Coach Jon Green On Starting Verde Track Club With Molly Seidel + Emily Infeld, His Career Path and The Importance of Having Fun

"If you’re not having fun with it, I think you’re going to look back in a few years once you retire and be like, ‘You know what, maybe I didn’t handle it the right way. I was too serious with it.’ You can have fun with it, enjoy it and still do well. Everybody was talking about how Molly wasn’t taking it seriously – No. We were taking it super seriously in Sapporo and Tokyo in everything we were doing. Having fun is also super important and I think that improves their performance at the end of the day. People can look at it and be like, ‘Oh they’re joking around and having fun.’ But yeah, we joke around, we have fun but we perform, which is what matters at the end of the day.”

Jon Green is a former All-American from Georgetown who ran professionally for a brief time after college but now he’s most known for his coaching credentials. At 27 years old, he’s coached someone to an Olympic team and an Olympic bronze medal in Tokyo. That someone is Molly Seidel, who used to be his teammate but then they teamed up together in October 2019 and it’s been history ever since. Jon was the coach for Mary Cain’s professional women’s running team in New York City called Atalanta NYC but just recently passed the torch to Julia Lucas since he’s decided to move to Flagstaff, Arizona to coach Molly and former Bowerman Track Club runner and 10K world championship bronze medalist Emily Infeld. His squad is going by Verde Track Club – a super creative name. In this episode, hear more about his plans for the team and his coaching offerings for everyone from post-collegiate runners to everyday joggers like me or possibly you. We also touched on how Jon keeps everything fun and that’s at the heart of Verde Track Club’s ethos.

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