews with fast runners date quickly, because the results that made them interesting get superseded. Interviews with people who have simply been present for thirty years do not. This is one of those.