by Dave Prokop

In the annals of human achievement, there has never been a story quite like this!

It is Bob Anderson’s story, in this supremely exhilarating, challenging year of his life that has been 2012.

During the week all year long he was a businessman running his Ujena swimwear company in Mountain View, Calif., and striving to bring forth into the world a new running competition and sport he had created, the Double Road Race™. On weekends he was an intrepid explorer into the human spirit and the frontiers of a man’s endurance, perseverance and willpower – his own! – as he boldly undertook the daunting 50-Race Challenge he’d set for himself at the beginning of the year to celebrate his 50 years of running.

People seeing him at work in his successful business or striving to make the Double Road Race™ a reality on the American sports scene would never have known he was simultaneously engaged in running a demanding series of races from one end of the country to the other that would test any man’s endurance. Fellow runners seeing him competing in those races would have no idea this 64-year-old man was simultaneously involved in bringing into existence a new sport he had created.

He was indeed a man living in parallel universes – and totally committed and determined to succeed in both. This Sunday when his long run ends at the Pleasanton Double Road Race™ in the sport he has created, the world will see that he has.      

In the uninterruptible passage of time, when the calendar flipped to 2012, Bob Anderson, who founded Runner’s World at age 17 because of his love of running, would mark his 50^th year as a runner. That’s half a century! The occasion had profound meaning to him, and he settled on a memorable way to celebrate it. He would run 50 races in 50 weeks during the year, covering a total of 350 miles, and just to make it a greater athletic challenge and a truer test of his mettle as a runner, he would commit to averaging under seven minutes a mile for the entire distance. Running 50 races in a year is one thing, averaging under seven minutes a mile – at age 64! – is quite another. Perhaps nothing in his past as a runner suggested he could accomplish something like this, but everything in his heart told him he could. Thus the 50-Race Challenge was born!

At an age when most men his age were entering retirement, Bob Anderson was undertaking the greatest physical and mental challenge of his long running career. Was it simply a celebration, or some subliminal quest for justification? This setting of a physical challenge so repetitively, relentlessly demanding, having to put out such a hard, honest effort, race after race after race after race after race– for each and every time he stood at the starting line and listened for the starting gun he knew he would have to strive to average under seven minutes per mile, lest the possibility of achieving his stated goal slipped away from him. And making the entire endeavor more meaningful, and perhaps inspiring to others who are fitness minded, the entire series of races and the people encountered and stories experienced along the way would be documented in a film, A Long Run (scheduled for release in 2013). Bob Anderson’s son, Michael, happens to be a filmmaker.

Photo: Filmmaker Michael Anderson with Dave Zimmerman and Bob Anderson.  This project has brought a lot of people together.  Dave and Bob had not seen each other for over 40 years.  They were best friends in high school and Dave was there when Bob started Distance Running News that became Runner's World. 

I can not hardly believe that my 50-race challenge is coming to an end this Sunday in Pleasanton at the Double. Here is Dave Prokop's take on the Challenge...
Bob Anderson 12/19/12 3:26 pm

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Fifty races, 50 weeks, seven minutes a mile! Obviously the numbers, sitting there on a printed page or a computer screen, don’t do justice to the magnitude of the challenge or the sheer physical effort and mental concentration required to successfully meet it. Numbers can’t truly tell the story. The story is better told by considering the starting lines toed, the starting pistols answered, the finish lines crossed, the moments of truth faced in an almost endless number of races that took him from one coast to the other and back again, not to mention Hawaii and Mexico. You’ve heard of frequent flyer miles; this was frequent racing miles – and he raced them well, more often than not finishing first in the 60-65 age group…

And during the week he would be back at work running his swimwear company and putting all the elements together for the anticipated debut of his new sports creation, the Double Road Race™.

A man living in parallel universes – and he kept striving, kept moving forward, kept doing his utmost, always thinking of the finish line, in both…

Until the two universes finally merge this weekend in Pleasanton, when he runs the last two races of his 50-Race Challenge at the Double Road Race™ in the new competition and sport he created.

The synchronicity of this is mystical, awesome, profound!

Going into the Pleasanton Double, after 48 races, all of them a concerted, honest effort against other runners in each race but mainly against the clock, always battling that unseen opponent, the clock, as he fought to run each race under seven minutes per mile, often succeeding, sometimes falling short, especially in the longer races, like the 10 mile or the half marathon (his races have all been in the 5K to half marathon range)… going into the Pleasanton Double, where the 10K and the 5K will be his 49^th an 50^th races, he is a mere 33 seconds outside his goal of averaging seven minutes per mile for the entire series. Only 33 seconds! That’s less time than it would take you to read an average paragraph on this page.

Thus, he has to run the 10K and 5K of the Double 34 seconds under seven-minute-per-mile pace to achieve his goal. In other words, he has to post an aggregate time for the two races of 1:04:32. 

Can he do it? Of course he can, but he will, in fact, have to run the Double Road Race™ with almost flawless pacing to give himself the best chance of accomplishing his goal. He cannot afford any serious mistakes in pacing or strategy. For, ironically, he would have a much better chance of achieving his goal if his last two races, the 10K and the 5K, were held on separate days, better still separate weeks, rather than back to back as they are in the Double. Now, he will have to show he not only created the Double Road Race™, but he has mastered how to run it properly from a pacing and perseverance standpoint in order to achieve his goal in the 50-Race Challenge. That’s how interconnected the two now are. Two but not two. The two have now become one.

It’s only fitting perhaps. For he has admitted that if it wasn’t for the 50-Race Challenge, he doesn’t think he could have brought the Double Road Race™ into existence as a real and legitimate event, as a new sport. That’s how much energy and purpose the 50-Race Challenge contributed to his life, and he used that in every appropriate way to bring forth the Double Road Race™. He may have been living in parallel universes, yes, yet they were closely connected – through the man at the center.

“The catalyst behind the Double was the 50-Race Challenge,” he has said. “Without the 50-Race Challenge, we wouldn’t be here.”

Yet even if he falls short of his goal in the 50-Race Challenge, and if he does it won’t be by much, it still will have been an amazing journey, an awesome exploration, into the human spirit and a man’s capacity to endure, persevere and aim high, perhaps higher than anyone thought he could or should.

The long run ends, a new sport begins…

When was the last time a runner of any age, let alone a 64-year-old, concluded a 50-race series like this and saw the birth of a new sport he created at the very same time and place. The answer is – never! Bob Anderson stands alone in that respect.

Five days after the Pleasanton Double, on Dec. 28, Bob Anderson turns 65, knowing that among all the previous years of his life as a runner, this last one, the 50^th, was a very good year. The best year.

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For more details on Bob Anderson’s 50-Race Challenge and the movie documenting it, A Long Run, go to www.alongrun.com