SALT LAKE CITY Bob Wood will run his last Deseret News Marathon tomorrow.
It will be his ninth straight, and even though every race keeps getting better and less work, enough is enough. At 63, Bob is moving on, leaving the footrace he inherited on life support in 2003 standing solidly on its own two feet.
Technically, I should point out that Bob has never actually run the marathon, but if it wasn't for him, neither would anyone else have run it the last nine years.
He took over as race director in the fall of 2003, about a month after the marathon had been written off as a lost cause due to declining attendance and the loss of the services of Salt Lake County to help with logistics.
He was "Exactly the right person at exactly the right time who knew exactly what to do," says Jim Wall, then the Deseret News publisher.
It was a little like needing a house painter and winding up with Michelangelo, remembers Wall.
Because it soon became apparent that this wasn't Bob's first footrace. Or his 50th. Or his 500th.
There wasn't much to do with running he hadn't had something to do with.
It began when he was a ninth-grader in his home town, a place called Ten Sleep on the high plains of Wyoming, and the basketball coach lined up everyone to run the mile in the spring. "What should I do?" Bob, who had never run a mile before, asked, and the coach answered, "Just follow Donny, he's the school record-holder."
Bob followed Donny for a lap or so and decided they were going sorta slow so he passed him. On the sidelines, everybody laughed at the new kid. He still had three laps to go and he'd passed the fastest runner in the school. Three laps later, Bob came across the finish line in 5:15, 11 seconds faster than the school record.
By the time he graduated he'd hung four consecutive state mile championships on the wall at Ten Sleep High.
That got him an athletic scholarship to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, 400 miles away and 1,000 times as big. Undeterred, Bob ran track and cross-country at the U., then helped coach the Ute track team for three years.
After that he branched out into the business end of the sport, representing track & field athletes as their agent. By the 1990s he was one of the most powerful men in track. USA Track & Field elected him its national chairman of men's long-distance running.
He wasn't a director of just one race, he was the director of all of them.
Who'd have thought? Somebody like that lived right next door in Bountiful.
Better yet, when the Deseret News called, he was available. By 2003 he was scaling back his work as an agent and track official.
When Wall asked if he'd rescue the marathon, Bob agreed to be race director for a year.
A year that stretched into nearly a decade.
I know much of this history firsthand, because for most of that decade I sat just around the corner from Bob.
I'd never met anyone like him. Who else listens to a Chris LeDoux tape at the same time they're watching a track meet online in Cologne?
Watching the Olympics with Bob is a particularly unique, and edifying, experience. Not only does he know the current world record of every event and the qualification times and the history of virtually everyone in the competition, he also has a very strong opinion of which of them is doping.
Essentially, if they medal, they're dirty.
I asked him once, if everybody's cheating, why keep watching?
Bob shrugged. "I don't know," he said. "I guess because it's my world – and it's a world I know well."
He'll likely stay in that world, just not this corner of it. He's leaving direction of the marathon, and the other Pioneer Day races with the Deseret News name attached, to Dan Hill, an independent race director and one of the founders of the popular Ragnar Relays.
"It's time to move on," says Bob, and I suppose that's true, but before he does it would be good for the running community to slap him on the back and thank him in the finish area tomorrow for saving Utah's oldest and most iconic 26.2-miler. He's easy to spot. He'll be the guy who doesn't look like he ran the marathon, even though he just finished his ninth straight.
Lee Benson's About Utah column runs Monday and Friday.
Email: lbenson@desnews.com