31How did you end up in San diego and
covering endurance SportS?- I was living outside Chicago, working with
emotionally disturbed kids at a residential
treatment center. My sister was teaching
school here, and I decided I was tired of
60 below zero and all that crap, so in 1978
I came out and got a couple different job
offers, including running a PE program. The
program was called Bob Time, and basically
I’d play with kids. We had no athletic fields,
just blacktop, but we had a volleyball net
and a pool. One of the things I did was cre-
ate a little kids’ triathlon, called Ironkids, in
- Then I called up a guy from Running
News [Editor’s note: it was later changed to
Running and Triathlon News] and said, ‘I’m
putting on this thing, why don’t you come
out and cover it?’ He says, ‘Why don’t you
write it up?’ I thought, OK, how hard can it
be? So I wrote it, and he liked it. That led to
leaving teaching in 1984 and working full-
time as L.A. editor of that publication. Lois
Schwartz, who was also a teacher, became
the art photographer.
How did you go on to create Competitor?- Running and Triathlon News was bought
then immediately put out of business, so we
were trying to figure out what to do with our
lives. I talked to other regional-magazine
publishers around the state, but no one was
interested in having skinny runners on their
covers, and they thought triathlon was a
fad. So some friends called Lois and I into
a meeting and gave us a check for $17,000
and said, go start your own magazine. For
$200 a month we got 200 square feet under
a guy’s bike racks in a shed in Del Mar. We
didn’t pay ourselves for a year and a half, just
lived on our savings and slept on people’s
floors. But we loved what we were doing.
We loved the athletes we were meeting.
We loved telling the stories. The elite ath-
letes are great, but it’s really the stories of
perseverance and overcoming that are the
hallmark of what Competitor is really about.
wHat were tHe early dayS like?- Sometimes ignorance is bliss. We had
no idea that 95 percent of all magazines
go out of business in the first year. But we
loved what we were doing—it never felt like
I had a job. In the early days, we couldn’t
pay our print bill. So I would drive to L.A.
to supplement our dollars. This was when
bodybuilding pants were big. I would buy
these pants, and we’d get free booths in
the race expos for Competitor, and I’d sell
the pants then use the dollars from that to
help pay our bills. There were some months
we made more selling pants than from sell-
ing ads. And every once in awhile, a client
couldn’t pay their bill with us so they’d give
us a lot of their product—like sunglasses.
So we’d sell them at the expos too to help
pay our bills.wHat made Competitor SucceSSful?- I’ve always been a firm believer that you can
rely on social media all you want, but when
you want to grow something, it’s got to be
person to person. I prided myself on handing
out magazines at the races. Our philosophy
first and foremost was that for us to be suc-
cessful, events have to be successful. And
if they’re filling up, then the retailers would
be busy—and everyone in the sport wins. So
it was our job to convince race directors to
put on events all year long, and we would be
there promoting. Our race-ad prices were
a third of our regular advertising prices,
because Lois and I didn’t look at those as ads.
I looked at our editorial like a triangle. The
tip of this triangle are elite athletes. Those
were the stories that a lot of people wanted
to read about: what made them tick. A lot
of the elites started out as age groupers.
And their stories helped motivate our read-
ers, the base of the triangle, to get into the
sport. If those stories could keep our readers
excited and touch the nerve of somebody
who hadn’t done our sport before, and got
new people in, that was huge.wHat doeS tHe name Competitor mean
to you?- When I’d be handing out magazines at
events, I’d have people come up to me and
say, ‘That’s not for me, I’m not a competitor.’
I’d say, ‘What do you mean?’ They’d say, ‘I’m
not an elite athlete.’ So I said, ‘The word
“competitor” does not mean elite athlete.
What time did you get up in the morning?
What did you come out here to do? You’re
competing with the course; you’re compet-
ing with yourself.’ To me, that’s what it’s all
about: The masses.
wHat’S one tHing tHat SHould never
cHange about Competitor?- The Competitor brand has always been
about changing lives through endurance.
Even if it’s a color run, people are chang-
ing perceptions of themselves through that
achievement. All it takes is to put a number
on, and you can change everything.
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