Re/Disconnected: Jimmy Whelan

Editor’s note: Three-time Olympian, physiotherapist, crew leader and coach Dave McNeill returns to Tempo Journal. Re/Disconnected will be an occasional series exploring the intersections between a person’s history and their running now. How do events and feelings from the past shape a runner’s character and determination in the present?

Do you remember that scene in Forrest Gump where a young Forrest, corrective braces strangling his legs, is confronted by a band of bullies on bikes and tries to run away? With Jenny screaming in his wake, his knees constricted from bending, Forrest flees from his stone-throwing antagonists. Eventually the braces break off in pieces, and his running morphs from awkward to poetic. He doesn’t just get away; he makes it look easy. 

This is a story about hard things becoming poetic and looking easy.

Back in October last year, on the streets of Valencia in Spain, an Australian professional cyclist turned runner, Jimmy Whelan, suddenly turned heads, running a 61-minute half marathon barely a year after retiring from professional cycling. His run made headlines all over the running and cycling world. Like Aussie AFL stars turned punters in the NFL, Jimmy’s career change was captivating. He was a novelty. Yet, watching him run in online post-race highlight reels revealed a quintessentially poetic stride. 

How hard must it be to not only change sports but to look like a veteran doing it? This is Jimmy Whelan’s story of making the hard look easy. 

It’s a Monday morning in January, and after trying countless different angles and configurations, I’ve managed to tetris my wife’s heavy e-bike into the back of my hatchback. I’ve driven the short commute from home – we’ve recently moved to the Yarra Valley – to meet Jimmy for his recovery run. We’re meeting at the old Seville Railway station, which sits somewhere in the middle of the 40km long rail trail that runs between Lilydale and Warburton. The trail traverses a mix of bushland and farmland, surrounded by mountains to the north; the ranges are a reminder of where we are:the Yarra Valley. We’ve picked a section that takes us through a nice mix of bush tunnels and mountain vistas. Eucalypts tower over us from either side of the trail, with birds in full song. Horses eat grass in a paddock adjacent to the trail head and, being the start of the work week, there aren’t many people about.

Many moons ago, I was a professional athlete meeting Jimmy as a scrawny 15-year-old for the first time. He was in Year 10, barely into puberty; I was preparing for the London Olympics. Jimmy was a runner then, before he turned to the bike. He had joined our club, and we lined up as teammates that day for a cross country race. His coach at the time, my long-time friend Jason, pulled me aside after introducing us and said, “Watch out for this one.”

Over the years, watch I did. We shared the odd run and coffee from time to time. I remember one we had together in Southwest London. It was 2016, and I was now preparing for the Rio Olympics; Jimmy was taking a gap year, slowly acquainting himself with a bicycle. 

Just two years later, he was winning a national title on said bicycle.

Fast forward another eight years. I’ve slowed down now, and he’s sped up. Jimmy’s cycling career has given way to a running career. Returning to his roots, Jimmy is now representing the renowned outdoor brand Salomon. 

Today, I enjoy riding alongside him as he runs. Each pedal stroke on the e-bike is rewarded with a disproportionate level of acceleration. It’s a far cry from the ordeal I experienced getting the bike into my car. What started off hard and awkward is now poetic. I glide along the trail, thick tyres and front suspension shielding my bony bum, electric assistance cheating me of an opportunity to get any form of exercise-induced endorphin hit. 

I’ve brought my camera with me, and Jimmy has kindly indulged my request to “get a cool photo” of him. We stop along a section of the trail backdropped by Mount Toolebewong, with the more famous Mount Donna Buang to its east. The crushed gravel trail is dry, and I want to capture the instant Jimmy kicks up dust and glides over the trail. It seems a fitting tribute to the company now supporting his professional running career, one born on the trail and now making waves in the road-running scene. Right now, Jimmy is surfing the top of that wave. 

The photo kind of works, but not really. The puff of dust Jimmy kicks up is pretty measly. He’s a beautiful mover. He glides over the gravel, barely leaving an impression. I’d expected something moving so quick to kick up a bit more dust. Jimmy doesn’t. All wake, but not much dust. Pardon the cliché, but it’s poetry in motion.

I wonder what hard and awkward things preceded it.

We keep going. Both gliding over the gravel, one of us leaving a little more dust than the other. We talk about the injury he’s returned from, and the one I’m in the thick of. The dulcet tones of Jimmy’s voice are calming. He’s a pretty serene individual. Talking to him, you get the sense that he’d be pretty hard to fluster. During a twenty-odd year career of my own, Jimmy’s unflappability is something I could have used some more of.

I wonder where it has come from. That serene demeanour. The poetry that extends beyond his graceful stride.

So I ask Jimmy about winning, success, failure, and disappointment. His earliest memories are of the latter, not the former. “As a runner, from maybe Year 6 to Year 10, I actually had a lot of potential … but I kept failing … more mentally, actually. I couldn’t handle the pressure,” he says. So I’d have moments in training and races where I’d just start slowing down, not because I was physically exhausted, but because mentally I wasn’t relaxed. That’s something that, as a kid, shaped me to then become a good athlete.”

I wonder about the fate of all young, impressionable people. How long will they persist with something they enjoy or are good at? What happens to the ones who experience success before failure? Or failure before success? Many give up when what once was easy becomes hard. And the ones who fail first? Many simply turn their attention elsewhere.

Jimmy was arguably the rarity. He gained an innate belief and persistence without any early confirmation of his talent.

With age came both mental maturity and physical growth. He got better at dealing with the mental side of things, and his ability to handle that self-imposed pressure improved. Combined with a growth spurt, a positive feedback loop eventually fell into place. “I had a lot of potential and a lot of talent, and the pressure I put on myself to perform [meant that] … when I started to physically mature, I could then put things together, and the nerves went down. I could start actually performing the way I wanted to,” he says now.

Building on significant high school success, he dreamed of competing in the US collegiate system. “That was my big goal,” he says. Until he ran into the next inevitable challenge of any young runner’s career: injury. 

Away on an altitude training camp at Falls Creek, and unable to run, Jimmy could see that college running opportunity slipping away. College recruitment, at times, can be a fickle business. Timing is everything and, in this instance, it cost him. 

But perhaps the timing was fortuitous. With no chance to lace up his trainers, he hopped on his bike and rode up and down the mountain while his peers laboured on the aqueduct trails. “To not achieve that [college running scholarship and to] get injured at Falls Creek, and then start riding my bike, I felt very lost at that time. I didn’t really know what to do with my life.”

The pressure and self doubt of his early teenage years gave way to an uncertainty at the start of his formative adult years. Jimmy recognises working through that helped him work through the uncertainty of injury, and go all-in on the bike. “Failing as a runner in Year 9 … it sounds like a negative thing but, in the end, it was a good thing for me,” he says.

The metaphorical knee braces weren’t off yet though. In reality, Jimmy hadn’t even experienced hard, yet alone poetry. He had some growing up ahead of him.

At the age of 20, he naively signed his first professional cycling contract. 

I remember when I myself was 20, signing a college scholarship and shipping off to the US. In retrospect, I also had no idea what I’d signed up for. I was away from home and family, from everything familiar. I remember arriving and having nowhere to live, knowing no one. I remember the tears, feeling homesick, experiencing the culture shock of a foreign country. No one to lean on, except over a phone.

“When I signed my pro contract and moved overseas, I didn’t really understand what I signed up for,” Jimmy recalls. “I’m glad I didn’t, because I would have been arguing with myself about whether it was the right call. My ignorance was actually really good.

“The amount I learnt in the first two years – I went from being a boy to a man. When you move overseas, you have to deal with everything yourself. When something goes wrong, you’re the only one who can sort it out. That’s one way to grow up fast.”

Listening to Jimmy tell me this was like hearing my own story. I too remember how hard it was, and how much I grew up in the process. 

But professional cycling and college running are definitely not the same thing. Not even close. I had a scholarship guaranteed, irrespective of performance. I was also doing something I’d been doing for years. This was still a new sport for Jimmy. 

There’s riding a bike. But then there’s riding a bike in a peloton down a hill at 75km/h. “I was still learning to race a bike – I came into the sport quite late,” he tells me. “Management saw potential but also a big question mark. I had some good performances, but also crashes.” 

Quite a few crashes, in fact. Which can cause a snowball effect. “The smallest disruption can undo everything,” Jimmy explains. “Suddenly you have a year of no results, and you get a call saying, ‘If this keeps going, you’ll just be another number that didn’t make it.’ To hear that when you’re 20 and living alone overseas – it’s brutal. But that’s the sport. There’s no support system. If you don’t perform, you get replaced.”

Jimmy says all this so matter-of-factly, in the same calm tones he speaks of most things. Still unflappable. It’s hard to ignore the parallels between the way he moves as a runner and the way he has moved through confronting difficult situations, even from such a young age.

Of course, learning to ride a bike was never the hardest part of the gig.

“The most character-building stuff was always related to contracts,” he explains. “The pressure to perform, the risks, the sacrifices you have to make just to be on the start line, to be healthy, to be race-ready – and then to crash, especially in a contract year. You don’t know if your boss is going to give you a job the next year.”

“Doing a lifestyle like that, just to perform at the minimum level, is crazy. The pressure in that sport is like nothing I’ll ever experience again. I hope not, anyway.”

While I’ve experienced many of the same lessons Jimmy has, they probably weren’t so brutal. And they certainly didn’t involve coming off a bike at speed, knowing the impending time on the sidelines might cost you a contract renewal.

Uncertainty is absolutely character building. No question. And it transcends sport and performance. Understanding the background he’s come from, it’s not hard to see where Jimmy’s even keel – his acceptance of uncertainty and the sometimes cruel way the world of elite sport and business work – comes from. 

“You get really good – or you’re forced to get really good – at dealing with those times,” he says.

Imagine for a moment trying to compete with the best cyclists in the world, knowing that if you don’t it can all be taken away. It’s an extreme example of how performance is often the victim of self-sabotage. Where we rob ourselves of our best performance, not because of fitness or ability, but because we expend too much energy feeding our anxieties about what’s already happened, what’s happening around us or what might happen in the future. Trying to control all the things we have no control over. It’s exhausting. It gets in the way of performing. I know too well myself. And it’s no wonder Jimmy hopes to never experience that kind of pressure again either.

Before our Monday run, most of the correspondence I’ve had with Jimmy over the past couple of months has been over WhatsApp, with me in my role as physiotherapist helping him navigate a niggle that appeared at the end of 2025. I remember chatting to him about it and his decision to take a short break and rest it. I also remember him seamlessly shifting his energy from training and performance to filling his cup with all the activities he’d normally put on hold. He showed no anxiety about missing training and losing fitness. He just made a swift disconnect and moved ahead.

It’s never easy letting go of that daily pursuit that gives you purpose. Jimmy is no exception. But where he is exceptional is in making it look easy. It wasn’t always that easy, but he has learnt what to do.

“You have to turn all the switches off and learn to be at peace with the situation, which is really hard as an athlete,” he tells me.

And while Jimmy admits he’s not a deep thinker, he does understand that the mind and body are inextricably linked. That each rely on each other to recover fully. It was something he learnt on and off the bike.

“The stress of worrying about [injury] was huge – for recovery and longevity. If you’re not relaxed, your body isn’t happy, and it doesn’t recover as well.”

Already back to 180km training weeks following his recent niggle, Jimmy hasn’t skipped a beat. We finish our run on the trail and head back to my place to clean up and feed up, and for him to prepare for his next engagement: more media work in the afternoon ahead of the official announcement of his joining the Salomon team.

I’m conscious this will probably be the last time I catch up with Jimmy before he heads back overseas in a couple of weeks. I’m a bit sad about that. His poetic stride, the calm way he carries himself through pressures and hardships of performance and elite sport – it’s good for me to be around and soak in, even as a has-been. 

Taking a glimpse into the journey Jimmy has been on, it’s perhaps no surprise he is the way he is. Calm, collected and able to make the hard look easy. He’s had to! He’s been through the hardest of hard. At times, on his own, and a long way from home.

I think about my own ability to be calm and collected. Dialled in. Present. These trails we are on today are a big part of that. There is a quiet here. Where what's outside and what's inside resonate. Creating a feeling of peace.

I wonder how *place* factors into Jimmy’s equation. The Yarra Valley was where his cycling journey began, when injury closed the doors on that running scholarship to the US all those years ago.

“This is the area that taught me to fall in love with cycling. And I don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s different from other places I’ve been in the world,” he says. 

“Back when I was riding, when I got overwhelmed with performance pressure, I’d do these long rides through certain places that I was living at the time. And I’d be three to four hours out in the middle of nowhere, completely by myself. No one would know where I am. And I’m just completely alone and completely in the moment. Being back here in the Yarra Valley, it’s that same feeling, with the trees, and the mountains on the horizon – it’s pretty nice.”

It’s a reminder that the energising power of solitude sometimes comes more from place rather than from being on one’s own. And that there are many places to find it.

The next place Jimmy is off to is Barcelona. In recent years, between all the cycling training camps and now the run training camps, it’s been his home away from home. And while it’s a far cry from the Yarra Valley, it offers something else so important to his ability to dial in. 

“Cycling taught me that your existence has to be simple,” Jimmy offers. “You need a routine. Living in Barcelona makes it easier to focus. [With less social responsibilities, there are] no dinners, no distractions. When I trained for Valencia [where he ran his now infamous 61-minute half marathon], I did the same routine every day for weeks. That uninterrupted consistency leads to good races.”

While that simple existence would be a sacrifice for some, for Jimmy, it’s the opposite. “I’m happy that way; it’s rewarding,” he says. “There’s a rhythm, and the days stick together nicely. I’m chasing a level of excellence, and that’s satisfying. 

Jimmy’s most recent quest for excellence came at the Berlin Half Marathon, his first race as a professional runner for Salomon. And while he passed the first 10 kilometres on par with his famous half marathon showing in Barcelona, the wheels slowly came off in the back half and the former cyclist crossed the finish line in just over 65 minutes. “My history suggests my best days come after my worst” was what Jimmy had to say afterwards. There is no reason not to believe that. 

“When you put in sacrifice and work – and it’s quantifiable – it feels good. Running is perfect for that. After being injured, I’ve done two solid weeks and found my mojo again,” he told me back in January. “It’s like a flow state. The body reacts well, the head’s happy, legs are happy.”

The sentiment is reminiscent of the monk-like attitudes espoused by the great Eliud Kipchoge. He’s a runner with probably more money than he’ll ever need, yet six days a week for most of the year he lives in a training camp, sharing not only miles but also cooking, cleaning and doing chores and simple daily tasks many others would pay someone else to do. Kipchoge could do the same, but he doesn’t. Nor does Jimmy.

It would be easy to throw cynicism at Jimmy’s new professional running career. It has seemingly eventuated off a single half marathon performance.  Indeed, his recent relaunch in Berlin wasn’t pretty. It’s natural to wonder, can he hit that Valencia time again? Can he go faster? Can he produce an equivalent performance over the marathon? After all, cycling and running are pretty different. 

But in his favour, if you’ve heard Jimmy’s own assessment of his running prospects, you’ll have heard him reference the comparatively much larger training volumes his body is used to compared to most elite runners. There’s no doubt of his ability to handle a big work load.

But I feel it’s a set of more intangible qualities that assure him much more success than his work ethic and load tolerance. The stuff you can’t teach. The stuff you learn when you’re 20 years old, wading water in the deep end, forced to grow up, with no alternative. The ability to calmly negotiate your existence on the doorstep of injury. To disconnect and reconnect without overthinking it. The joy that comes from simple living, from routine and rhythm.

It’s all the hard stuff Jimmy’s done, the stuff he now makes look so smooth and easy, that I think bodes well for his next start line.