Be Your Own Vibe | Zee Jenkins On Running, Ambition and Mindset

“Be Thy Own Vibe”: Zee Jenkins Goes Forward by Going Inward

Zee Jenkins was never about giving running anything less than his all. At age 13, with minimal training and no real understanding of what 26.2 miles entailed, he undertook his first marathon. Ever since then, his relationship with the sport has been defined by ambition and a willingness to find out how hard enough he had to go to be “good enough”—to be proud of himself, and to have others be proud of him, and to achieve his goals.

“I just knew that I was going to do it really aggressively,” he recalls. “I was going to go big or go home in life, no matter what.”

Today, now in his mid-30s, Zee is a 57-time marathoner, a board member and coach with the San Francisco Road Runners, and the founder of WīzSport, a sport psychology app that uses reflection to help athletes train and race their best.

Young Age, Big Ambitions

His relationship with athletics started in childhood. With his seemingly endless energy as an elementary schooler, he excelled in endurance activities; by the time he was in high school, he was a four-sport varsity athlete, competing in cross country, wrestling, soccer, and track.

Athletics—specifically distance running—gave him a way of establishing his own identity. “I was a queer kid in rural Appalachia with an eating disorder who just didn’t want to be like everything else that I saw around me,” he says.

As an adult, his eager ambition has sometimes led to burnout. He’s had multiple moments where he’s considered giving up after races or training cycles went wrong. “I’ve full-on stopped running a few times in my life,” he says. But each time, running pulls him back. No other athletic discipline “ever scratches the itch or heals the soul quite like running does,” he says. “It is kind of the most pure form of connection that brings out your soul and connects it to your body. There is always a place for you in running because it is as serious or as silly as you want to make it.”

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Encouraging Others

This belief ultimately led him to join the San Francisco Road Runners, which he initially joined for training partners. Over time, he became a pace group leader, a coach, and a board member. The involvement gives him the opportunity to guide a club of more than 700 runners.

“I need people,” he explains. “Otherwise I would wither on a vine and die if it’s just me.”

Witnessing an influx of young runners join the club in the wake of the COVID pandemic showed him that a lot of enthusiastic newbies had rigid, hyper-intense training mindsets (mostly popularized by influencers and social media). These mindsets made them train too hard too soon and set them up for injury.

He created WīzSport to help runners train more consciously. The app guides them to have a better idea of themselves by combining accountability with a chance for reflection. “Not so I can tell them what their best way of training is, but so that they can explore and understand it themselves and enable it to become an actualized part of them,” he says.

Still Ambitious

While he helps and encourages others, he isn’t slowing down at all on his own goals. He’s currently training for the Boston Marathon, and as recently as last year, his goal was to PR every distance from a mile to a marathon. He didn’t hit the mile or marathon goal, but he did lower his 5K PR from his high school best of 17:12 to 16:07, his 10K best from 36:31 in college to 32:38, and his half from 1:16 to 1:13:48. He considers it a pretty epic year overall despite a couple of misses.

But most of all? He wants to excel while rejecting any kind of rigid formula. “Life is silly and too short as it is,” he says. “Find what works for you. Be your own vibe.”

Follow Zee:

Instagram/Threads: @zeejenks_ / @wizsportapp / @sfrrc

Tiktok: @zeejenks / @wizsportapp

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