Richard Benyo is the editor of Marathon & Beyond, a bimonthly magazine.  He is  the author of more than 20 books, most of them in the areas of fitness, health, and running. His newest running book is Timeless Running Wisdom.  He was a newspaper editor (1968-72), editor of Stock Car Racing Magazine (1972-77), executive editor of Runner’s World Magazine (1977-84), and running and fitness columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle (1985-90).

Rich is the veteran of 37 marathons and in 1989 along with running partner Tom Crawford, became the first maniacs to run from Badwater in Death Valley to the peak of Mt. Whitney and back, a distance of 300 miles. 

Rich is the president of the board and co-race director of the Napa Valley Marathon and has been on the board of directors since 1985. He is also the 1998 winner of the RRCA journalist of the year award. 

In early 2005 RunningUSA inducted Rich into its Hall of Champions.   Rich and his wife Rhonda currently live in Forestville, Sonoma County, California; in their spare time, they are attempting to learn to sail on the San Francisco Bay.

Rich and I first spoke in 1977.   I was looking for a special person to take over the head editorial spot at Runner's World.  After three hours I knew I found the right guy.  I told Rich the next step would be to come to Mountain View to close the deal.  He did and we worked together for seven years.  As a bonus we became good friends.  It was a sad day when I needed to sell the magazine in 1984.  We had to go our own ways until we crossed paths two years ago in Forestville.  We spent over three hours together having dinner and drinking lots of wine.    We will be stopping by en route to the Ave of the Giants again this year too.  (Interview by Bob Anderson) 

1. When did you start writing? What was the first article you had published?
My cousin and I started—and wrote for—a little school newspaper at St. Joseph’s School in Jim Thorpe, PA where we grew up. We started the paper in the seventh grade. It lasted two issues. When we wrote an editorial for the third issue criticizing how the basketball coach picked his team, we were shut down by the nuns. In high school I published Galactic Outpost, a science-fiction fanzine. My first article published in a professional magazine came in 1968 when I wrote a story on gun safety for the Pennsylvania Game News; that was the same time I began working for the Times-News, a local newspaper in central-eastern Pennsylvania.

2. When and why did you get interested in running?
My interest in running came as a means of self-preservation. I wasn’t especially fast, but I found that if I could get a three-step advantage on the bigger kids, I could out-last them and thereby avoid getting beaten up. We did not have track in high school, although we did have an annual intramural track meet where I ran the longest distance offered: a sort of 5/8^th of a mile: two laps around the rutted road that circled the football field. I ran cross-country in college.

3. What was your life like before joining Runner’s World in 1977?
As editor of Stock Car Racing Magazine, I spent more than half of my weekends on the road following the stock car circuit, smoking cigars and drinking beer and inhaling exhaust fumes. I managed to put on some serious weight, but by 1977 I’d begun losing weight through a combination of better diet and getting in some jogging three or four days a week—when I wasn’t on the road.

4. How different would your life be now if you had stayed at Stock Car Racing Magazine?
Although I still follow auto racing, I suspect that spending so many decades doing the same thing so intently would have eventually gotten to me.

5. How did you land the executive editor job at Runner’s World?
While I was covering stock car racing, I met Hal Higdon, who besides doing a lot of writing about running, was also writing auto racing books, such as Six Seconds to Glory and Showdown at Daytona. I used to buy stories from Hal for Stock Car Racing Magazine and we began to hang around together when our paths crossed at Daytona or Martinsville or Talladega. He knew that I’d ran in college and when he heard that an opening was coming at Runner’s World, he put in a good word for me. I interviewed with Bob Anderson over the phone—a three-hour phone conversation, as I recall; I had to excuse myself at one point to take a bathroom break—and was later flown to Mountain View for a face-to-face interview, where I recall we drank a lot of wine.

Photo: Passing the baton to Bob Anderson in the Corporate Cup Relays - this was one of the events created by Bob.

6. What was it like working at Runner’s World?
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Running was growing so rapidly and it was exciting being in the middle of all that, but at the same time, the deadlines we had to meet to keep up with the growth of the magazine were exhausting. I can still remember the last week in 1978 when we were all involved in putting on National Running Week while at the same time trying to get out the next edition of the magazine. We were spending the days at the seminars and out running with our VIP guests (I remember I ran 97 miles that week, my largest running week until I began training for Death Valley 10 years later) and the nights at the office trying to get the magazine put to bed. Fortunately we were a lot younger then; to try something like that today would be to commit suicide.

7. How about your personal running at that time (1977-84)?
I started out at the Sunday morning Fun Runs that RW put on. I remember keying off a certain guy who always showed up, and gradually, week by week, finishing closer and closer to him until I eventually beat him. From there I kind of did the typical thing: I raced way too much. I did eight marathons and two 50-milers between April and December of 1978. Working at the magazine helped my running enormously, both because we put on the Corporate Cup, so we had our team that went to the track every Thursday afternoon for speed work, and it was always easy to find somebody to run with. The most fulfilling point in that process was in October of 1980 when I finally broke three hours in the marathon.

8. Did you think rating running shoes was a good idea?
On many levels it was. The running shoe companies were trying all sorts of things to improve their shoes in those days—some of which worked, some of which did not. As an example, Puma came out with a shoe with little round nubs on the soles that were fine in dry weather, but the first time it rained, it was like running on ice skates. By rating the shoes, the magazine was doing a lot of research the individual runner could not afford the time or the money to do. I think it inspired many of the shoe companies to improve the breed. But it was sure a lot of work behind the scenes to put together the annual shoe issue.

Photo: Running with Hal Higdon in the Boston Marathon in 1978.

9. Nike pulled out $1 million of advertising in RW because they didn’t like the way their shoes were ranked. What was your take on this?
The whole thing seemed, at the time, to be incredibly silly. Nike didn’t like how their shoes were ranked in the annual shoe survey and claimed that we had “fixed” the results to ding them, which makes absolutely no sense. If we were going to “fix” the results, we would have “fixed” the results in Nike’s favor, because at the time Nike was by far our largest advertiser. Why would we plot to screw our largest advertiser? Hell, Blue Ribbon Sports (the forerunner of Nike) was RW’s very first advertiser.

10. What was your involvement with Runner’s World after Rodale Press purchased the magazine?
After November of 1984, I was no longer involved in the magazine, other than once in a while to drop Amby Burfoot a note.

11. When did you run your first marathon? Which race was it? Did you enjoy the experience?
The first marathon I ran was Boston in 1978. I didn’t intend to run it. I was in training to run the 1978 Avenue of the Giants as my first marathon; Avenue was scheduled two weeks after Boston. But while we were at Boston, doing the magazine’s annual Open House (which predated marathon expos), Larry Tunis, our advertising director, who had done several marathons by that point, talked me into jumping into Boston and running it with him. Hal Higdon was there and he gave me some advice about how to pace myself, but Hal was nursing a bad Achilles tendon. I started at the back of the field and dropped Larry at Cleveland Circle and caught a hobbling Hal around the Citgo sign. I did a 3:29 that day, and remember the experience as fulfilling—but dumb. I ran Avenue two weeks later in almost the same exact time, but aching all over because I didn’t give myself time to come back from Boston.

12. When and why did you become interested in ultras?
Ultras just seemed to be the next step. And they were fun in a perverted sort of way. And there were such wonderfully eccentric characters doing ultras. I did two 50s in 1978. One was the AAU 50-Mile Championships on the track at Santa Monica, which I dropped out of around 35 miles, after having gotten virtually no sleep the night before. And the second was the Cow Mountain 50 that fall in Ukiah, California, which was organized by Gordy Ainsleigh, who originated the Western States 100. I recall we camped out at the lake Friday night and cooked spaghetti over a camp fire; we started 45 minutes before the horses and Gordy had dumped the Body Punch (RW’s version of Gatorade) into horse troughs along the way and we had to move horse whiskers out of the way so we could dip our bottles in. When the race was over, they had a big old hoe-down with a country and western band where they served steaks as big as man-hole covers. Gordy was into ceramics at the time, and he made Studrunner awards for anyone who finished the race under 10 hours; I made it by 90 seconds. I still have my Studrunner award; it’s a giant ceramic dildo.

13. Tell us about your Marathon & Beyond Magazine. When and why did you start it?
It’s all Runner’s World’s fault. Back in those crazy years RW used to do its annual marathon issue in January. But marathoning became so huge that the January issue could no longer hold it all, so it became a two-part special section that ran in the January and February issue. As a way of releasing some of the stress of all those pages about marathoning, I had the bright idea to propose we do a quarterly magazine dedicated to marathoning, The Marathoner. Bob Anderson, being a marathon junkie himself, thought that was a swell idea, so in the spring of 1978 The Marathoner debuted. Unfortunately, around the same time, we also launched On the Run, a fortnightly tabloid that was supposed to be like the Rolling Stone of running. Both magazines were joined at the hip as far as the profit and loss statements went. On the Run, from the start, was expensive to do (It required a whole separate staff from RW’s, while The Marathoner was done using RW staff.), and eventually had to be deep-sixed and The Marathoner sunk with it.

Marathon & Beyond is the bastard child of The Marathoner. I’d always been deeply disappointed that The Marathoner died (It went through only five issues.), so when I had the opportunity to pitch Marathon & Beyond to Human Kinetics in 1996, I did that enthusiastically. The first issue came out in January of 1997 but then a similar thing to what happened at RW happened at HK: two of the major money-earners in their journals division (both dedicated to strength training) were pulled and that had a profound influence on the bottom line at HK, so they decided to kill M&B at the end of 1998, but Jan Seeley (then the managing editor) and I decided to take over the magazine and keep it going, which we’ve managed to do all these years. So the bastard son of The Marathoner, lives on…

14. You personally have done some amazing feats. Which one stands out in your mind and why?
That would have to be Tom Crawford and I being the first crazies to run from Badwater in Death Valley (lowest point in the Western Hemisphere and hottest spot on Earth) to the peak of Mt. Whitney (at 14,454’, the highest point in the Lower 48) and back, roughly 300 miles. I had been in Death Valley to cover the early attempts at running the one-way course, and became fascinated by it. At a picnic at Crawford’s, where way too much beer flowed, I made the observation that once you’ve run the one-way course, you have to come down off the mountain on foot of Whitney Portal, so you’ve already done 12 miles of the return trip, so why not just keep going? Crawford and I decided, fueled by too much brew, that the following summer, we’d be the first to ever do the out-and-back. Unfortunately, some of the other people overheard us, so we had to follow through and do it—which we did in the summer of 1989. And which I did again in 1991 and 1992. None too bright.

Photo: Rich and Rhonda (black jacket) at a recent race expo.

15. How involved is your wife Rhonda in the running world?
She’s very involved. She manages to train wisely and well and typically qualifies for Boston every year. But she was led astray back in the good old days. She did triathlons in the early days of that sport, she did ultras (Western States 100), and she followed in the crazy footsteps of Crawford and Benyo when, in 1995, she became the first woman to do the Death Valley 300. She’s also been the medical coordinator at the Napa Valley Marathon for more than a dozen years, and she’s the medical officer at the Red Star Ridge (16.5 miles) aid station of the Western States 100.

Rich, I really lik your interview. You have done so much for running over the last 35 years. I am glad to have you as a friend. We will see you at your place in May...
Bob Anderson 2/1/12 12:20 pm

Great photos and article!!
Lisa Anderson-Wall 2/1/12 1:33 pm

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16. Why did you and Rhonda move to Forestville?
We had moved to Napa Valley after leaving the Mountain View/Palo Alto area. Rhonda was working for Kaiser Permanente as a nurse anesthetist and had a long commute. Kaiser began working on opening a hospital in Santa Rosa, so Rhonda got involved in opening the anesthesia department, but she still had a 45-minute commute. When I sat down and did the math about how many hours and days that would involve over the next several decades, we decided to move closer to Santa Rosa, and found a nice place in Forestville, a town of about 1000 residents.

Photo: Rich running the Corporate Cup Relays at Stanford in the early 80's.

17. How much are you running now?
Not as much as I’d like. In the wake of my 1992 Death Valley 300, my immune system was badly broken down, and I made the mistake of having gum surgery not long after that. Between being broken down and breaking loose all the foul stuff we keep hidden in our mouths, I developed a viral cardiomyopathy, wherein my heart muscle was compromised to the point that on each contraction, I was pumping out only 14% of the blood in my heart (normal is about 70%). Naturally, my performance was terrible.

I thought for the longest time that I was just being a wimp in the wake of my third Death Valley 300, but when it didn’t improve, I had myself tested, and the cardiologist was able to pinpoint the problem. By putting me on a relatively-new-at-the-time drug, we were able to bring the ejection up to about 40%, but it’ll never be normal. So, I’ve managed to go from doing 300 miles in a week to alternately jogging/walking about 20-25 miles a week. It’s taken some adjustments in how I look at priorities in life.

18. How many running books have you written? Which one stands out in your mind?
I’ve written seven strictly-running books. The one that stands out is The Running Encyclopedia, which I wrote with Joe Henderson, who was the editor of RW from 1970 to 1977. Collaborations can be difficult, but by incorporating our individual strengths in writing the book, we came out of the experience with a book that, for an encyclopedia, reads well, and Joe and I are actually still talking to each other. It is very flattering when other running journalists mention that they keep the book close to them when they are writing about the history of running.

19. Are you still writing on a manual typewriter?
I still use a Royal standard typewriter for many of the first-drafts of articles and books I write. I find that there is a certain kinetic feedback from the manual typewriter that isn’t there with a computer. And the fact that you can’t hit delete on a typewriter makes you think harder about what you are going to type next. I guess I am something of a luddite in that regard.

20. How much are you writing on an average day? How has this changed over the years?
Between book projects and what I need to write for Marathon & Beyond, I’m writing roughly for an hour a day. Most of what I do in my office is read submitted manuscripts, knock out contracts for articles, plan issues, and do a lot of proofing of articles. I essentially read each article that goes into Marathon and Beyond a minimum of five times: the first time when the submission arrives, a second time if the submission goes into the Possible file, again when I do general editing (from there it goes to a very capable line editor), again in galley proof stage, and then a final time in page proofing. If there is one drawback in this job, it’s that by the end of a long day of proof-reading, my eyeballs are spinning like a pinwheel, and it’s hard to then spend some time in the evening reading for pleasure.

21. How closely do you follow the under-26.2-mile running scene? Has this changed over the years?
There is an awful lot to follow in the 26.2-mile-and-above but I do try to follow the 5,000, 10,000, and cross-country, which I think is the most natural of all racing.

22. How about the marathon and beyond scene?
I follow this pretty much on a daily basis, but growth in both areas has been enormous over the past several years so it is difficult to keep up with everything. The ultra scene has really taken off in the past five or six years. We can remember when there was only one 100-mile trail race (Western States 100); now there are more than 100 100-milers! Pretty incredible. The ultra scene has also changed in that it used to be where tired, washed up old marathoners went to extend their careers. These days there are quite a few young people getting into ultras long before they tire of doing marathons. It’s a pretty exciting time for all aspects of running. I think we all remember the First Running Boom in the late 1970s when we thought that running could never get any bigger than this. Boy, were we naïve.

23. Do you think a sub-two-hour marathon is possible?
The sub-2:00 will depend on how much faster runners can do the 10,000 meters. Since a marathon is essentially four continuous 10Ks, the potential sub-2:00 marathoner will have to be able to run what would today be world-class 10Ks back-to-back. But anything is possible, and today’s marathoners are getting the world-record down faster than most of us thought they would.

Photo: Rich's latest running book.

24. Derek Clayton ran 2:08:34 and held the record for 12 years. Most major marathons today are won in faster times than Clayton’s. What are runners doing today that runners before were not doing?
It seems that the art and science of marathoning has improved dramatically over the past several decades. And, of course, the increase of east African runners has radically changed the whole sport. The African runners are generally born and raised at altitude, they run as part of their lifestyle, and they are incredibly hungry to reap the monetary rewards of modern marathoning. One major win can change—for the better—an entire village, so there is terrific motivation.

I think Derek held his record for so long because he managed to put up such incredible psychological barriers by describing, as often as possible, the ordeal he went through to achieve that outrageous time. Notice that once his time was breached in 1981, the record was pounded down over and over again on a fairly frequent basis. And that certainly is not to take anything away from Derek; he was a fierce competitor who trained with enormous intensity and quantity of miles, but his tales of excreting black bile for days after his record run kind of scared other runners, kind of like breaking the sound barrier: What terrible things will happen to me when—and if—I do break Derek’s time?

25. Does the huge amount of prize money being given out help improve times?
Definitely. It allows runners to be professionals in that they no longer need to hold down a job and train and race in their spare time. Their running is their full-time job. You remember back in the 1970s, almost all of the top runners held down full-time jobs and ran in their spare time. If memory serves correctly, I seem to remember that Billy Rodgers used to have a job pushing corpses around from a hospital to a morgue.

26. What do you think about the big races?
Personally, I never liked them because you were never able to get off the line cleanly and they made it almost impossible to get into an early rhythm. But as a phenomenon and as a draw for new runners—and as a pure spectacle—they are pretty impressive. And, from a race director’s standpoint, I’m major-league impressed with the organization that goes into them.

27. You are involved with the Napa Valley Marathon (as board president and co-race director). How has this marathon changed over the years?
We try to keep Napa as retro as possible. We make a lot of behind-the-scenes changes, but we try to keep it down-home and simple compared to a lot of the other marathons. The one innovation we put in for our 20^th annual running (the 34^th edition will be run in March of 2012) was to introduce a Marathon College the day before the race, where we put together an all-day series of seminars, keynote speeches, panel discussions and such, which has been very popular and which has been copied by several other marathons. For a marathon our size (2500 entrants), the Marathon College is pretty ambitious.

For 2012 we are celebrating the 30^th anniversary of The Duel in the Sun between Alberto Salazar and Dick Beardsley. We invited Alberto to join us, but he wants to stay home that weekend. But we have Joe Henderson acting as moderator for a 90-minute presentation, we have a film of the last 15 minutes of the race, we have Dick Beardsley and his then-coach Billy Squires giving a presentation, which will be followed by Amby Burfoot putting the Duel into perspective. We also have two panels on how to run the course (with grizzled veterans of the race giving advice), a presentation on proper nutrition, etc. While we’ve tried to keep the race itself retro and simple, we try to give our runners a world-class weekend.

28. Do you like the running scene better today than, say, 20 years ago?
Some aspects of the modern running scene have improved, especially in the tech side of it, but also something has been lost: primarily that camaraderie we used to have, that tendency to stay around after the race and have a few beers and socialize. One aspect that I think is tremendously beneficial is the incredible increase of female runners. Some races now have more than half their fields filled with women. That’s a tremendous plus for the sport—and for the women. And for the guys who like fit women.

29. What if anything needs to be changed?
The one major complaint I have is the over-gadgetting of the sport. Too many gadgets for a sport that is essentially this simple: place one foot in front of the other, then alternate.

30. Has your opinion of the Olympic Games changed over the years?
Yes, and not for the good. There are just too many sports being contested in the Olympics these days. I think the whole Olympic movement would be enormously improved if they began systematically removing sports from the Games instead of constantly adding more. If you remember, the original Ancient Olympics had only one event. The Greeks from those days would be appalled to see what the Games have become.

31. Would Steve Prefontaine be pleased with how the running scene has changed?
I suspect he would be very pleased that today you can earn a living by running well. He spent a lot of his time trying to bring that about in his day.

Photo: Rich will always be a kid at heart.

32. You have won several journalist awards. Which one are you most proud of?
That would go back to the auto racing journalism days. On several occasions I won writing awards in the technical category. Now anybody who knows me would be surprised at that, in that I’m one of the only males I know not born with the guy-gene..that gene what gives guys a talent in building or fixing things. To try to make up for it, when I was the editor of Stock Car Racing Magazine, where I stressed coverage of the people in the sport (i.e., Richard Petty, Junior Johnson, etc.), I took great pains to teach myself about various technical aspects of auto racing, and then attempted to translate that into writing an article that literally anyone could follow—simply because I made the subject so simple that even I could understand it.

I won a first-place award in technical writing by explaining how a fuel cell works, in which I went back to the Second World War and traced the fuel cell’s development for bombers and fighter planes to prevent the plane from bursting into flame when it was hit by enemy fire and brought the technology up to then-present-day on the race track.

33. I have always liked your sense of humor.
I still get a real chuckle out of what would be considered sophomoric humor and I still love puns, which are reputedly the most base form of humor. I’d say my sense of humor has never matured, i.e. subtle, sophisticated humor doesn’t make me chuckle, but irony in real life certainly does. Example: How can a person be for abortion and against the death penalty? That’s a real knee-slapper.

34. What is the craziest thing you have ever done?
Probably that time in 1989 when I ran from Badwater in Death Valley to the top of Mt. Whitney and back in the middle of summer. Surpassed only by the fact that I then proceeded to do it two more times.

35. What have you not done that you want to do?
Write the Great American Novel. Although I think it has already been written…twice. But in each instance (John dos Passos’ U.S.A. and James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan) it took a trilogy to get the job done.