Jack Tupper Daniels (Missoula ’54)
Posted: February 28, 2026
Jack was born April 26, 1933, in Detroit, MI. He passed away at his home in Cortland, NY, at age 92 on September 12, 2025.
A two-time Olympic medalist and renowned exercise physiologist and researcher, Jack was also an athletic trainer so esteemed that Runner’s World magazine once named him the “world’s best running coach.”
Jack grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, graduating from Sequoia HS in Redwood City, where he was a competitive swimmer and played the trombone.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in physical education from the University of Montana and would go on to earn a master’s in P.E. from the University of Oklahoma, and a Ph.D. in exercise physiology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Jack’s brothers, Ronald “Danny” Daniels (GAC-54) and Jerry Daniels (MSO-58) were also smokejumpers, and it was thanks to Danny that Jack became a jumper his final summer of college.
“Typically, to be a jumper, you first were expected to spend a summer doing more menial forest service work,” Jack wrote in his 2020 autobiography, Luck of the Draw. “But Danny persuaded the powers that be that I was a great athlete and ready to be a jumper straight away.”
Jack remembered all his jumps, writing that this was “partly because the chutes we used brought you in pretty fast and partly because I didn’t get in that many jumps.”
In 1955, Jack joined the Army, going on to serve in Korea as a rifle platoon leader at the DMZ. He did so well in a military triathlon (pistol shooting, swimming, and running) that he qualified to begin training for the Olympics, where, despite being a relatively weak runner, he won a spot on the US Modern Pentathlon team. Jack’s three-man squad went on to win a silver at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne and a bronze four years later at the Olympics in Rome. He was also a two-time US national champion in the sport.
He soon found himself in the elite ranks of coaching thanks to his doctoral research, which involved the study of athletic performance at high altitudes. While still a student at the University of Wisconsin, he became an Olympic-level consultant, helping train runners for the 1968 Olympics in high-altitude Mexico City. Jack would spend a year coaching the Peruvian national team, three years helming the men’s distance program at the University of Texas, and 17 years leading the track and cross-country teams at SUNY Cortland. He later served as director of the Center for High Altitude Training at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, where he coached emerging track and field athletes for Team USA. Over the years, Jack would mentor or coach some of America’s finest distance runners, including Jim Ryun, Joan Benoit, Ken Martin, Jerry Lawson, and Magdalena Lewy-Boulet.
But perhaps Jack’s biggest legacy was his running formula, a pace-based exercise system designed to optimize athletic performance for runners of all levels. Dubbed VDOT, his formula uses an individual’s unique speed to create a streamlined workout regimen calibrated to build speed and endurance on the track or trail. Jack’s 1998 book, Daniels’ Running Formula (now in its fourth edition), brought VDOT into the mainstream, where it proved to be a game-changer for athletes around the world.
It was in part thanks to his formula that his athletes excelled. Under Jack, SUNY Cortland’s women’s cross-country team placed in the top ten nationally every year from 1987 to 1999. According to SUNY Cortland’s website, Daniels “produced 24 individual national champions and more than 90 All-America athletes in cross-country and track and field” during his time at the school.
But even after all the accolades, achievements, and awards, Jack remained extraordinarily humble. He always felt his biggest win wasn’t on the track or cross-country course, or on a podium receiving a medal. It was right at home with his beloved wife, Nancy Jo (who’d been an elite athlete herself), and their two daughters, Sarah and Audra.
