Geoff Thurner always imagined himself surrounded by highly trained athletes, Olympic gold medals and the intensity of athletics.

His love for running started in the fall of 1991 at Indiana University, where he walked on the cross country and track and field team. After a year with the varsity team, seeing the commitment and talent level of Olympians, Thurner turned to refocusing on running on a more personal level.

“I’m a very active person,” he said. “We’re always driven to try to do greater things, and so for me I wanted to be around the best in college athletics and help share their successes and dreams and how hard they work.”

Now in his ninth year here, he’s surrounded by students as a communications specialist for the Jordan College of Agricultural Sciences and Technology.

“By the time I had turned 24 years old in 1996, I was still loving trail running and had raced 10 marathons,” Thurner said.

Before arriving here in 2013, he helped coordinate media relations for the University of Oregon athletic teams for 17 years, which led him to meeting his wife who was the marketing director for the athletics department here at the time.

Thurner said that this was the turning point in his life where he figured out that he needed to make a change. “I was realizing that there’s more to life than just working harder to be better. Eventually I needed a step back to calibrate or reorganize my life. I then started working with student-athletes, and that led me to working with students, and to have a more balanced life.”

Although Thurner doesn’t work on trying to achieve an Olympic-level running talent anymore, he still got an opportunity to work on the media services team at the World Athletics Championships that were held in Eugene, Oregon at the end of July. It was the sixth time he has worked at the world's top track and field meet after serving as the only American staff member at similar meets in 2001 (Edmonton, Canada), 2003 (Paris, France), 2005 (Helsinki, Finland), 2007 (Osaka, Japan) and 2009 (Berlin, Germany).

“The best athletes from all over the world come together for this event,” he said. “My job was to make sure that the athletes and the media are taken care of, and to make sure everything works together the best they can.”

Alongside that, he enjoys running and the outdoors, but just in a different way now.

“Today, looking back on my ninth year at Fresno State, I now have a different life and commitments with having a wife and 3- and 5-year-old sons who also love the outdoors,” Thurner said. “That means I have a new dream job because I can still get up early before 5 a.m. and go for trail runs in the foothills or in the mountains on the weekend. I also can still work with our agricultural students during the week and tell their amazing stories and their impressive levels of commitment and dreams for the future.”