05/06/2026
Love this dude! No challenge no change! If it don't kill you.... well hell you ain't dead yet keep goin'. What don't kill you make you harder to kill baby! Let's go!
Jon's post:
The Pittsburgh Marathon is known as a tough race because it has a lot of hills. The biggest is this one giant incline around Mile 11. It’s called the Oakland Climb because runners don’t jog up as much as stagger. I ran it thanks to the help of my friend, JC Jones.
Every Wednesday morning, I start my day with a leg workout with my trainer, JC. He owns a boutique gym (Jc Jones bootcamp) at 6 Mile and St Mary’s way out on the NW side of the city. JC focuses on helping everyday people become the best version of themselves through high-intensity training sessions. A friend told me about how he was building up his lower body muscles for his races through these grueling sessions at JC’s. Sign me up. Little did I know what I was getting into.
JC has this saying, “It will get better, just not today.” I felt every letter of that sentence the first few months I was there, doing more mountain climbers, squats, tire flips, and balance work than I thought possible in an hour. Over the next year, it turned me into a far better runner and overall person. JC’s early morning Wednesday workouts became the anchor of my weekly workout schedule and built up muscles I didn’t even know existed. They played a key role in leveling up my discipline.
And they gave me another couple of gears when I was running. I stopped lumbering along on my runs. I began running with better posture at a deliberate pace. I could speed up to pass other runners on command. Most importantly, I could chug up every incline I saw on a race course. I stopped dreading hills and saw them as opportunities to pass other runners who had to stop and walk.
That’s what happened with the Oakland Climb last weekend. Everyone else around me stopped and started walking at one point or another on that hill. Which is totally reasonable because it’s a steep incline that gains the better part of 200 feet of elevation in a little less than a mile. I ran the whole thing nonstop. I had my best marathon yet in a race that’s not known for PRs because I could do that. That’s thanks to the guidance and expertise of JC and his team. Thank you. You all played a critical role in making this dream come true. It is getting better.
