By Paul Gains
Canadian Olympian John Gay will line up for his much-anticipated debut at the TCS Toronto Waterfront Marathon on October 18 with a national championship title in his sights.
Once again, the race doubles as both a World Athletics Elite Label race and the Athletics Canada National Marathon Championships.
A native of Kelowna, British Columbia, he was a 3,000m steeplechase finalist at the Tokyo Olympics five years ago and also finished fourth at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in what was his favourite event.
That was until a series of injuries, caused by hurdling barriers, interrupted his running for lengthy spells, and he decided he would pursue the marathon.
He left the steeplechase as the fourth-fastest Canadian of all time with a best of 8:16.99. Most significantly, that personal best was achieved when it counted most at the Tokyo Olympics.
Gay had intended to debut at last year’s TCS Toronto Waterfront Marathon but was forced to withdraw after hurting his lower back within a month of the event. Instead, his debut came in Ottawa this past May, where he satisfied himself with a 2:14:16, good enough for 12th place.
Lessons learned, he has a clear objective for this one.
“Now that I have got my head wrapped around reaching for 42km, the idea is to swing for the fences,” he declares. “Even a sub-2:10 clocking is not what it was, even five or six years ago.
“I think, to my mind, there is no point in playing it safe and going for a conservative ‘bridge’ time. And, being a Canadian national championship, I will swing for whatever time it takes to win a national championship. I feel I have nothing to lose at this point in my career.”
This time last year, together with his wife, Camille, Gay was living in Flagstaff, Arizona, having joined Verde Track Club along with fellow Canadians Ben Flanagan and Rory Linkletter.
He returned to Kelowna for the summer, a move that was initially a temporary one, as he was simply waiting for his U.S. permanent residency to be approved. Of course, he maintains a close relationship with Verde coach Jon Green.
“I now have my American ‘green card’ by virtue of my dual-citizen wife,” he explains with a smile. “The original plan was to come back for the summer. We have several weddings and engagements throughout the summer. Now we are back, and we are feeling very settled.
“Now we are not sure if we will make it back (to Flagstaff) full-time in the fall. Regardless of whether we move back or not, it won’t be until after the Toronto Waterfront Marathon.”
Camille works remotely as an urban planner and so was not tied down.
“We are very fortunate that both of our professions follow us wherever we go,” he explains.
“We still have a storage locker in Flagstaff. We are kind of going back and forth as to which country to make our permanent home and which one to spend extended training camp periods in.”
In Flagstaff, he was an understudy to Rory Linkletter, and the pair trained together often. Now that he is back at home in Kelowna, he originally found himself training alone much of the time.
But a chance meeting with Russell Pennock, with whom he competed in Canadian university athletics — Pennock ran for the University of Calgary Dinos and Gay for the University of British Columbia — has resulted in them training together.
Coincidentally, Pennock is also training for the TCS Toronto Waterfront Marathon.
Already in his buildup for Toronto, Gay has covered up to 200 kilometres a week, though he has also had to contend with smoke from the wildfires, which are destroying thousands of acres in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley.
“This morning I was able to get out for an easy run,” he says. “It was certainly not smoke-clear but still decent running conditions. But yesterday evening it was opaque smoke; you couldn’t see across the lake.
“Unfortunately, it’s nothing we are not used to in the Okanagan. It’s been years since I spent a whole summer here. But it harkens back to my high school years when we would have a couple of weeks most summers affected by smoke.
“We have been pretty fortunate relative to further south — like Vernon and Summerland — both of which have out-of-control fires burning now.”
Checking the air quality index is part of his daily routine. If the air was ever too dangerous, he would take to the treadmill instead. But so far this summer, he says, he has not had to resort to that, even though the air is not always suitable.
Since February 2025, he has enjoyed hosting Canadian Running Magazine’s weekly podcast, ‘The Shakeout’. It’s one form of income he receives.
Another income stream is from online coaching for Mile2Marathon. Along with 2012 Olympic marathoner Dylan Wykes and Mike Woods, a sub-four-minute miler 20 years ago who also won a stage of the 2023 Tour de France, they work with runners of all abilities.
“It’s been about a year that I have been doing that kind of coaching work,” Gay says. “It’s something I find rewarding — seeing the sport from a different perspective now, through the eyes of a coach.”
Sometimes his clients might do more than he has prescribed, and that’s a lesson he has reminded himself of — stick to the plan, embrace recovery, and avoid overtraining.
As his coach Jon Green has told him, it’s better to be 100% healthy and 95% fit than teetering on the verge of injury.
The TCS Toronto Waterfront Marathon always attracts world-class runners and leading Canadians who benefit from battling foreign competition.
Winning a Canadian championship gold medal won’t be easy, but John Gay seems to have a plan.
