Marathon Trainer Passed Away

Coach Jeong Bong-Su, `the godfather of the Korean marathon`, passed away at Thursday night.

``This is serous! I have tried to find the marathoners like Hwang Young-Jo and Lee Bong-Ju, but I couldn`t. The future of the Korean marathon is very unclear``.

Jeong had been concerned only with the future of the Korean marathon, watching the 2003 Donga Seoul International Marathon held last March.

An unknown sprinter Jeong entered the army during the Korean War in 1953, and undertook the coach of the Army relief corps as a long-term sergeant. And he took charge as coach for the newly-established Kolon marathon team in 1987. Since then, as he found Kim Wan-Ki, Hwang Young-Jo and Lee Bong-Ju, he opened the prime time of the Korean marathon.

Jeong was a man of marathon. He had treated the runners as his own. He had always lived with the marathoners since the establishment of the Kolon marathon team in 1987. He knew everything about the marathoners including even the personality, hobby, food preference, and sleep habit. He seemed to see through their hearts. But his unique leadership would sometimes generate the conflict with the hot-blooded young marathoners.

``Marathon is not the kind of leisure that anyone can enjoy, squandering with friends or paying attention to other stuff. If you waste a day, you should practice intensively for a week to recover your condition. Although I don’t care for the nickname of a `cold blooded` viper, unless I manage the runners for 24 hours, they will see a drop in their performance. Hence, I could not sleep until they went to bed.``

Coach Jeong did not allow an exception to anybody in the training, even if (s)he was a talented runner. Even the natural-born marathoner Hwang Young-Jo had to endure the intensive training beyond imagination. Baffled with the unbearable training, Hwang once told that ``when the cars passed by, I wanted to throw myself under the wheels of cars.

Jeong was committed to his own philosophy on the marathon such as `most important is the indomitable spirit in the marathon,` `the coach should find out the training method suitable to each marathoner beyond the textbook,` and `the coach should never be dragged by the marathoners`.

It was when Hwang Young-Jo retired in 1996, and his disciples including Lee Bong-Ju left his arms in 1999, that Jeong was most grieved and perplexed.

Hwang Young-Jo expressed his grief in the mortuary, saying that ``people used to call coach Jeong a `cold-blooded viper`, but he was a warmhearted person just like a father. I could not forget his tears when I won the silver medal despite the fact that I broke the wall of 2 hours 10 minutes with the record of 2 hours 8 minutes 47 seconds at the Beppu marathon in 1992. Since I became the coach [of the Seoul Olympic Sports Promotion Foundation], I can appreciate the spirit of coach Jeong.

Kim Hwa-Sung mars@donga.com