From Couch to Coach: Jaysen Chambers' Alpine Story

Jaysen Chambers will tell you, without any hesitation, that he hated running. Not "wasn't a fan." Hated it. If that's you too — if running has always sounded like something other people do — his story is worth reading before you write yourself off. So how does someone who hadn't run more than a mile since his early twenties end up an RRCA certified coach, and someone who's now completed 10 marathons? The answer says a lot about what running can become when you give it a real shot — and find the right people to do it with.

A New Orleans Kid Who Became a Vernon Hills Dad

Jaysen was born and raised in New Orleans. Married in 1993, and in 1998 they moved to Vernon Hills, where they raised four kids. For twenty years he worked in sales and sales management in the printing industry, before transitioning to a stay-at-home dad just over a decade ago as his kids' schedules got busier than any office job could compete with.

The Birthday That Changed Everything

The running story starts a few months before Jaysen's 48th birthday. Forty-eight sounded uncomfortably close to fifty, and he wasn't getting any younger. If the bucket-list marathon was ever going to happen, it was now or never.

So he made a plan: a Hot Chocolate 5K at 48, a half marathon at 49, and a full marathon at 50. He hit every milestone right on schedule, capping it off with his first marathon in New Orleans in February 2020 — fittingly, back where it all began. Somewhere along the way, hating running turned into loving it.

Finding Alpine

The road to Alpine ran straight through a treadmill at Lakeview Fitness Center. Training through a Chicago winter, not yet brave enough for the roads, Jaysen met Alpine legend Bob McCann. The two talked running constantly, and Bob kept nudging him toward the club. Jaysen's answer was always the same — he'd get there, but he wanted that first marathon finished first.

Three weeks after he crossed that finish line in New Orleans, the world shut down for Covid. He stayed in touch with Bob anyway, and in June 2021, as he began training for the Chicago Marathon, he showed up for his first official run with Alpine. That training block introduced him to a wave of Alpine members who fueled his love for the sport and gave him more support and knowledge than he expected. He was hooked.

That's the part people miss when they picture a running club: it wasn't the marathon that hooked Jaysen. It was showing up to a group of strangers and finding out they'd become the reason he kept coming back.

Paying It Forward

For Jaysen, loving something this much came with an itch to share it. That itch has taken him down a lot of paths in a short time: coaching Girls on the Run at Harper Elementary in Wilmette, volunteering with Alpine's Kids Running Program, working two Park District 5Ks, and joining the Race Committee for the Alpine Races.

Closer to home, his park district gym started calling him "the crazy running guy" — which led the Vernon Hills Park District to ask him to help build running programs for them. Last year, that culminated in Jaysen becoming a certified Level I coach through the RRCA. In coordination with Lakeview Fitness Center he launched a new Half Marathon Training Program.

What Coaching Looks Like Up Close

Coaching, volunteering, mentoring kids — for Jaysen these were never really separate tracks. "My passion is running and I enjoy helping others on their journey," he says. "They are one and the same to me." That's as true when he's unpaid, cheering at a Park District 5K, as it is when he's running an official training program.

It shows up in the small things. Runners who work with Jaysen mention, almost without prompting, that he gets back to them within minutes of a finished run — while the endorphins are still firing and the details are still fresh, rather than hours later when a workout has already blurred into the rest of the day. It's a habit built on a simple read of human nature: catch people at the moment they're most open to a conversation about how it went.

The correction he finds himself making most, especially with beginners, is the opposite instinct: almost everyone wants to run too fast. Slowing down on the days meant to be slow is, in his experience, one of the hardest things to teach — it runs against how badly people want to feel like they're working. So his plans start somewhere else entirely, with the runner's own goals, not a template. The biggest difference between training someone for a first 5K and a first marathon isn't philosophy, he'll tell you — it's simply volume, the sheer number of miles the body has to learn to hold.

And when life does what life does — work, injury, illness, the ordinary chaos that derails a training block — Jaysen doesn't pretend a plan can out-muscle it. "We do our best to modify around life, work, injuries, and illness," he says. "Good communication is essential." But he's equally clear that a coach can only do so much: at some point, the runner has to decide running is a priority worth protecting. His part is showing up with encouragement and support, week after week. Consistency, more than any workout, is what actually gets people to a finish line — and it's the same thing that's kept tears of joy at the finish line as the moment that still gets him, race after race.

The Miles That Made Him

Jaysen likes to say that coaching a wide range of runners has made him a more well-rounded runner himself — everyone's journey is different, and he's still learning something from each one. His own journey took longer than most: he gave himself two full years to build up to that first marathon distance, and by his own admission, he didn't really know what he was doing yet. It showed. It was only afterward, once he'd joined Alpine, started leaning on other runners, and read his way into the sport, that things began to click.

Nothing tested that education like the Berlin Marathon. Jaysen toed the start line with a torn meniscus and a surgery date already on the calendar for the week after the race — his training block nowhere near where it needed to be. "If it was any other race, I would have pulled the plug," he admits. But the flights were booked, the Airbnb was paid for, and a major marathon isn't something you walk away from lightly. So he ran it anyway, with one job for 26.2 miles: get to the finish line, whatever that took.

That kind of grinding-it-out has added up. Ten marathons now, most recently in Montana. Asked which one means the most, Jaysen won't pick just one — his first, because it was first; the one where he finally broke four hours, because it marked real progress; and his current PR in Houston, simply because it's still the fastest and best race he's run. These days, the calculus has shifted again. Since knee surgery, his running is a lot slower, and chasing a PR or a Boston Qualifying time isn't the active goal it once was. Instead, he's picking marathons in new places and aiming for the same thing every time now: do the best you can, on the day you're given.

It's not far from the advice he gives every new runner, no matter what age they start: start slow, and build consistency. Coming from someone who hated running into his forties and has now finished ten marathons, it's less a platitude than a lived fact.

Beyond crossing any particular finish line, what Jaysen hopes people take away from working with him is simpler than a PR: that they saw someone who genuinely loves this, and genuinely wants them to get there too.

Your Turn to Show Up

Jaysen didn't get here by being a natural. He got here by showing up to one treadmill, one club run, one uncertain first mile at a time — and by having people around him who made the next step feel possible. That's exactly what Alpine is built to be for anyone starting where Jaysen started: hating it, unsure of the pace, not even sure they belong on the start line yet.

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From a guy who hated running to a coach building programs for an entire park district — that's the kind of turnaround that's available to anyone willing to get off the couch and show up once. As Jaysen puts it: runners are amazing people. Come find out for yourself.