Kelly Jaske doesn’t know who the good Samaritan was. All she knows is that he caught up to her sometime after mile 23 of this year’s Boston Marathon.

“I was really starting to struggle,” she says. “Then he came up, close enough to bump his shoulder into mine, and said, ‘I’m going to take you to mile 24. Then I’m going to drop back, but I’m going to take you to mile 24.’”

Sitting in a Starbucks, nursing coffee and a sunburn three days after the race, Jaske can’t even describe him. “I never looked over, never saw his race number,” she says. “I have no idea who he was. But this guy totally saved me.”

Whoever he was, he made good on his promise, never speaking again until mile 24. “Just keep going,” he said, then slowed, and dropped away. “It’s extraordinary that somebody would do this,” Jaske says. “It was such a generous thing.”

Jaske did keep going, and turned in the second-best performance (2:48:49) of any American woman.
But as she sips her coffee, she tries to shrug off that elite-sounding result. The marathon, she points out, was held one day after the women’s Olympic Team marathon trials (also in Boston). “I’m second American when all of the fastest Americans other than Wendy were home in bed,” she says. (Wendy Terris, profiled in the April issue of Competitor, ran both races – hitting 2:55:28 in the Trials and 3:03:18 in Boston.)

Still, there weren’t a lot of non-Americans in front of her, either. Overall, in fact, she was 16th. She’s startled when she learns that the top American, who clocked a time only six seconds better than hers, garnered $1,500 for her efforts. Then she shrugs that off as well. To be eligible for prize money, she would have had to start in the elite women’s wave, and if she’d done that, there would have been no mysterious stranger to pull her through that rough patch.

Many runners cut their racing teeth on high-school teams. But at that age, Jaske was riding horses.

“I grew up on a farm in Virginia, so we always had horses,” she says.

But she didn’t just ride: she competed. Her specialty was eventing. The equestrian equivalent of a triathlon, it’s a three-stage contest that merges dressage (“dancing for horses”), cross-country jumping and stadium jumping. “It’s not all that different from marathoning,” she says, “only the real athlete is the horse.”

Running didn’t appear on the scene until she was in college, majoring in the rather sedentary field of philosophy. Then she was merely a jogger, if a rather fast one. “It’s the perfect cure for being stir-crazy, which I always am,” she says. “So I just kept on running more and more.”

Somewhere about the time she graduated she ran her first marathon (the Marine Corps Marathon). “Sloooow,” she says, though when pressed, she cites a respectable 3:39.

Law school followed at Harvard, in marathon-mecca Boston. “I did law review,” Jaske says, “and it was bazillions of hours of sitting still. Being able to get out to run was such a release.”

If you want to put a little extra zip in your speedwork, she says, train in the mountains of West Virginia. That’s where she wound up after law school, clerking for a federal appeals judge.

It isn’t hill running per se that she’s taking about. “West Virginia has more pit bulls than any other state I’ve lived in,” she jokes, “and I think 80 percent of them have chased me. If you want good sprint training, try moving to West Virginia!”

She continued to run marathons (she’s now logged a total of 10), with times as slow as 3:50. Then, a couple of years ago, working as a litigator for a large D.C. law firm, she got serious about picking up her pace.

The 300-lawyer office had enough serious marathoners to have its own training group, and Jaske started running with them.

Running merely for fitness soon became a thing of the past. “When I started,” she says, “I was just going out there. Now I can’t imagine not having a goal to shoot for.”

Meanwhile, she’d been filling her spare time with other adventures. In 2005, she took a summer off to work for Amnesty International in Mongolia.

It’s an arid land, where running had unique challenges. “I always ended up caked in dust,” she says. But that’s not all. “The real challenge was when my neighborhood in Ulaanbaatar had its hot water cut off for a segment of the summer – each neighborhood does, each year. The piped water was frigid. I’d get back from my run every morning, brown with grit, heat up water in my teapot, and pour it over my head to warm up after freezing myself in the shower.”

In 2007 she took a winter sabbatical to volunteer on the Iditarod dogsled race, in Alaska. Initially she worked in Anchorage, sorting supplies. “All the mushers have to do food drops (mostly for the dogs)” she says. “I lugged around sacks of fish carcasses.” Later, she wound up at the finish in Nome. And, of course, in her spare time, she went running. “That was spectacular,” she says.

To avoid frostbite, she had to make sure she dressed without exposing any skin. But of course, while running she warmed up. “My clothes would be sheets of frozen sweat.” Later, back home, she realized that East Coast law wasn’t for her. “I kept running away,” she says. “It was a sign that I was restless enough to go work somewhere else.” Somewhere more outdoorsy than D.C., maybe.

That somewhere turned out to be Portland, where she’s now half of the full-time staff at an environmental services company – a job that involves everything from challenging legal problems “to figuring out how to make the printer work.”

Moving west last September, she and her boyfriend, also an attorney, spent two weeks on a rambling drive across the country. She was training for a fall marathon (she would eventually run Philadelphia in November, with a then-PR of 2:58:52). So of course the drive involved running.

She particularly remembers the day they crossed South Dakota. “I woke up in Sioux Falls and went to a track at 5 a.m.,” she says. “It was freezing. I did a 14-mile tempo on the track, then hopped in the car to drive west.”

In the next few hours, they stopped in Mitchell to visit the Corn Palace (a large, ornate building covered in murals made from corn, wheat and other grains). From there they went to the Badlands, then fetched up at Mt. Rushmore just as the sun was setting and the moon rising.

“I figured Mt. Rushmore would just be kitsch and a mob of people,” she says. “Instead, it was peace and quiet.” A perfect dinner and a few more miles’ driving, and the day ended in Wyoming. It was, she says simply, a perfect day. And as she notes, “it all started with a great run. This is how you start good days!”

With her adventurous spirit, you might think she’d end up as an adventure runner or multi-sport athlete. But Jaske doubts this will happen. While she does a lot of things for fun, she likes to be good at the ones she takes seriously. “That is much more satisfying than sort of stumbling into something,” she says. “I like throwing myself into one sport.”

In Portland, she soon turned her training up another notch, joining a group of men prepping for Boston with training runs of up to 24 miles. “They run a long way and they run fast,” she says. “It was incredibly helpful because they really pushed me and got me to see a faster pace as normal.

The men, in turn, immediately recognized her talent. “How well Kelly ran [in Boston] comes as no surprise to those of us who trained with her,” says Tim Sweitlik, one of the group’s organizers. “From the first run, when we found out what her current marathon PR was, many of us immediately told her she would blow that out of the water.”

Other than her law-partner mentors and Boston-bound training partners, Jaske has never had a coach. She’s developed her own program, based on three hard workouts a week: the long run, speed work (repeats ranging from 800 meters all the way up to 3 x 3 miles), and continuously paced tempo runs, that this time peaked at about 10 miles.

After all of that training, Boston was the racing equivalent of her drive across South Dakota. “There are some days when you just wake up feeling like you want to run,” she says.

Not that the race was painless. Pain, she says, is an inevitable consequence of marathoning – one you must face down if you are ever to find your full potential. “You just get your head around it and say, whatever.”

What was different this time was that she really hit the zone, and except for the hiccup at mile 23, pretty much stayed there. “Most marathons, you get a couple miles in and think, ‘This is going to take the rest of my life.’ But this time it just flew by.”

She also thrives on chasing down other runners, whether or not they’re in her division. “In the middle of a race,” she says, “I want to pass anyone. I don’t care if they’re 55; I don’t care if they’re men. I don’t care if they’re toddlers. If they’re in the race, I want to beat them.”

In Boston, she must have passed them by the hundreds. Her qualifying time put her in pen 2, more than 1,000 runners from the front. By the end there were only 406, male and female, ahead of her.
The only drawback to the perfect racing day, she notes, repeatedly tugging at the collar of her shirt, was “one hell of a sunburn” which she and a lot of runners got when the skies cleared just at the start of the race.

But, she’s quick to point out with a smile, that’s a small price to pay for a 2:48.

Richard A. Lovett coaches Portland’s Team Red Lizard running club. He is a senior writer for Running Times, author of The Essential Touring Cyclist, and coauthor of Alberto Salazar’s Guide to Road Racing and The Essential Cross-Country Skier.