Jeff Helmer: Running is his job

Published 11:44 pm Tuesday, July 15, 2008

It was not pretty.

His feet were battered, bloodied, and blistered.

They looked like red meat, is the way his father put it.

Too beaten up to take another step.

Yet, having just finished seventh in a 10,000-meter race, Jeff Helmer was scheduled to run again in less than 24 hours.

“No way,” his father, also named Jeff, protested.

“Got to,” Jeff the Younger said. “I’ll tape them up and do it.”

There were the feet. And then there was the heat. Ninety-five plus degrees in Tempe, Ariz., site of the Pacific-10 Conference Track and Field Championships in May.

Young Jeff did what he vowed to do: He ran the 5,000 meters the next day.

He didn’t win, didn’t even finish in the top 10, but what he did do was show how mentally tough he is. And how much pain he can endure.

“He amazes me,” his father said.

He amazes his coaches, too. They didn’t find out about his condition until after the second race.

Why didn’t you tell us? they asked.

“This is college,” young Jeff said, “not high school.”

As the commercial says, “Just do it.”

Jeff Helmer — who prepped at Jackson and Everett high schools — just does it.

Running is his job now. He is a dedicated employee of Arizona State University. The school gave him an athletic scholarship when he came out of high school in 2006. And he is bound and determined to live up to his end of the bargain.

Sometimes that means running with sore feet. And sometimes it means running when you’re suffering from food poisoning.

He shouldn’t have run that day in early April, but the job called for him to race the 10,000 meters in the Stanford Invitational and so he did and then afterwards they had the doctor who was traveling with the ASU baseball team, which was playing Stanford in Palo Alto that day, come and examine him. And Helmer ended up in the hospital having four IVs.

Why run?

“He doesn’t like to make excuses,” said his personal coach, Shelby Schenck.

And so he runs despite bloody feet and vomiting his guts out.

Sometimes, during the summer, Helmer runs from his home in Mill Creek to his workplace, “Run 26,” Schenck’s running store across from the Alderwood Mall, a nine-mile jaunt.

It is his job. It’s what he does.

He does it well.

For the Sun Devils, Helmer qualified for the NCAA Division I cross country championships in November, finishing 91st overall and leading all ASU runners into the chute. Then, in February, running for the ASU track team, he won the 5,000 meters in the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation indoor meet at the Dempsey Center on the University of Washington campus.

But his proudest moment came in the West Coast Regional cross country meet where he finished 14th to earn all-region honors. “That,” said Helmer, who was recognized as the most improved athlete on his team, “was pretty hard to do because there were a lot of good guys in it. It’s the deepest region by far in the country as far as quality runners.”

Though he’ll be starting his third year at ASU in the fall, he’ll be running as a redshirt sophomore in track while competing as a pure junior in cross country. Which means he’ll still be competing in track after he has earned his degree.

He’ll begin the fall season as the No.1 runner on the Sun Devils cross country team, which returns every member but two from the top seven who went to the national meet.

“We’re a very young team,” Helmer said. “In a couple of years, the program should be pretty good.”

Helmer is committed to doing his part to make it good.

Thus the nine-mile jaunts to work. And the 90-plus-mile weeks he puts in on the roads.

Nothing gets in the way of his running. He lives what seems almost like a monastic life. He lives alone in a condominium his parents bought in Tempe. He goes to school. He has a part-time job at a running shoe store in Tempe. He trains on his own to log the many miles that have become part of his routine, and he trains with his team.

“Of all the kids I’ve coached, he’s the most focused,” said Schenck, who began working with Helmer when he was a sophomore in high school. “You never have to worry about him going to parties. He’s in bed by 9 o’clock. He’s very detailed, very strict in what he does.”

His father says he might be too focused.

“Once he sets his mind to something, he gives it 110 percent,” the senior Helmer said. “Anything short of that, he feels he’s a failure.

“He doesn’t have much of a social life. I tell him to truly live the college experience, you have to go out and do something fun once in a while. He has a hard time with that. He feels it distracts him from his running.”

Let it be said that he does get out and run around a little. Literally. He’ll call up buddies on the team and they’ll go for a run, sometimes to escape the drudgery of studying for finals. “Aside from that,” he said, “it’s just pretty much all business.”

Helmer is a student of running, not just a runner. “I’ve got to be sure everything I tell him is right,” Schenck said with a laugh, “because he’ll go home and Google it to see if it is right.”

After transferring to Everett midway through his senior year, Helmer ran track for coach Bruce Overstreet, who soon discovered that Helmer had a “real deep, sophisticated level of understanding” of his sport.

Overstreet credits Helmer with taking a sophomore distance runner, Arian Anderson, under his wing and helping him make great strides in the 3,200 meters. In one race, Helmer stayed with Anderson until the very end and then allowed the younger boy to hit the finish line first.

Overstreet recalled Anderson saying, “Jeff taught me well.” So well that he’s going to give cross country a shot at Linfield College this fall.

As for his own future, Helmer is looking no further ahead than the 2008 cross country season, for which he is building strength and stamina with long, easy runs this summer. He recently attended the Olympic Track and Field Trials in Eugene, Ore., which planted some thoughts in his head about the 2012 games. “It’s just going to depend on how fast I run my junior and senior years,” he said.

Another thought that’s rattling around in his brain is the possibility of giving triathlons a go after college. The Olympic Training people broached the idea and suggested he “go swim 400 meters and get back to us,” said Schenck, a former triathlete himself.

“He did it in 5:20, which is pretty solid with no training and terrible form,” Schenck said. “Swimming is all technique and he has zero technique. I don’t think biking is going to be an issue.”

Neither, you can be sure, is dedication or pain tolerance.