Bob Anderson

(This piece is for my latest book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from August 1996.)

HE STARTED THIS. His is a name you don’t hear much anymore. You never see it in the magazine he founded. Yet everyone who works there now owes him a debt, as does the whole sport.

Thirty years ago as a high school boy in Kansas, Bob Anderson wanted to read more about his favorite sport, so he started a magazine, Distance Running News. It took so much of his time and attention that he dropped out of college. Later he moved to California and changed the magazine’s name to Runner’s World.

I joined him then as his first editor. We stayed together, in several capacities, for most of the next 15 years. In 1985 he sold the magazine to Rodale Press and apparently dropped out of the sport.

Since then I haven’t seen or talked with Bob Anderson, but I’ve often wondered how he is doing since leaving running publishing. As the oldest and biggest of

the sport’s magazines marks its 30^th birthday, you might also wonder about its founder. Mark Winitz answers this in The California Schedule magazine.

Now 48, Bob manufactures and markets women’s swimsuits from RW’s old hometown of Mountain View, California. He runs as he never did while owning the running magazine.

“When I was involved in the business of RW, I never had the time to train,” he tells Winitz. His usual week was a Sunday race and nothing else.

“Now I have a lot more time for my own running,” he says. “I haven’t missed a day of running in over three years.” He recently broke 36 minutes for 10K and is approaching 17 minutes for 5K.

Only when he talks about racing does Bob’s old hard edge show. The competitive juices that he once funneled into the running business now go into his races.

“I think jogging is boring,” he says. “If I were a jogger, I wouldn’t bother with the activity at all.

“To me running has always been a sport rather than just recreation. That’s why I was always willing to promote anything that got people into racing.”

Bob Anderson promoted well. His magazine gave the developing sport its first and longest-lasting national voice, for which we can thank him. He gave me a career, for which I thank him.

UPDATE. I’m now in semi-regular touch with Bob. In his mid-60s he still races, hard, and he’s back in the running business – as creator of the Double Road Race series.

He publishes a magazine that supports this “new sport” that combines two back-to-back races (usually 10K and 5K) with a “halftime” rest break between.

In 2012 Bob celebrated 50 years of running by completing 50 races, at an average pace of 7:00. A movie titled “A Long Run” documented this effort. As an encore he ran his first Boston Marathon in 2013.

The magazine that he founded turns 50 next year.

[Hundreds of previous articles, dating back to 1998, can be found at joMany books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. Latest released was Going Far. Other titles: Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Memory Laps, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]