I was editing on April 29, 2026 and I got a comment from someone Robin Waller. Ms. Wallner noted that Runner’s World wasn’t the beginning of her media journey, and frankly, she didn’t think much of the article’s attention. I thought this was the first time the article had been noted after 19 years in the archives, so I’m reposting it with his commentary. Thanks, Robin.
My feelings about Bob Anderson have not changed. It was my first real job out of college, and for better or worse, it launched me into the media world, where I’ve spent the last 46 years. I am grateful to Bob Anderson for shooting me. RW changed my life, seriously.
Originally published in 2007.
Although there were earlier running magazines in the US, Bob Anderson, founder of Runner’s World magazine, was the man who really helped make running big time. I have a copy of the first Runner’s World magazine that 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 of ​​starting a running magazine. His crew on this adventure was none other than Joe Henderson, who was writing for Track & Field News at the time.
I started reading Runner’s World in 1973 and started working there in the summer of 1982. At the time, RW was in its prime. In 1982, the magazine grew from a few thousand subscribers to nearly 400,000.
Bob Anderson was an innovator. I now use the term “entrepreneurship”. This is not a derogatory term. Please allow me to explain. An entrepreneurshipunlike him entrepreneur, is someone who is willing to pick up and try something, actually try a lot of things and see what works and what doesn’t. What doesn’t work, says goodbye. What works is expanded and thrown back to the waiting crowd to see if it works.
Let me give an example. The revision of the shoe was one of Anderson’s developments that he continued to refine over the years. In 1980, Runner’s World shoe reviews could make or break a company. I remember watching company after company owner come into Bob’s office, show him the new product and ask for his comments.
Bob Anderson was, in my opinion, a complex individual. He was a runner cast in a business role. He was proud of the development of RW, his team, and his company, but he really didn’t know how to show it. He made good hires, great hires and some terrible hires. Top hires include Bob Vishnia, Marty Post, John Brant and Danny Ferrara. All great journalists, all developed at RW and its unique culture, and then they went into their own worlds. Bob and Marty were two of the longest tenures at RW, surviving the old RW, then the first version of Rodale, and finally the newest evolution of the magazines. Wischnia and Post are over twenty-five years, I think. John Brant is a great book writer as well as one of the best sports reporters in our sport, and Danny Ferrara became an editor at Worth and I believe had the same title at Outside.
RW was one of the best-selling magazines on the newsstand at the time, selling 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 designed a newspaper cover, usually featuring an attractive Hollywood star, and then a serious cover for subscribers. That was the beginning of an estrangement between Anderson and his reader that I don’t think Bob ever recovered from. He was appalled that his readers would be offended by such a thing.
RW was the first job out of college for many of us. The sales department was practically a call room, and there were five to eight salespeople at a time, mostly making cold calls on the phone and making sensational money for their time. However, when a sales rep made too much money, it was time for them to lay off, and we saw the constant movement of sales reps in and out of the RW offices in Mountain View (just across the street from where Silicon Graphics is now) as a reminder that this job’s time was fleeting.
Working anywhere in the media culture is tough. By the early 1980s, working at RW was considered longer than dog years. You know, one year of a dog’s life is like seven years of a human’s life. I was told it was pretty similar on RW when I started. I had to agree. salespeople averaged fifteen to sixteen months, and editorial staff half that time. Art people were months, if they were lucky. It was hard, fast and exciting.
For the few of us who were true running geeks, RW was an interesting mix of sport and business. We could go into Marty Post’s little hole and find Athletics Weekly magazines or TFN. We could go see Vishnia and get a good story about a new athlete he recently 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’m not making this up. My favorite picture letter was from a guy who felt that boy aerobics clothing wasn’t innovative enough, so he started wearing women’s fitness clothes to class and couldn’t, for the life of him, understand why he was less admired for his challenges to sports cultural totems.
It was Bob Anderson who gave all these people their start in the magazine business. Since Robin Waller From Rich Benyo to Bob Vishnia to Bruce Morrison and countless thousands more.
Bob Anderson’s fatal flaw? He didn’t want to see negativity or challenges. When George Hirsch was developing the wonderfully iconic magazine called The Runner, Bob Anderson refused to give him or his title the time of day.
The dispute between Runner’s World and Nike, which began in the late ’70s over shoe reviews, was not resolved with Anderson’s attention and cost him not only millions of dollars in advertising, but was one of the main 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 to get the ad into the headline. This was a feud between Bob Anderson and Phil Knight, and neither was going to back down. Since I was the one taking the phone calls from Nike when they inquired about ad dates, I was shocked at how quickly (it was now 1985) word of the sale spread, but I was also fascinated by Nike’s willingness to return to a book they had abandoned for five years.
Bob liked the idea that his magazine could make or break brands. Old Sports, the true developers of athletic tights, worked with Gary Goethelman, owner of the Santa Clara store, 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, brand names are countless (remember Osaga) that came through the doors of 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 its emaciated back. The pressure of many things, the competition, the changing media landscape, the decline in popularity of running, the fallout from the 1984 Olympics that really depressed the sport of running, the death of Jim Fix and personal tragedies in Anderson’s life forced him to sell RW, his baby, to Rodale Press.
By the time Rodale Press bought RW, World Publications had dropped from 160 to about 50 employees. Six employees went to work at RW with Rodale. That was the fall of 1985 and I stayed there until November of 1986.
I would never have had the career I had if Bob Anderson had started Runner’s World and realized that runners needed to read about themselves and others in their community. Although things are changing, culture has remained fairly stable. Bob Anderson read that cultural tidal wave of running, caught it, rode it through many changes for nearly 17 years, and gave us a true cultural icon. He also gave many of us our start in this business.
To that end, and for that start, I thank Bob Anderson.
