John of all Trades
The farmer that trains with Canada’s top runners
While most elite Canadian marathon runners are sleeping off the 30k they ran the day before, at 6 a.m. every morning John Mason is up feeding cows.
After seeing progress each year while competing for Fanshawe College in London, Ont., Mason didn’t want to give up running when he graduated. An aspiring marathoner, Mason moved up the road to Guelph and joined Speed River, one of Canada’s premier training groups. Now, he trains with Olympians Reid Coolsaet and Eric Gillis.
Although Mason is dedicated to his elite pursuit, he and his training partners lead very different lives before practice.
Living on his family farm, Mason helps with the daily chores, which include tending to the cows, before heading out for his run in the morning. After a quick core and strength session, he’s off to his day job, a construction company that he started. After a full day of building decks or repairing roofs, Mason gets in another shorter run, of about 10k.
“I learned at a young age not to be afraid of hard work,” Mason says of what many would see as an impossibly hard schedule. “My two jobs are fairly physical and not always conducive to running fast, but it is what it is.”
With his mileage reaching 180–190k for the majority of his build up and his jobs demanding much of his energy, Mason tries to put an emphasis on recovery. Other than workouts, he never wears a watch. “After 50 minutes of tempo my brain would just be mush and I wouldn’t be productive at work,” Mason admits of the tougher days. “Thankfully, being my own boss, I had the f lexibility to go home, do some office work and get a nap in.”
The summer is the peak period for construction work and it tends to slow down in the fall and winter. Last winter, Mason didn’t book any jobs and, instead, went to Iten, Kenya to train with the best runners in the world, including his Canadian training partner Reid Coolsaet, who was preparing for the London Marathon. It was both a running vacation and a learning experience. Mason found that it didn’t matter that he wasn’t elite compared to the world-class runners in Kenya. They respected his desire to keep running and his passion for the sport.
After returning from Kenya, Mason started his marathon build up, deciding to debut in Ottawa at the end of May. He told his clients that he wanted to run the marathon and would be working shorter hours until then, promising that the work would be done in the summer.
Despite Mason’s best efforts, and his shift in focus from work to running, his first marathon experience wasn’t good. Leading up to the Ottawa Marathon, Mason raced the nyc Half, where he set ran a personal best, and a few other road races that showed fitness. But for the final three weeks of the marathon phase, he experienced some calf tightness that would persist until race day.
“It was a bit of a roller coaster between workouts and cross-training. It wasn’t healing but I thought it would be fine once we hit the taper week. It wasn’t,” Mason recalls.
Nevertheless, he stuck to his race plan for the Ottawa Marathon. After warming up in his signature f lannel shirt, Mason went out with his pace setters, including Coolsaet, through halfway at 69 minutes to run 2:19 or slightly quicker. He was on pace through 12k before his calf started tightening up. By 15k, he wondered if he would make it the whole way. At this point the group running 2:20 pace had caught him and Mason tried to hang with them but they pulled away.
For the next 10k, Mason pushed on, battling the desire to quit the whole way.
“I really didn’t want to drop out, so at 15k, I thought ‘ just five more kilometres.’ But at 20k I couldn’t see the 2:20 group anymore. Somewhere between 22 and 23k I looked up at Reid and I said, ‘ That’s it,’ and stopped.”
After some downtime, Mason plans to give the marathon another shot at the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon in October.
More than most, Mason understands the demands of balancing work and elite training. While his goals are the same as most Speed River athletes – to win races and represent Canada internationally – he maintains a very different lifestyle and he knows not to take the opportunity to run for granted.
“Sometimes I wonder if its worth it when I’m turning down work to train or when races don’t go well,” Mason admits. “But I would give up being on any national team or getting the win in any race if you could tell me I could run every day for the rest of my life.”