I was editing on April 29, 2026, and I received a comment from one Robin Wolaner. Ms. Wolaner noted that Runner’s World was not the beginning of her media journey and, quite frankly, that she did not think very highly of the article’s focus. I thought that, after 19 years in the archives, this was the first time the article had a note, so I am reposting with her comment. Thanks, Robin.
My feelings for Bob Anderson have not changed. It was my first real job post-college, and for better or worse, it put me into the media world where I have spent the last 46 years. I am grateful to Bob Anderson for giving me a shot. RW changed my life, in all seriousness.
Originally published in 2007.
While there may have been earlier magazines about running in the U.S., Runner’s World magazine founder Bob Anderson was the man who truly helped make running big-time. I have a copy of the first Runner’s World magazine, which featured a shoe review by Jeff Johnson, then an employee of Blue Ribbon Sports….
Bob Anderson was a pretty good high school runner in his day, who dropped out of college with the idea to start a running magazine. His cohort in this adventure was none other than Joe Henderson, who had been writing for Track & Field News at the time.
I started reading Runner’s World in 1973, and began working there in the summer of 1982. By this time, RW was in its first heyday. The magazine had grown from several thousand subscribers to nearly 400,000 by 1982.
Bob Anderson was an innovator. I use the term now, “entremanure”. This is not a derogatory term. Please let me explain. An entremanure, as opposed to an entreprenuer, is a person who is willing to pick up and try something, actually try an alot of things, and see what works and what doesn’t. What does not work, goes bye-bye. What does work is expanded on and thrown to the waiting crowd again, to see if it works.
Let me give you an example. The shoe review was one of Anderson’s developments that he continued to refine over the years. By 1980, the Runner’s World shoe reviews could make or break a company. I remember watching one company owner after another come to Bob’s office, show him the new product, and asking for his comments.
Bob Anderson was, in my mind, a complex individual. He was a runner thrust into a business role. He was proud of his development of RW, his team, and his company, but he really did not know how to show it. He made good hires, great hires, and some terrible hires. Among the best hires were Bob Wischnia, Marty Post, John Brant, and Danny Ferrara. All superb journalists, all developed at RW and its unique culture, and then they went off to their own worlds. Bob and Marty were two of the longest-tenured at RW, surviving the old RW, then the first Rodale version, and finally the newest evolution of the magazines. Wischnia and Post made it past twenty-five years, I believe. John Brant is a fine book writer as well as one of the best sports journalists in our sport, and Danny Ferrara became a managing editor at Worth and, I believe, held a similar title at Outside.
RW, at the time, was one of the best-selling magazines on the newsstand, with sales of 60 percent in some months! One of the innovative ideas that Bob Anderson and his crew brought to the table was the use of two covers. He developed a cover for the newspaper, usually featuring an attractive Hollywood starlet, and then a serious cover for the subscriber copies. It was the beginning of an estrangement between Anderson and his reader, which I do not think Bob ever recovered from. He was aghast that his readers would be upset by such a thing.
RW was the first job out of college for many of us. The sales department was virtually a call room, and there were anywhere from five to eight salesmen at a time, doing mostly cold calls on the phone, and making sensational amounts of money for the time. However, when the sales rep made too much money, it was time for them to be cut back, and we saw the constant moving of sales reps, in and out of the RW offices in Mountain View ( right across from where Silicon Graphics is now located) as a reminder that time in this job was fleeting.
Working in a media culture anywhere is tough. Working at RW in the early 1980s was looked at in longer than dog years. You know, one year of a dog’s life is like seven years for a human. I was told that it was quite similar at RW when I started. I would have to agree: Salespeople made it an average of fifteen to sixteen months, and the editorial staff was half that time. Art people were months, if they were lucky. It was hard, fast-moving, and exhilarating.
For the few of us who were true running geeks, RW was an interesting mix of the sport and business. We could go into Marty Post’s cubby hole and find Athletics Weekly magazines or TFN. We could go see Wischnia and get a good story on some new athlete he had just interviewed. We could visit Dan Gruber or Danny Ferrara and read a letter from a subscriber who regularly sent poems about his happy colon — I am not making this up. My favorite letter, with pictures, was of a guy who felt that guy’s Aerobic clothes were just not innovative enough, so he began wearing spandex women’s fitness outfits to class and, for the life of him, could not understand why he was looked at with less than admiration for his challenging of sports cultural totems at the time.
It was Bob Anderson who gave all of these people their starts in the magazine business. From Robin Wolaner to Rich Benyo, from Bob Wischnia to Bruce Morrison, to countless thousands of others.
Bob Anderson’s fatal flaw? He did not want to see negatives or challenges. As George Hirsch was developing a wonderfully iconic magazine called the Runner, Bob Anderson refused to give him or his title the time of day.
The feud between Runner’s World and Nike, which dated back to shoe reviews in the late 70’s, was not settled under Anderson’s watch and cost him not only millions of dollars in advertising but was also one of the primary factors in the success of Runner magazine. As soon as the ink was dry on the RW-Rodale sale, Nike was on the phone, working on getting advertising into the title. This had been a feud between Bob Anderson and Phil Knight, and neither man would back down. As I was the one taking the phone calls from Nike when they inquired about advertising dates, I was shocked at how quick (this was now 1985), the word had gotten out about the sale, but also fascinated with NIke’s desire to return to a book that they had abandoned for five years.
Bob loved the idea that his magazine could make or break brands. Hind sports, the real developers of sports tights, had worked with Gary Goettelmann, a Santa Clara running store owner, on the product in the late seventies. Hind became a real player in the apparel industry thanks to Runner’s World. Brooks, Saucony, New Balance, the brand names are countless (remember Osaga?), that came through the doors in Mountain View.
It was the best of times, it was the only time. RW, in the seventies and early eighties, was a camel with a heavy load on his frail back. The pressure from many things, competition, the changing media landscape, the drop in the popularity of running, the aftermath of the 1984 Olympics, which really depressed the sport of running, the death of Jim Fixx, and the personal tragedies in Anderson’s life forced him to sell RW, his baby, to Rodale Press.
By the time Rodale Press purchased RW, World Publications was down from 160 to about 50 employees. Six employees went with Rodale to work on RW. That was the fall of 1985, and I stayed around through November 1986.
I would never have had my career without Bob Anderson starting Runner’s World and recognizing the need for runners to read about themselves and others in their community. While things change, the culture has stayed pretty constant. Bob Anderson read that cultural tidal wave of running, grabbed hold of it, rode it for nearly 17 years through many changes, and gave us a true cultural icon. He also gave many of us our starts in this business.
To that end, and for that start, I thank Bob Anderson.