By Paul Hof-Mahoney
December 9, 2024
Isaiah Jewett, a 2021 Olympian for Team USA in the 800m, has parted ways with coach Jebreh Harris and has begun training with a new coach, Chris Woods.
Jewett, who began working with Harris when he took a coaching position at USC in 2020, will now be training alongside 2023 800m World champion Marco Arop in Starkville, Mississippi, where Woods is the head coach at Mississippi State.
Jewett has yet to make another national team after making Team USA at the tail end of his redshirt senior year for USC in 2021 and reaching the Olympic semifinal. As a 2024 campaign where he dealt with early-season injuries wore on, Jewett knew that a change was needed.
“Regardless of if I made the team or not, I realized I’m not only not performing how I want, I’m not presenting myself how I want to be,” Jewett tells CITIUS MAG. “I wanted to get to that level of living my life how I wanted to… I feel like I was forcing a reality that everybody saw in the way that they are successful, and I was following that plan. You know, that’s half of it, but the other half is seeing how I want to live my life because I’m the only one who has to live with it at the end of the day.”
Jewett felt that a big struggle throughout 2024 was living up to mounting internal pressure. After his elimination in the semifinals at the U.S. Olympic Trials in June, Jewett was able to use that loss to gain perspective on his career.
Kevin Morris / @KevMoFoto
“I was so into this fixed mindset that I had to be in so much pain to perform well,” he said. “I understand that you have to work hard to get to where you want to be, but at the end of the day it’s more of believing in yourself and having a little bit of fun. I feel like I missed out on a lot of that in 2024 because I was so focused on just getting my goal.”
Jewett and Arop are currently training in Utah for an altitude camp, a first for Woods and his athletes. The pair has been at altitude for about a month and are in what Jewett described as a “trial and error” phase. Given his collegiate coaching responsibilities, Woods is not in Utah.
This partnership was first proposed in Tokyo, just after the Olympic 800m semifinals, where both Jewett and Arop failed to advance to the final.
“Me and Marco cooled down together, and when we were cooling down, ironically, we were talking about training together,” he said. “We were just talking about it, it didn’t really go any further from the cooldown, but that thought really resonated in my mind. If I’m being completely honest, my immediate thought was, ‘How cool would it be to have a Goku-Vegeta situation?’ We’re playing off each other’s strengths and developing each other’s skill.”
The new training partners come at the 800m from different skill sets. Jewett is more in the mold of a 400m-800m runner, whereas Arop has more of a strength background and will be racing four 1500s with Grand Slam Track in 2025. Jewett’s sprint side was amplified in the last several years by training alongside sprinters like Michael Norman and Rai Benjamin in Quincy Watts’s and Joanna Hayes’s groups in Los Angeles.
“There’s a lot of stuff where we don’t really do the same types of workouts,” he said of training with Arop. “It is also a change for me because I’m developing more of the strength as a whole... When it comes to the runs, he’s teaching me a lot more. When it comes to the speed stuff, I’m helping him out as well… I feel like I’m learning a lot more about the mileage side.”
Kevin Morris / @KevMoFoto
The last 800m race Jewett ran in 2024 was at the Olympic Trials, and in the months following, the international landscape of the event changed dramatically. 10 of the 20 fastest times ever were run between July 7th and August 22nd. With his new training partner playing a large part in that late-season surge, Jewett is excited to get back on the track, when he previously thought there was “no wiggle room for the 800m in terms of getting faster.”
If there’s one thing in particular that Jewett’s eager to do in 2025, it’s to go head-to-head with Arop (who was sitting across the kitchen table from him during our interview).
“Especially after training with Marco for so long now, I just want to race him,” he said. “I want to race my training partner and at least attempt to beat him. That would be a perfect anime moment, where you can verse your training partner and see who finishes on top.”
Looking beyond his early season goals of simply racing Arop, Jewett has his sights set on something bigger in September.
“I know Marco’s here and he’s gonna hear this, but you can listen because I’ve told you this multiple times,” he said with a grin. “A successful 2025 is: make it to Worlds, get to the final, and then beat Marco. He’ll come right behind me.”
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Paul Hof-Mahoney
Paul is currently a student at the University of Florida (Go Gators) and is incredibly excited to be making his way into the track and field scene. He loves getting the opportunity to showcase the fascinating storylines that build up year-over-year across all events (but especially the throws).
