Jan Smith started running on a dare.
It was the early 1980s and Smith, then in her 20s, was an aerobics teacher, rower and student at the University of Regina. Her aerobics class was tough and she teased some of the university staff that they wouldn’t survive one of her hour-long sessions. Many of the staff ran over the noon hour and shot back with a challenge of their own.
“They said: ‘Well, I don’t think you can run a 10k.’ And so that’s how I started,” recalls Smith, who turns 64 this month. “They did my class and I did a 10k and I started running after that.”
Her legs were “pretty rubbery” after that first run, but Smith enjoyed herself and saw running as a great cross training option for rowing. She was hooked.
Though Smith didn’t have a coach or training plan, she was naturally gifted and often found herself on the podium of local road races. Ironically, the most fateful run of her life was one in which she finished just outside the medals; it was a 10-miler in Regina in 1985 and, after crossing the finish line, Smith commiserated with Lyndon Smith, the male fourth-place finisher, about missing the podium. Four years later, the two were married. “We say we won each other at that race,” Jan says.
Jan took nearly a decade off from running as she and Lyndon raised three children in Saskatoon, but the family was always active — Jan played a lot of soccer — and the Smith children found joy in soccer, wrestling and gymnastics. “We hope (our active lifestyle) was influential to them picking up sports and sticking with it. Hopefully they’ll do it for life just like we plan to,” Jan says.
Jan returned to running in 2010 and began training on the track in 2016 with Lyndon, who had started coaching masters athletes.
“It doesn’t seem to matter what the distance is — it’s hard,” Jan says of the track. “You can’t make any mistakes in those races or else you’re done.”
Still, Jan saw huge success on the track. At a masters meet in Vancouver in 2016, she set a Saskatchewan W55 age group record in the 5,000m, clocking 22:55.45. The next day, she set the W55 record in the 2,000m steeplechase in 8:59.30. “I probably was very naive and ignorant about those kinds of things at that point,” Jan says. “I just didn’t even know that there were records out there.”
Jan joined the Running Wild Athletics Club in 2019 and set her sights on competing in the 2020 World Masters Athletics Championships in Toronto, but the event was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. She returned to racing — and her record-setting ways — in 2021 when the world began opening up again.
This past summer, Jan set five W60 Saskatchewan age group records in the outdoor 800m, 1,500m, 3,000m, 5,000m and 2,000m steeplechase on top of an indoor record in the indoor 1,000m. Her steeplechase time of 9:37.87, which she ran at the Canadian Masters Athletics Outdoor Championships in August, is the fifth fastest W60 time in the world for this past outdoor season.
Despite being affiliated with Running Wild and feeling connected to the masters running community in Saskatoon, Jan does most of her training alone and balances running with full time work (she’s a bookkeeper and administrative assistant at Emmanuel Baptist Church). She does a lot of her speed work playing soccer in an adult league with her daughter. “My husband jokingly says this is my ‘special speed sauce,’ my intervals, or — more accurately — fartlek training,” she says.
In a decades-long running career, Jan feels lucky to have avoided serious injury, something she attributes to not overtraining. “It’s like I’m being lazy, but I just think an aging body really needs time to recover,” she says. “When I train, I train hard, but I definitely take my days off, take those recovery days, because they’re really important.”
The one thing Jan hopes to keep working on is the mental side of the sport, which she’s struggled with since she was in her 20s and racing on the roads. “I’m a really nervous racer, let’s put it that way,” she says. “I get really worked up about races almost from the time I sign up till the time I actually race. I know some nervousness is good, it can lead to good results, but I think something I can work on is just to chill a little more.”
She plans to get lots of practice in the coming months and years. With her 64th birthday looming, Smith is hoping to chase down more indoor and outdoor W60 records over her last year in that age group — which will mean signing up for more races.
“Even though it does cause some anxiety for me, I know I have to get out there and do it if that’s one of my goals,” she says.
“You can’t break records if you don’t race.”
