Living A Life In The Run
Bart Yasso is a figure of such legendary status he has become known as ‘The Mayor of Running’. The 61-year-old has finished more than 1,000 competitive races, including a 2:39 marathon and Death Valley’s notorious Badwater Ultramarathon in California. He is one of the few people to have completed races on all seven continents, among them the Antarctica Marathon and the Mt Kilimanjaro Marathon. Yasso has also spent 30 years at RW in the US, many of them as Chief Running Officer and, of course, he invented Yasso 800s, the gold-standard marathon-time predictor and workout, which is used by thousands of runners around the world. In this excerpt from his latest book, Race Everything, he shares a lifetime of hard-run wisdom.
It was the autumn of 1977, and I was a 21-year- old who had wasted my teen years on cigarettes, beer and weed. I headed out for my first run in cutoff jeans and a Budweiser T- shirt. I ran straight to a bar about a mile away. When I arrived, I celebrated by downing two beers – and then I walked home. It was an inauspicious start to a life forever changed by running, but it was a start nonetheless.
I had been inspired by my daily walks with my girlfriend’s dog, Brandy, who showed unadulterated joy when she was liberated from her leash, free to romp and play. Those walks eventually morphed into runs by myself, gradually enjoying my own sense of freedom from the dark days I had fallen into. My older brother George – one of six siblings – took notice of a kind of metamorphosis happening and, as a father figure to me, he encouraged this turning point in my life.
By 1980, George had goaded me into running a 10K with him in [the rural community of ] Moore Township, Pennsylvania, close to where we grew up in Fountain Hill. I had a giant shaggy beard that covered most of my face, along with flowing, unkempt hair. I looked like a running caveman. I was reluctant and had no idea what I was doing, but as is the most important point for anything in life, I showed up.
When t he gun went of f that morning, I shot out in a 5:20 first mile, naively going with a group of seasoned competitors in the lead pack. By mile two, I was, predictably, suffering a slow death and a waning pace. By mile three, I wanted to vomit. George pulled away and never looked back.
I crossed the finish line in about 40 minutes, and placed 40th out of 240 people. Not bad, I thought. Something inside was stirred.
When I headed back to my car, the windscreen was covered with flyers advertising other upcoming races in the area – the 1980s equivalent of email marketing. George was smart enough to appeal to my competitive nature and challenged me to a rematch. Three weeks later we were back on a 10K starting line, this time in Easton, Pennsylvania, where I was struck by