Runs in the family: Meet the Kleckers

Words by On team. Photography by: Colin Wong & archive images.

Janis Klecker started running marathons because of a letter in the mail. She was a freshman at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, at the time, and exchanging letters with her mom was just part of life. In 1978, another missive from home dropped into her mailbox. There was nothing exceptional about the letter—for the most part, it was filled with the everyday details of life, updates on the weather in Minnesota, work, and family. But buried among the ordinary rhythms were a few lines that played by a different beat: 

“I'm thinking about training for a marathon. What do you think?”

Mae Horns, Janis’ mother, had gone to watch the women-only Avon International Marathon that spring and felt a stirring in her soul as she absorbed the energy of the runners streaming past her. What was this running thing all about? It was the start of a new era for the sport—in 1972, women were allowed to register for marathons for the first time (although it took a sitting protest at the New York City Marathon before women were allowed to start alongside the men) and in 1977, the first sports bra was invented. 

Horns ended up making her first attempt at 26.2 miles (42.2 kilometers) at Grandma's Marathon, Minnesota, in the summer of 1979. Janis, aged only 19, followed in her footsteps a few months later at the City of Lakes Marathon, now known as the Twin Cities Marathon. Neither of them knew then that they were laying down the first set of footsteps on what would become a gilded path. 

The Kleckers are running royalty. Janis would go on to compete at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. Her husband Barney set the 50-mile (80-kilometer) world record in 1980, and their son, Joe Klecker, a member of the On Athletics Club, added to the legacy when he competed in the 10,000 meters for Team USA at the 2021 Games in Tokyo. 

When we talk about the passing of the athletic torch across generations, we tend to quickly relegate the retiring generation to the sidelines. We allow ourselves to be blinded by the brightness of potential, as we breathe life into the popular sports adage, “An athlete dies twice.” But what if the end of a career can actually be a rebirth?

Janis Klecker

Sometimes retired athletes don’t resemble their former selves. The kinetic energy that almost seems to radiate from world-class performers, once gone, leaves an emptiness behind. As Hemingway, writing about Fitzgerald, so aptly described this physical nostalgia: “he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction, and he learned to think and could not fly anymore because the love of flight was gone, and he could only remember when it had been effortless.” 

It’s immediately clear upon meeting Janis Klecker that she still knows how to fly. She is 61 when we speak, yet projects such strength and energy, even through a Zoom call, that it’s not hard to imagine her in her athletic prime. 

Janis Klecker was part of the first wave of women’s running in America. You can draw a line through history from today’s stars back to the women who toed the line at the 1984 US Olympic Marathon Trials, the first such race for women. Janis was on that starting line—her first of what would ultimately be five Olympic Trial races that she qualified for—alongside soon-to-become legends like Joan Benoit.

Hearing Janis describe that race reminds me of the first day of cross-country practice after summer break. While most of us never stand on the crest of a new era, we all know the thrill of possibility, the electric energy that tastes like hope, nerves, and responsibility.

For the 200 women on the start line that day, they didn’t just carry their own dreams, they carried the dreams of women around the country. From the youngest starter—16-year-old Cathy O’Brien—to the oldest—Sister Marion Irvine, who was in her early fifties—they demanded that women not be seen as weak or mellow, but as strong, capable, and athletic. Janis didn’t compete at the front of the race that day, but she did something more impressive—she helped launch a new era for women’s running. 

Eight years later, Janis was back on another Olympic Trials start line. Her commitment to the sport had deepened over those two Olympic cycles and while she’d just been happy to be there in 1984, in 1992 she was there to compete. It was a drizzly day in Houston, and Janis settled into her rhythm with the lead pack. But at mile 15 (kilometer 24), she got jostled as the group approached a drinks station—in a split second she was face down on the wet tarmac, the heels of her competitors quickly disappearing down the road.

She was helped to her feet by Cathy O’Brien, the same athlete who had been the youngest starter at the 1980 trials. According to a 1992 NY Times article about the race, “O'Brien stopped, stepped back, pulled Klecker to her feet and asked, ‘Are you all right?’ She was. ‘I was shaken but not hurt,’ said Klecker.”

Together, the two runners pulled themselves back to the leaders before O’Brien made what looked like a decisive break, running a 5:29 mile. But Janis stayed patient and reeled her in with a mile to go. 

“I was seeded fourth. No one would've picked me to win that race. I just ran steady and smart and just believed. It was very much a faith-filled event for me, just relying on the strength that I had been given to perform that day,” Janis recounts. 

“When I came down the finish line, knowing that my parents were there and my husband was there, and it was a group of people that had just really helped and supported me along the way [...] people that were praying for me and just cheering me on to cross that finish line first was pretty amazing. That was the dream. Make the team. Make the Olympic team.”

Janis’ mother, Mae Horns, was among that support crowd. And of everyone there, she might have understood better than anyone what Janis’ run that day meant. 

Mae Horns

There’s not much information about Mae Horns on the internet. But Janis paints a vivid picture of her mother. Horns didn’t start running until she was 43, but she quickly became a mainstay of the Minnesota running community. 

That first marathon in the summer of 1979 was just the start. Horns ran races all around the country, often with Janis along for the ride. It’s easy to imagine the two women, traveling and racing together—mother and daughter discovering a pure and fresh passion for the sport. In those early days, it wasn’t about anything more than enjoying the simplicity of running. Enjoying the pre-race dinners, long road trips with nothing to do but talk, and the comforting exhaustion of a race run right. 

“We used to travel. I would just be like, ‘Hey, Mom, I'm running an all-women's race in DC. You want to come?’”

“‘Oh, sure, I'll come.’ And then we ran as a mother-daughter team in several races. She was a good masters runner. She ran a 3:14 marathon in, I can't remember, I think she might have been in her early fifties,” recounts Janis. 

Before the 1992 Trials, Horns joined Janis at a month-long training camp in Malibu, California, that Janis was squeezing in while also working as a dentist.

“I went and stayed in a house on the ocean, which was lovely, with my mom. We had so much fun and we trained. We trained hard and we did long runs. We didn't really train together, because we didn't run the same pace, but we were doing the same kind of workouts.”

Janis spoke about this training camp with clear joy. Of course, the race mattered, but the training camp mattered, in its own way, just as much, maybe even more. The Olympics is such rarefied air that it’s almost ethereal. Its very existence is defined by exclusivity. But the experiences she shared with her mom—following her to marathons, racing side by side and, finally, at the training camp in Malibu—gave Janis her love of the sport. It gave her the oxygen to ascend to its highest peaks. 

When Horns watched Janis qualify for the Olympics in Houston, she wasn’t just watching her daughter succeed. She was witnessing the legacy of her own journey as a runner. It’s apparent that Horns never had the opportunities her talent deserved, but Janis’ running was an extension of hers, a homage to that letter Horns sent to Janis more than ten years earlier. 

Almost three decades later, Janis stood in her mother’s shoes as she saw her legacy given new life through her son, Joe, as he chased his Olympic dream. 

Joe Klecker

By high school, all but one of Janis and Barney’s six children were on the cross-country team. On any given day, five young Kleckers could be found running the roads in and around the almost-overlapping cities of Minnetonka and Hopkins. It was before GPS watches were an essential part of a runner’s kit, so Janis would simply try to keep track by asking them which route they were going on and which direction they were running. 

Three of the children worked at the local running store, so running shoes weren’t in short supply. It’s easy to imagine shoes spilling out of every nook and cranny, discarded post-run by cold, hungry children in inconvenient locations around the house. 

Janis didn’t need to tell Joe and his siblings to run. While Janis’ mom had kick-started Janis’ passion for the sport with a letter, the Klecker children had a front-row seat to the unfolding drama of Janis and Barney’s running careers—more than enough to inspire them to join the show.

“[My mom’s] influence in my life, and just the encouragement, I think really set an example. You don't nag and drag your children to run […] running was in the fabric of our home,” Janis told me. 

But if the fabric laid the foundation, it was the Minnesota winters that added the embroidery. No athlete is forged in the comfort of their home and, while a tough environment is far from a necessary precursor for success, it seems apparent that the Klecker children dodged a common pitfall: expecting success to be easy thanks to their genes.

Barney grew up on a farm in a family of 11. Nothing was given to him. And Janis was working as a dentist, and still pouring her heart into her own running. It wasn’t easy. Janis’ career was punctuated by injuries, and she recalls how she’d aqua-jog and cycle with Joe when he was injured in high school—the hard work didn’t stop even when the bright lights had dimmed and nobody was looking. All the Klecker children learned quickly: If you want to be good, you better get used to putting in the unglamorous work. 

That lesson was never more apparent than when winter rolled around. 

Barney owned a lawn care and snow removal business. When it snowed, the whole family was expected to help with the shoveling. And it wasn’t just for an hour or two, it could be anywhere from four to six hours until 5 a.m. 

“We'd go out, and we'd do it as a family,” Janis explains. “We were part of the shoveling crew and that was hard. It's hard work, and you're tired, and we still had to keep going, because you're just part of the business.”

But, while shoveling snow at midnight isn’t most people’s idea of a fun family bonding activity, there was a deep joy in that shared hard work that made those nights, with just each other and the falling snow, something special.  

“Those were some of the best nights we would spend [... ]. They'd be working together, and then they'd start; one kid would think he was shoveling harder than the other kid, so it wasn't always very amicable,” Janis laughs. 

In Eugene, in the summer of 2021, that commitment to hard work paid off for Joe as he chased his own Olympic dream. It was a searingly hot day in Oregon, with the sun beating down on the newly laid track at Hayward Field. The 10,000 meters is a peculiar kind of race. It often becomes apparent with more than half the distance to run that the majority of the field hold no hope of winning. The track’s geometry is like a giant eye: There’s no place to hide when the gaps open. But rarely do athletes drop out, each continues chasing their shadow. Their goals are enough to drag them round and round the oval. 

It seems to suit Joe Klecker. Peek at his Strava profile, and you’ll see #KleckerMiles make a few appearances. This has become a byword in the American running scene for grit and grind—run lots of miles and run them fast, that’s the Klecker way.

In Oregon, Joe found himself slightly boxed at the bell, back in fifth or sixth place, but as the front two athletes moved, Joe catapulted himself into contention. Watch it back and, as the first three—Woody Kincaid, Grant Fisher, and Joe—round into the home straight, you can see the disbelief of what’s about to happen settle over Joe. He crosses the line, eyes wide open, hands raised to the sky: He’s just become an Olympian.

His whole family was in the stands. But Janis missed most of the race. 

“It is very hard for me to watch him race, because I just pour my heart and soul into it right with him. It really is hard for me to watch any of my kids race, but when Joe was running at the Trials, I can watch some of it, but I just look down and I pray. One of my daughters says, ‘Yep, mom's back there doing the pray and sway.’”

“It brought tears to all of our eyes to see him do what he's worked so hard to do. It was amazing. It gave me an appreciation for what my mom felt when she would watch me race.”

It’s telling that Janis thinks first of her mom when she tells the story of Joe’s race in Eugene. She could so easily have first thought of herself. To bathe in the nostalgia, the yearning for her own glory days. But she doesn’t linger in her memories because, through Joe, she’s still writing new chapters in her running story. 

The Klecker family legacy isn’t like a torch being passed generation to generation, only for the past to be left in the dark. It’s more like a string of lights through the night sky, each generation adding a new link to the chain. What ties them together isn’t just success, although that matters. It’s all the tiny moments of joy and resilience, passion and pain that punctuate a running life. 

Mae Horns gave Janis a deep joy for the sport, and she and Barney passed that on—with the addition of some lessons on hard work and grit—to Joe and their children. Thanks to this gift, each of them has soared to the highest level of running. And they keep that knowledge so close, they never forget how to fly.