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Reebok Boston Track Club’s Justyn Knight takes ‘unrealistic goals’ to Olympics
Knight will run the 5K in Tokyo, an event in which he's the second-fastest North American runner of all time.
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Justyn Knight doesn’t like to talk about his goals openly because he knows how they might sound to others.
Unrealistic. Improbable. Overly ambitious.
“For the person on the outside looking in, they might see the goals I set for myself and think, ‘You’re not even close to doing that’ or ‘That’s very unlikely for you to do,’” he says.
But for the 24-year-old Canadian distance runner, that’s entirely the point.
“Nothing in life, nothing in any race ever goes perfectly,” he explains. “But if I’m training for that unrealistic goal, it gives me room for error where I can still accomplish something amazing for myself.”
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So his declared mission for the 5,000-meter run at the Tokyo Olympics later this month shouldn’t surprise anyone: “I’m training to try to win Olympic gold.”
Knight won’t be alone in that quest, of course, with dozens of other runners – including a Team Canada teammate – possibly standing in the way.
But the former Syracuse Orange and current Reebok Boston Track Club athlete is no mere longshot or upstart. He’s one of the five fastest 5K runners in the world right now, and he’s still getting better.
From gym-class hero to rising star.
There’s something fitting about Knight striving for an Olympic medal in the race that got him started in as a runner.
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The story goes that his high school gym teacher assigned Knight, a basketball and volleyball enthusiast, an almost 5,000-meter cross country run for class to help raise his flagging physical education grade.
He blew the race, his classmates, and the fastest previous course record for 10th-graders out of the water. His school’s cross-country team took notice and convinced him to join shortly after, and the hidden gem ended up riding his newfound passion for running to Syracuse’s track and field program.
All Knight did there was blaze a trail to an indoor 5K national title in 2018, multiple All-American honors, and three Syracuse Male Athlete of the Year awards. During his sophomore season in 2016, he nearly hit the Olympic qualifying standard for the 5K, missing an automatic berth by a mere second.
After finishing school in 2018, Knight made the decision to go pro — a move he called “very stressful.” But in the end, Reebok Boston Track Club made it an easy one — and not just because of what they offered on the track itself.
“I felt like the goals that I set out for myself as an athlete and as a person were very similar to the goals they set out for themselves as a company,” he said. “They’re very involved in trying to make the world a better place, which I like…they made sure that all of my needs were met.”
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In 2018, Knight became the first athlete to sign with the club, which also includes 3,000m runner and fellow Olympian Amy-Eloise Markovc.
Reebok Boston also took on Knight’s college coach, Chris Fox, as the group’s head coach — a move the 24-year-old called “super beneficial” for his development.
In the run-up to the expected 2020 Games, Knight proved himself again as an international force with Olympic potential. He smashed Canada’s indoor 1,500m record at Boston University’s Last Chance meet in February of last year and took first at the Millrose Games against worldwide competition.
But his chance to redeem his near-miss of the Olympics would have to wait: the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic forced Canada’s Olympic Committee to keep its athletes out of the 2020 Olympics in Toyko. The Games were later postponed until this year.
Seizing a second chance at the Olympics.
The pandemic didn’t just rob Knight of the chance to compete in the 2020 Olympics. It fundamentally changed his training.
Knight says he didn’t practice with his teammates at all from March until October of 2020 out of safety concerns about COVID-19. His training sessions consisted only of him and Coach Fox, who merely watched as Knight ran alone.
After long relying on competition with his teammates to drive him, the pandemic had forced him to battle an even tougher opponent: himself.
“It was very difficult,” he admitted. “It was the first time in my life that, for such a long period of time, I was responsible for holding myself accountable to make sure I hit the splits during workouts that Coach set out for me. I’m not going to lie, it wasn’t a strong point for me. That was the one thing in track and field that I was never naturally good, hitting those splits by myself.
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“I think that was a blessing in disguise because it gave me time to work on the one thing that I wasn’t really good at.”
Once he hit the track with his team again in October, Knight says he noticed a difference in how he pushed himself to hit times during practice even with other runners around.
He also made it a point to study other elite 5K runners, noting that they, like him, also ran well in the shorter, faster-paced 1,500m run. So instead of aiming to qualify in just one of those events at the Olympics, Knight chose to try for both.
“When you work on so many different things, it sharpens your tools,” he said of his training at multiple distances. “In the 5K, I can hold a fast pace for a longer time. But then I’ve also been working hard on my speed to where, that last lap to go, you’re thinking, ‘Hey, I just ran 11-and-a-half laps. I’m sure I can stick it out for one more lap and run fast.'”
Knight’s dual focus paid off. He notched a personal-best time of 3:33.19 in the 1,500m to beat the Olympic standard in May, then run another personal record of 12:51.93 in the 5,000m in the Diamond League in June, finishing just behind his Canadian teammate Ahmed.
The time made Knight the second-fastest North American 5K runner of all time, behind just Ahmed, and gave him the fifth-best mark in the world this year — three seconds behind world leader Jakob Ingebrigtsen of Norway.
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Though he said he was open to doubling at the Olympics, Knight said he’ll only run the 5k this time around: ‘Team Canada made me pick,” he laughed.
With just a few seconds separating him from the top runners in the world at his event, the former Syracuse star has a legitimate chance to make his “unrealistic” goal a reality — even against a star-studded field.
“Once you get to a certain level, your competitiveness is unmatched,” he said. “We’re not just going to show up to get 10th place or something. We all want to do something special.
“Right now, I’m focusing on just getting stronger. And then the closer we get to the Olympics, we’ll start working on sharpening that speed to make sure that with those last couple laps to go that I have another gear.”
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