Stories from Triathlon's Godfather with Bob Babbitt

Foreign.

I'm charlie redding.

And I'm claire fudge and this is.

The tribe athlon podcast.

Foreign.

That was Bob Babbitt and this episode is Stories from Triathlon's Godfather. Bob Babbitt's name is so synonymous with the sport of triathlon, he is known as its godfather. Bob's first Iron man in Hawaii was the third in Iron man history and he's been hooked on triathlon ever since. Both as a competitor and also on the media side of things too. He's a passionate storyteller and is amazing at finding the real stories amongst the noise of the race. And he's also devoted to the Challenged Athletes foundation which he helped to co found and through which has raised over $140 million. So Claire and I wanted to chat to him about the early days of the sport, about how both he and some of the characters he hung out with went on to building amazing businesses within their passion and how innovation in sport and business can create whole new exciting opportunities for the future. In this episode you will hear what a brilliant storyteller Bob is. Hear about the roots of the sport that we all love as well as how his genuine passion is just completely infectious. I know you are going to love this episode with the legend and godfather of triathlon that is Bob Babbitt. 33 Fuel Produce Award winning natural sports nutrition and everything they do is led by their philosophy performance for performance for health and for a fitter future. 33 Fuel's awesome products have been fueling triathletes worldwide since 2012 as well as many of the world's best athletes. So from the England football team to Tour de France winners and triathlon world champions including four times Ironman world champ Chrissie Wellington who's been using 33 fuel for years. 33 fuel also leads sports nutrition sustainability with plant focused formulas for reduced environment impact, recyclable packaging and carbon neutral delivery on all orders which also got them rated as by Runners World as one of the top 50 eco hero companies worldwide. Another reason why I love what Warren and Erica are doing at 33 fuel. So to find out more about 33 fuel go to 33fuel.com and if you use the code tribathlon or click the link in the show notes, you'll get an extra special discount when you purchase your amazing stock of 33 fuel. So Bob, welcome to the Tribe Athlon podcast. Really genuinely excited to chat to you today. I know that this you being you're used to being on the other side of the microphone So I know you're going to make my job an absolute breeze. But I know your, your, you're the sort of storytelling godfather of, of triathlons. So I know there's so much good stuff that we can cover. How we're going to all cram it into one episode, I have no idea. But we'll see where we go. But given that you are such a great storyteller and I always like to start with the story, we've got to start with how you found your way into triathlon and particularly Iron man because it's such a wonderful story. So can you kick things off with, with that?

Sure. So we back in. Gosh. I moved to San Diego in 1978 and this, the sport of triathlon started in 74 with the San Diego Track Club. And the track club would. They were. It wasn't really a sport, it was sort of a workout, you know, a night. One night of the week they would go down to this place called Fiesta Island. And actually today there's a, a rock with a plaque on there commemorating the first ever Triathlon on September 25, 1974. But we would go down there and we do the swim, bike, run things and that became the sport of triathlon. And a couple of the folks who would join us down there starting in 74 were John and Judy Collins who lived in Coronado and had their kids and they would come up and do these swim, bike and run things. Well, the Collins family moved to Hawaii and John was in the Navy and they were, one day they were reading Sports Illustrated. Sports Illustrated is sort of a link to a lot of this. Sports Illustrated was this magazine that everybody received in, in the US who was involved with any type of sport came every Thursday. It was sort of the bible of all sport. And there was an article in Sports Illustrated saying that Eddie Merckx, the five time winner Tour de France, was the greatest endurance athlete in the world. Well, John and all his buddies had just finished doing this perimeter relay around the island of Oahu and they got into this argument about, well, wait a second, why isn't it the person, why isn't it the swimmer? Why isn't he the best endurance athlete? Other people were like, well, why isn't it the runner Honolulu Marathon. And then John decided to get up at this, this banquet and say, hey, we're going to find out once and for all who the best endurance athlete is. We're going to take the Waikiki rough water swim which is 2.4 miles, the Around Oahu bike ride 112 miles and the Honolulu Marathon, 26.2 miles. Put them all together and we'll call the winner the Ironman. And that was it. He sort of forgot about it. And then one of the men who worked for him kept saying, sir, when are we going to do that iron thing, sir? And so finally in, In February of 1978, they decided to put on this iron thing, sir. And actually the photo behind me is not the 78 start, but the 1979 start with really the same number of starters. 15 started and 12 finished. And this was an adventure. People had no idea what they were doing well, so they put on this first event in 1978. A guy named Gordon Haller wins it and he passes a guy named John Dunbar, a Navy SEAL who's leading the race. And you had your own crew back then. There was no aid stations, nothing like that. No roads were blocked off. And John is winning the race when his crew runs out of water. So they're like, well, what do we do? Okay, we've got this beer, Beer is fine. It's still wet. He'll be fine. And next thing you know, Gordon Heller makes up what, 20 minutes, half an hour during a marathon and wins the first ever Ironman, passing John as he's sort of staggering down the road. So that was year one and year two again, 15 starters, 12 finishers. Not like this thing is growing. The difference was Sports Illustrated came to cover it in 1979. And a guy who won the race, Tom Warren, owned a tavern here in San Diego. And he also put on one of the first endurance events called the Tugs Swim Run swim event, which was a half mile swim around a pier, Crystal Pier in San Diego. Five mile run on the beach and another swim around the pier. And the key was if you were one of, if you were one of the little running guys, after you passed the swimmers on the way out to this jetty and back, you wanted to make sure that you didn't get, that you didn't get run over in the swim by those swimmers because they were going to come storming by you. And the key about that event was that when you finished, you didn't stop at the finish line. The finish line was sort of just a suggestion. You ran past the finish line to his tavern, which is another like four blocks away. And the first 75 people to get to the tavern got breakfast. And that was your, that was your, your glory was standing there with your plate of runny eggs when the 76th guy showed up and got nothing, right? That Was that was. That was your bragging rights? So my roommate at the time was a guy named Ned Overend, and I was a school teacher. Ned was working at San Diego Suzuki. And if the name sounds familiar, Ned went on to become one of the most decorated mountain bikers in history. But mountain bikes hadn't been invented yet. So Ned was working at San Diego Suzuki. The two of us were doing this tugs thing and, and we got a photo taken of us with our running eggs. The two of us standing there with our two big beards, right? It's sort of part of the era. And when we heard this guy, Tom Warren, won this thing called the Ironman that we just read about in an eight page article in Sports Illustrated, we're like, huh, that sounds pretty cool. So we tracked down Tom to have him explain how to do. How do you do this thing? That's a long way to go. So we track him down and he tells me, I call him up, he says, hey, Babbitt, my, my office is on the west side of, of the road, down by Crystal Pier, just to the south of Crystal Pier. So we go down there and there's no buildings there. There's a motorhome, it's a parking lot, there's a motor home with a bike on the back and a paddle board on top and running shoes tied around the side view mirror. And I'm like, Mr. Warren, sir. He goes, babbitt, welcome my office. And he had a roll of dimes in his console in the motorhome, and it was a payphone behind him. So he would go for a run, he'd go for a paddle, he'd go for a run ride, go for a swim. And in the meantime, he'd get out of his motorhome and call and order beer for the bar, order chips, order salsa, all that type of stuff. But that was his lifestyle, that's what he did. So when we sat with him, it's nine o' clock in the morning and he's ordering a beer, right? This little restaurant behind it. Like, every time he would take a drink, he would be making a mark on his arm with his Magic Marker. And we're like, you know, again, this is our mentor. He's going to explain to us how to do this silly iron thing. And we're like, Mr. Warren, sir, what's the deal with the Magic Marker? And he goes, well, I have a little bit of a drinking problem, so I make a mark on my arm every time I have a drink. And when I get to my sleeve I go home, and I'm like, oh. So it made us realize very quickly that this was a sport of eccentric type of characters. We go to his house. He's got a bike mounted on a trainer in his sauna. He's riding five hours a day on that bike. Mounted on. It's like. It's a Lionel Sanders workout, but it's back in 1979. So anyways, we. We find out. It's not like you can go online to find out about this Ironman thing. We had to. Basically, Tommy told us who to call, and we called this John Collins, and then they sent us an application, and then we filled it out and sent our $25 in to. To sign up for this iron thing. And then, you know, we get over there. Well, then we got to figure out what to do for a bike. And I thought, you know, we. We went to a police auction, got a bike for $75, went over to the island. The funny part was, I get off the plane, and I've got this bike with solid rubber tires because I didn't know I change a flat. I had a fuzzy raccoon seat cover on it because, you know, we want to protect your butt. Foam grips on the handlebars, and a radio shack radio mounted on the front so I could listen to music. Bungee corded on, listen to music. Plus pan your sleeping bag and tent because I thought you swam 2.4 road 56, day one. Camped out and rode back day two and did the marathon. I was a little bit of surprise when I found out you're supposed to do the whole thing day one. So anyways, this bike rolls off the plane. There was no bike boxes back then. You just sort of roll the bike into the airport. And I had this big beard. The guy who won the race in 78, Gordon Heller, had a big beard. The Navy SEALs who were in the waiting room at the. At the airport see this bike roll off. They see me with a big beard. They think I'm Gordon Haller. They think I won the iron man on the 75 police auction bike. I think it made them feel like, okay, we got this in a bag. This loser won. Who is this guy? So anyways, we get out there on race day, and I have a crew that I didn't meet until that morning. I was a school teacher, so one of the kids I taught her dad lived over in Oahu, and he brought his two girlfriends. They had their little Fiat convertible. We didn't know what to eat or anything, so I had, like, tons of Gatorade. And then I had Hawaiian sweet bread because we thought you needed carbohydrates and that there was no gels, There was no electrolyte drinks. Nobody measured their carbohydrates. We had no idea. So I'm swimming along and, oh, the night before the race, they get us all together and say, hey, we got huge storms rolling in, and we're standing at the host hotel. The waves are breaking against the building, and ten foot. And Ned and I are like, we're gonna die tomorrow. I mean, it's nice knowing you, but there's no way we're gonna get through this, sir. We walk into the meeting, and again, because of the Sports Illustrated article, now there's 108 of us from 15, and the race director, this guy Hank, goes, guys, you know what? ABC Wide World of Sports, which is a big TV show, they're here to cover cliff diving on Sunday, and they want to cover the Ironman tomorrow because they're here. But the problem is, if we have to. If we have to postpone it a day because it is huge surf, I'll lose ABC Wide World of Sports. So I'm moving the swim to Alamoana Channel because that way we can do the race tomorrow and we won't have to postpone it because a huge surface now, Dave Scott and all these Navy seals are like, what a pussy event. You can't change it. It's the Ironman. Go in the serve. And Ned and I are like, yeah, what are you doing? Knowing that, oh, my God, we're going to live. So we get out there the next day, gave all my Hawaiian sweet bread and Gatorade to my crew, and it's four lengths and Alamo on a channel I'm swimming down. And on my way back, there's a guy named John Huckabee. His claim to fame is he'd run the Athens Marathon three times in one day. Back, back, back. But he couldn't swim, and back then anybody could sign up for this thing. So he's walking the swim. He is. Seriously. I'm staying as shallow as possible. I almost run into him as he's walking, moving his arms like this, right? He's the only guy in the history of iron man to get blisters on his feet during the swim portion of the Ironman World Championship. Then we get out of the water, and I'm so excited that I got out of the water. I got my wool bike jersey on. I got all this Hawaiian sweet bread jammed in my back pocket. We're riding through Waikiki, I'm tuning in my radio, and there's my crew, 25 miles in the side of the road. I'm like, my God, this is like the Tour de France. They're going to give me one of those little things with food in it. This is awesome. They give me a brown bag with Big Mac fries and a Coke, and I'm like, this is awesome. And then we get to about mile 90, and I got a root beer snow cone, which was wonderful. Then at the end of the bike, I come rolling in, and I'm hearing this music. And as I roll in, there's my crew, and they got a bamboo mat rolled out, rolled out. And they're like, how about a massage? I'm like, you know what? My neck and back are really tight. So I laid down for a massage about 45 minutes between the bike and the run, which felt really, really good. And then we got out on the run. And back then, they had a rule that said, if you lose 5% of your body weight during the race, we're taking you out of the race. So you had to get off your bike a few times to get weighed, and then you got weight in the run. So I get on the scale, start the run, and then I'm waddling through Waikiki, eating, you know, Hawaiian sweet bread, drinking Gatorade. I get on the scale again at mile five, and I can hear the guy on the walkie talk. Can you give me that again? This guy's gained five pounds. You can't gain weight doing this thing. So then I'm running along, waddling through Waikiki, and then I get to Diamond Head, and I'm so excited because I'm actually at this point, mile 19, mile 20. I'm gonna finish this in one day. I never thought I was going to finish this thing in one day. My crew is behind me in their little Fiat convertible with their lights on, and I'm running up Diamond Head, and I'm thinking, this is the coolest thing. I can't imagine what they're going to have to finish. They're going to have bands, they're going to have cheerleaders. It's going to be really exciting. And I drop into Kapiolani Park. Running along, there's a chalk line on the road, and there's a light bulb above me, and I sort of slow down, and I hear this voice in the darkness. It's like, hey, you. I'm like, yeah, you in the race. Yeah, you're done. That Was it. There was like one guy doing one arm push ups in the park and me and this guy saying, you're done. That was it. It was up. I. You walked away from that finish line. Ned had waited for me and I went where Ned and I walked back to the room and I'm thinking, this is the coolest thing I've ever done. If other people could find out about this, they would realize how I had just changed from being one person to another. I realized finishing this Iron man thing gave me a belief in myself by finishing something audacious that I never thought I could do in two days. And I finished it in one with really no training. I didn't train for any of this stuff. So that led to, I came back to San Diego and the guy who took that original photo of Ned and I, he had started a magazine called San Diego Running News. His name was Mike Plant. And through my badgering, it became San Diego Running and Triathlon News and I became the LA editor. I left teaching and moved up with my partner who was the art teacher at the school, Lois Schwartz, who took the classic iron war shots and all that. She wanted to learn photography. So the two of us would drive to LA every weekend and cover running events, triathlon events, and we loved it. And that was 84, 85, 86, and the funny story. Speaking of business, and when we first started Competitor, we're standing at an event and I'm handing out Competitor magazines. The guy standing next to me, Brian Maxwell, had started an energy bar called Power Bar. And Brian is handing out his power bars. And it was December and it was so cold that I don't remember. The early power bars were so hard in the winter time. I mean, they were like bricks. You would break teeth trying to bite. You'd lose fillings trying to bite anything. So we would take Brian's power bars and put them on top of the dashboard and turn on defroster to try to make them soft enough so he can cut them up. And then the other guy who was with us, a guy named Phil Talbot, started a company called Kashi, which was a hot cereal. So Phil's spooky spooning out his Kashi. Brian's passing out power bars. I'm handing out Competitor. The three of us are thinking, got to be so cool. If we ever make a living doing this. This is the neatest thing. Well, Brian sold power bar for $425 million. Phil sold Kashi for $75 million. Eventually we became when in 1987, with what was Then running a triathlon news went out of business. And I wanted to. I felt there was a real need for a magazine that covered running, triathlon and cycling. So I went to these local. These two guys who had magazines covering cycling in California Southwest cycling and California bicyclists. And I went to both of them, said if we do a magazine combining all three, that would be really popular. And both of them said the same thing. We'd never put a skinny runner on the COVID of a magazine. This sport of triathlons, a fad, it'll be gone in five years. This is 1987 and we really have no interest. So I came back home and some friends of ours gave us a check for $17,000 and said, go start your own magazine. And the next month we launched the first edition of Competitor magazine. And we were in. We were underneath 10,000 pounds of bike racks in a guy's garage in 200 square feet of office with paying $200 a month for the first year and a half. I lived on friends floors, didn't pay ourselves anything. And so we built this thing called Competitor magazine. We started in June of 87 and eventually built it to 11 editions of competitor, half a million circulation around the US covering running, triathlon, cycling, mountain biking. And then in 2008, we were purchased by a private equity firm that loved our brand, Competitor. And at that time we owned. I had Competitor magazine, Competitor Radio, which we had started in 1990, because I really wanted people to understand that our athletes were special. And there was a sports radio station where they would interview Wayne Gretzky and my. Adrik Johnson and all the greatest. Steffi. Steffi Graff and all the classic endurance. Not endurance athletes, but sport. Major sport athletes. And my thought was if we had a show where people heard interviews with Dave Scott, Mark Allen, Paul and Libby Frazier, along with those other folks, they would go, oh, they're important as well. So there was those sort of little method to the madness of, hey, Competitor Radio will complement Competitor magazine. And I said, what's your worst times spot? Well, eight to ten on Sunday nights. I'll take it. That's. That's perfect. I can sum up the week, all the different stuff that happened during the week, we can do that on Sunday night. And we had, you know, Dave Scott and Mark Allen and Paul Newby Frazier and all these legends on the show. And so when we ended up. And then a couple years later, I started this thing called the Competitor Magazine Endurance Awards because I wanted to create something classy that where people would meet A Henry rono, a Greg LeMond, athletes from running, triathlon, cycling. We'd have 500 people at our endurance sports awards. We rented out SeaWorld here in San Diego. And imagine we had a. We had an arcade with all these special. These games where you were sitting with a squirt gun and you're squirting at a. At a whale, and it's. It's going along, and if you. If you got it, if you hit the. Hit the whale, right, he would move along, and your whale would beat the other guy's whale. Well, imagine Dave Scott, Mark Allen, Peter Reed, all these guys playing these games and how competitive this was. And imagine all the stuffed animals that all these guys won. And we would be in there for dinner, and you'd hear, ladies and gentlemen, could you please get your stuffed animals out of the aisle? The waiters can't get to the tables. And there we. I wanted to grow the sport so we would honor not just runners, triathletes, cyclists, and mountain bikers, but also celebrities. Will Ferrell did the Boston Marathon, and he did our San Diego Triathlon Challenge, along with Robin Williams and Jim Carrey. Well, having Will as our celebrity athlete of the year at the banquet and having that video piece, which is still online. You go to Will's acceptance speech during our awards banquet, where he. He basically stopped in the middle of his speech to take a jowl. He says, you know, when I race, I. I lose energy sometime, and I find these are really good chocolate makes me a little pukey. I didn't realize when I got into the sport that I'd be shaving parts of my body I never would. Thought I'd shave before and I'd be getting cramps in part of my body I didn't even know existed. And. But at the end of his speech, he goes, you guys are the greatest endurance. You guys are the greatest athletes in the world. And people don't realize it, and you don't get the credit you deserve. And that credibility that comes from getting celebrities to talk about you, it really is underrated. So in 2008, we end up selling Competitor to this private equity firm called Falcon Head out of New York. They buy Competitor magazine, which included my Muddy Buddy series. It included Competitor Radio, Endurance awards, and the 11 editions competitor magazine. And then they bought the rock and roll marathon series, which was a group called Elite Racing, had seven rock and roll marathons and then bought the woman's running magazine. And so we had three silos for our business. One was events. We had seven rock And Roll Marathons, seven Muddy Buddies, four Women's Half Marathon Series events, Media Competitor Magazine, Fellow News Magazine, Triathlete Magazine, Inside Triathlon Magazine, Woman's Running Magazine, and then all the new media, Facebook, YouTube, all the rest of that, that went along with it. So we went from seven rock and rolls in 2008 to 34 in 2012. And those 34 rock and roll marathons, 660,000 participants. More importantly, 60% women. When we first got into this world in the early 80s, it was 90% guys, 10% women. Well, all of a sudden you're 60% women at these events. Your expos change. People aren't coming like, like Charlie and I would run into an expo and see how quickly we can get the hell out of there. Well, all of a sudden you're changing the demographic of the expo and people are staying and they're shopping and they're buying more product, which led to different people at the expo and different expo vendors. So it grew and grew and grew. In 2012, we sold again to another private equity firm called Calera. And by that point, like I said, we had 34 Rock and Rolls and Muddy Buddy had gone from seven Muddy Buddies to 18 Muddy Buddies, seven Muddy Buddies to 18 40,000 participants around the US and it then. So I stayed until 2014 and at that point we went. Had gone from 22 employees to 500. We had a 50,000 square foot office building with all the, all the, all the rock and roll and Muddy Buddy stuff there, semi trucks going out to the events. It became a big. It became a big entity and it was. So I left in 2014 and relaunched under Babville and Breakfast with Bob. And as it's been, it's been such a treat ever since. Sorry to go on so long. No, it's absolutely brilliant. It's.

It's so good to hear. And it's. What, what I mean, what comes across in that is your. The infectious enthusiasm for the sport.

The sport.

One of the things I wanted to ask on the back of that was you've basically built a business on the. You found a thing in life that you were massively passionate about but weren't quite sure where the business was. And you've clearly created, you know, several businesses out of that. But you said you borrowed $17,000. I think the first print run. I think I'm right in saying that cost you $20,000.

Yeah. We're 3,000 whole.

Yeah.

After those friends. Yeah, they, they didn't. They gave us 17. They gave us a check Said, go start your own magazine. So, you know, we then it was just that they believed, that's the other thing I learned from this. They believed in us before we believed in ourselves.

Well, that's what I was going to ask is how did you, how did you get the confidence to, in such a, an off piece sport at the time to actually borrow that money and go for it and go all in on that, on that business?

Well, the nice thing is, is when you have nothing to lose, who cares, right? We're young. I think I was 27, 28 years old. And what I have to lose, I didn't have a house, I didn't have anything. So you're, you just, you follow your passion. And that's one of the things with everything we've done. I remember there wasn't one. And I talked to Graham Frazier, the guy who started Iron Man North America about this. We never sat with our, had our business meet, had our meetings with our team and started with, okay, how much money did we make? How much, you know, what's our bottom line? It was always, what can we do to make the magazine better? In his case, what do we add to make the Ironman experience better for the consumer? Right. It was always about the customer. I always felt with competitor some of the innovations over the years because when we first started, the idea was you put the magazine in places where people would go running stores, bike shops, things like that. And then I got to thinking, well, if I'm going to pick up and my magazine was free, right? So if I'm in a running store, how often am I buying running shoes? Maybe three times a year, maybe twice. So how often am I going in that running store? So I did a deal with a friend of mine named Ralph Rubio who had a restaurant called Rubio's. Eventually grew to 140 outlets because people eat a lot more than they go for shopping for running shoes or bike shoes or bikes. So people go into Rubio's and actually we did a deal with Jamba Juice, which was a smoothie location. And they grew to thousands of locations around the US and my thought was someone was going to walk in there because they're going to go to Jamba Juice and go, okay, I'm 30 pounds overweight. I'm not hiring a personal trainer, I'm not hiring a dietitian. What I'm going to do is I'm not going to eat a whopper for lunch today. I'm going to go have a smoothie because I've Heard those are healthy. So they go in there and they see this, the only magazine that's in there, Competitor magazine, and they're going to leaf through it and they're going to see the calendar and they go, 5K. What is that? What is a 5K? And then they're going to go, I'll sign up for that. I'm changing my lifestyle here, so I'm going to sign up for 5K. They walk the 5K, come across that magical finish line and realize, this is me. This is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I want to be. I want to feel good about myself as good as I did walking that 5k. And then they run a 10k and then they sign up for a sprint try. So my philosophy was that when, if you are Charlie, you're a race director, when your race is over, your corral for next year is empty. You're only going to have maybe a 15, 20% coming back. You got 80% to replace. My job is to replace that. My job is to drive new people in the sport through Jamba Juice and Rubio's. And, you know, we were going through 20,000 magazines a month in Rubio's. And the number of people who came up to me, when anytime we would put a training program in the magazine, they'd be like, I use that program to sign, to train for the Mission Bay Triathlon, right? That was my first triathlon. Now I'm training for the Ironman. So it was. The whole idea is I felt we were a welcome mat. We were sort of this welcome mat for the new person. And while the elite athletes, Dave Scott, Mark Allen, Peter Reed, Paula, were important, our people wanted to read about them. The magazine wasn't for them. I didn't give a crap if they ever picked it up. They were. People wanted to be them, right? They wanted to be them. They wanted to know about them, they wanted to know how they trained, they. What made them special. But it wasn't. The magazine wasn't written in a way where you felt like, oh, my God, this is over my head. He's. He's an elitist. I would have. When I'd hand out, my goal every month was to hand out 3,000 copies personally at races. I went to races every single weekend, be up at, you know, three in the morning, drive through races, hand out the magazines, and every once in a while I'd have someone go, you know, I'm not a competitor. I'm like, what do you. I'd say, what do you think competitor means they go, well, that's an elite race athlete. I said, no, no, no. You got up at 4 in the morning to drive down here to walk this 5K. You're a competitor, you're competing with yourself, you're competing with the course and you're going to feel better about yourself when you get to that finish line. And they were like, oh, I never thought of it that way. So I always felt of our brand, which a lot of people thought meant elite athlete, as this is where the welcome at. You are now part of our tribe. And there's something cool about that. People want to be part of that tribe.

It is brilliant with. In this day and age. So historically, the magazine and, you know, pick up the magazine in the smoothie shop would have been a great way of bringing people into it in this day and age of social media. YouTube, what. What do you. Where do you think the biggest kind of influx? Where's the new welcome mat in today's society?

I think the new welcome, Matt, is YouTube. Because I think what happens is people go on there to be inspired. And if you look at what Talbot Cox has done, bringing Lionel, giving you a backstage pass. So you meet a Lionel Sanders or you meet a Gwen Jorgensen, you meet these athletes. And this is the. And also hopefully Breakfast with Bob. This year we did 302 Breakfast with Bob interviews and had over 114 million minutes of viewing. And it's, it's, you know, average views over eight minutes. But I think what. What is attractive and what people like about it the same as me is they. Their. The mentality is that our pro athletes are the same as LeBron James and Michael Jordan, that they were identified at a young age and nurtured to become professional athletes. And nothing could be further from the truth. Our athletes. And a perfect example is Sky Munch. I'm interviewing sky in St. George at the for before the Ironman and we're in Zion's bank and sky is like, huh? I was a teller at a different Zion's bank, you know, in Salt Lake City. I'm like, really? He says, yeah. When I graduated high school, mom and dad told me they couldn't afford college for me. So if I wanted to go to college, I would need to work and support myself and do it myself. So I'm. I cleaned houses and I worked at Zion's bank as a teller and graduated with my CPA and owed nothing. Well, that tells you something about that person. And then she found out she happened to be good at triathlon so. And Jan Frodeno, when he was young and living in South Africa, his mom put him in swim lessons because she was worried he'd die in the surf surfing in South Africa. So I better make him drown. Proof. Well, he becomes a great swimmer and finds out he's got this. So our guys didn't start out as triathletes. You know, Alistair Brownlee, Javier Gomez, those guys started young. But, you know, that's probably the first generation where people started at 7, 8 years old and moved on up through the, through the, through the ranks. But most people, most of our people viewing think our athletes are, you know, have always been supported, have always been funded. And when they find out that, you know, a Craig Alexander and a Luke McKenzie when they left Australia, it's not like you can go to Europe for the weekend. It's not like you can go to US for the weekend, which is where all the races were. So they would move to San Diego and be gone from their families when these are young people for six, eight months and living in a little apartment with air mattresses, right? And, and going to races to try to make enough money to pay rent. Right now, Chris McCormick, same type of thing. He quit his job as an accountant. He was getting paid every week in a view of the Sydney Opera House. And he quit the job because he wanted to be a professional triathlete. And when he told his boss he was going to be a professional triathlete, the guy laughed at him. Says, there's no money in that. And the worst part for Chris is his dad would drive him to the train station every day. Chris would have his suit and tie on and go to the train station. Well, for two weeks, his dad would take him to the train station. Chris would put his suit and tie, and Chris had already quit his job. He'd go to the train station, his dad would drop him off. Chris would wait till his dad was out of sight and then he would go back home and go ride and run and swim all day. So finally he had to tell his dad. And he was so worried. His, you know, if your dad screams at you, that's okay, but if they're quiet, they're disappointed, then that's the part that hits you. And he is like, dad, please don't be disappointed. And his dad was like, chris, if you're going to do this, do it right. Don't half ass it and travel and have fun and then realize 10 years from now, you wasted 10 years. And so Chris went to Europe and he would, he Would. He would race on Friday in France. They would take the train all night, sad Friday night and race in Switzerland on Saturday and Sunday. He made $1,000 one weekend, thought he's the richest guy in the world. That. That's. Those are the stories that make you realize. Or if you listen to, you know, I just listening to an interview I did with LIONEL Back in 2015, talking about, you know, that he was. He was thinking the government was chasing him. He was so drugged out, he didn't realize that he was having visions that weren't there. Right. He wouldn't leave his apartment. He was doing technical writing so he could do it from the. This basement apartment and he have his hoodie on. He was worried the government was chasing him. And, you know, all of a sudden, after, you know, snorting his college money up his nose, and his parents, you know, his parents stood behind him even after he'd been in detox, even after, you know, he, they. He lied to them. I don't know how many different times. So when he said, I want to go to Louisville and do this Iron man thing out of nowhere, who drove him there? Who got him a hotel? Who got him a race kit? Mom and dad. Who could have given up on this guy? You know, those points where Lionel was suicidal. And now you see where he's at, and you see what he did this weekend, and you see, you know, I just wrote a little piece about he might be the greatest triathlon entertainer that we've ever had. He's must watch TV because, you know, whenever he's there, something great is going to happen. So. But look where he was. And now he's a father and he's. He's a husband and he's the triathlon entertainer and he's got a huge following and making a great living. But that's the story. To me, that's what resonates. It's not just Lionel was born to be this great triathlete. No, he wasn't. He made himself into a great triathlete. And our people who through. Through Talbot and hopefully through breakfast with Bob, you get to see that inside story of what made them the person they are today.

And so I think this, this, this repeated theme of the power of the story, I mean, something I've talked about in business quite a lot in that bringing stories, because people love listening to the stories, don't they?

And. Right.

I think listening to you speak, it's not. We're not listening to stories of the person that won this race and the person that won this race. It's the stories within the race that are really powerful, isn't it? So I suppose that prompts two questions. Is this a conscious thing to tell stories?

Is it?

Or is it something you've always been naturally good at? And also in business, you know, when you started out, did you, were there any particular lessons that you took into I know you came from. Your dad was a ran his own business. So was there any lessons that you took from that that have really stood you in good stead being a businessman in your, in the sport?

You know what I think the main thing Lois and I when we started competitor, we were school teachers. And when you're school, I ran a PE program called Bob Time, right. And, and Lois ran the art program. And what you learn as a teacher is getting along and getting along with people and caring about people. You have, you've got the constituency of your other teachers. You've got parents, you've got kids. Kids are going through, you know, they're kids of divorce. You've got a lot of stuff going on, a lot of dynamics. And when we started competitor, the whole idea was, you know, we want to be good people, we want to make sure that we. I'm thinking as the advertiser, I'm thinking as the race director or as Nike or whoever is advertising. How do I, how do I help them? So if they're successful, I'm successful. And the same thing in teaching, if, you know, if I'm, if I'm helping them reach their goals, then, then that's, that is success. And one of the things in terms of storytelling, Mike Plant, who is the editor of, of Runner Running news and running a triathlon News taught me something early on when I started writing and it was like, listen, you know, you can tell the story of the guy who won the race and he ran 208 and this guy ran 209. And then you can get into all the different stats of this guy won ad age group and. But who cares? Look at that story, look at that event. What's the story that means something to you? What is the one story? Because people will see the results and you know, this day it's even worse. But back then, you know, you're going to see results in the paper next day of the of the race. You don't want to just regurgitate that. What's the one part of that race that impressed, that meant something to you? And that's what, what always hit me. And one of the things when it came to I cover These running events. And I met a guy who was a wheelchair athlete by the name of Jim Knop. He ended up winning Boston. Five time wheelchair athlete. And back then they were using these four wheeled, look like shopping carts in these racing chairs. And I love the fact that the Jimmy was just this character, right? And he told me he was Olympic trials pole vaulter and he was paralyzed. He was on his motorcycle going to track workouts. He had used a rowdy, never used before, got hit by a car, paralyzed. And he realized early, he said, bob, I realized before I hit the ground that I had. That this was meant to be and I had a bigger role and there was a bigger purpose in my life. And so I'm interviewing him for this story because there's something about this story that resonated. He'd go out to the running events and he's in his wheelchair, and they allowed him the race, and he'd win the race and go, okay, I won. Where's my money? And they'd be like, wait, wait, wait, we're allowing you to race with wheels. You can't be winning the money. But he was sort of fighting for the rights of people to participate in these sports. So I'm at his house interviewing him, and I look down on the floor, and there's a nickel on the floor. And I'm thinking, first thought is, oh, the poor guy in a wheelchair can't reach down and pick up the nickel. It's not really a weird thought, but it's sort of like, hey, so I go down to pick up the nickel, and it's glued to the floor. And I look over and Jim Knob's drinking a beer, looking at me, and he goes, so you thought the. The poor guy in a wheelchair couldn't pick up the nickel off the floor? So, Babbitt, here's lesson number one. Don't ever underestimate anybody. And that just, you know, it really. It really stuck with me. And this was long before caf. This is like 1987, 1988. But there was just something about the stories. And he's in a Dalmatian outfit, right? A Dalmatian skin suit, and he's got these cool JT sunglasses on. And he would go to rehab centers. And I interviewed this guy, Bruce Cornell, who was at one of those rehab centers, and he's in a rehab center. And he said, you know, they're sitting there telling us, okay, you. I got injured in a construction accident. You need to understand, you're never able to drive your pickup truck again. These are Things you can't do because you're paralyzed and you're in a wheelchair. And he goes, so we're looking out the window and we see this guy, Jim Knob, drive up in a 62 rambler, which you probably never heard of, Rambler convertible, reaching behind and pulling out his wheelchair and tossing it next to the driver's side and jumping out into the chair. And he would roll in and he'd say to us, they just told you what you can't do. I'm here to tell you what you can do. And a number of people who he took skydiving, who he took deep sea fishing, who he showed how to maneuver in a wheelchair. And his whole thing was, why walk when you can fly, right? That was, that was his mantra. And it just, you know, taking the worst negative, becoming paralyzed and saying, this is a positive. This is something that's going to make me great. It just, it, it resonated with me and so many of my stories. We. Jimmy was the first wheelchair guy to be on the COVID of a magazine. Put him on the COVID of Competitor magazine. And my staff was like, who's going to pick up our magazine with a guy in a wheelchair on the COVID And then, you know, we actually. And a guy named Kenny Souza, who you might not remember, he was a top do athlete back in the day. I convinced him to put in $10,000. And we put on the Kenny Souza Wheelchair Criterium in downtown La Jolla, California. Between there was a women's bike race and a men's Bike Race. 40,000 spectators, half mile loop. It was a criterium, which is. Criterium is actually a bigger form of racing here in the States than other parts of the world. So you had 40,000 people out there. They're watching a women race, they're watching a men race. In between, I put on a 5K in wheelchairs, right? Top wheelchair guys, $500 free every lap. Jim Knob, this guy, Craig Blanchett, who was missing both legs and was, you know, was really fast. He's the first Nike just do it athlete. Was. Was Craig Blanchette. And downtown La Jolla, with these huge crowds, people got to see wheelchair racing and go, that's pretty cool. Plus, in between the races, the cyclists would come over and they'd be comparing equipment with Jim Knob and Craig Blanchett. It's, you know, it's graphite, it's titanium, it's fast. What is, what. What's the talk? A little about your equipment. I'll tell you about my equipment. And then we Brought in a flatbed truck and put it in one of the f. One of the turns. And I brought in the patients from Scripps Hospital and Sharp Hospital who were wheelchair bound because it was important for them to see this, to see athletes like themselves showcased. And when I was interviewing one of the athletes, one of the people up in the rehab center up on the flatbed truck, I was like, why is this important? And his name was David Kernow. And he goes, you know what's important? I might never get to the level those guys are at in terms of racing, but it's important to know that it's there. It's important to know that I could or one of these other folks could get there. And that. That really resonated with me as well. It was just really, really special. And that's. There's sort of a special part in my heart. And that led to eventually at the Ironman, which did not allow people in hand cycles or racing chairs. Starting in 1994, Dr. John Franks was convinced the Ironman to allow him to participate swimming using a hand cycle for the bike and using a racing chair for the run. He didn't make the bike cutoff time in 94. A guy named John McClain from Australia didn't make the bike cutoff time in 95. He didn't make it 96. Finally, in 97, he made all three bike cutoff make. He made the swim bike cutoff time, the swim cut off time, the bike cutoff time, and the run cut off time and became the first wheelchair athlete to finish the Ironman. But for those first couple years, break up saying, oh, can't. Nobody's gonna be able to do it. Nobody's gonna do it. Well, as soon as John did it 97. In 98, a Navy SEAL by the name of Carlos Maleda came over who had been shot in the back in Panama during. When his. His. His platoon was ambushed and they were guarding the president of Nicaragua or Noriega. They were guarding his plane when they were ambushed. Shot in the back. He comes over 98 and goes 10:55, which would have won the first two Ironman races overall. So it's quick. It's amazing how quickly perceptions can change. And then 98, 99, 2000, you had Carlos Maleda, Navy seal, shot in the back in Panama against David Bailey, motocross champion, who had. Who had made $650,000 as a top motocross athlete in 86 and then was paralyzed. And then here those guys are in 98, 99, and 2000 having these three classic battles where it was all people. People didn't care that they were in wheelchairs. It was two great athletes who wanted to kick the other guy's ass. And when those guys were on the course, people were cheering them. It was like, go, David, go. Go, Carlos. And one Carlos told me one time says, you know what? When I leave my everyday chair at the pier and I jump in the water, I'm the same as everybody else. I'm trying to get from point A to point B and become an ironman. And that just made, made a huge impact on me.

It is, it is brilliant. And so, so was that. Were those the stories that led to the Challenged Athletes Foundation? How, how did that come about? And tell us a bit about what's happening with that.

Sure. Well, Jim McLaren was a football player, American football player at Yale, weighing 300 pounds. I don't know what that is in real numbers, but 300 pounds, big guy. So in 1985, he was taking acting classes, New York, and he was on his motorcycle going to acting classes. He got hit by a bus, thrown 90ft in the air, dead on arrival, lives, comes back from. He ends up losing his leg below the knee, left leg. Comes back and runs a 3:16 marathon with a walking leg. It's not like the high tech prosthetics you have today. It was a walking leg, runs 3:16, comes to Kona and goes 10:42 in Kona, top 20%. Everybody in the race with a walking leg. So at that point, I've got Competitor magazine. I'm covering Jimmy. He's traveling the world. He's sponsored by Bud Budweiser beer company. And eight years later, he's racing here in, just out, just south of la, in a place called Orange County. A van goes through a closed intersection, hits the back of his bike. Guy is already an amputee, propels him head first into a pole, becomes a quadriplegic. He's already an amputee. So myself and two buddies got together and the whole goal was, okay, we got to do something for Jimmy. Let's put on a little triathlon here at La Jolla Cove. I cover Jim, you know, Jim Kanab and all these other wheelchair athletes. And the one thing they would tell me when I'd ask him, what's the worst part about being paralyzed? It was invariably, I'm 30 years old, here come mom and dad back in my life, no sense of self, no sense of independence. So our goal was, okay, we're going to raise 25,000 through his little triathlon, we're going to buy Jimmy a van with hand controls to give him independence. That was it. So we raised 49 and we thought, okay, we're done. And three amputee women come up to us and they're like, it's great. We did for Jimmy, but did you know when you get injured, your health insurance here in the US will cover a walking around leg, an everyday wheelchair? Nothing to do with sport is covered by insurance because insurance companies consider sport a quote unquote, luxury item. And you go, you know, sports on luxury items, huge part of who we are and what we do. So that's when we got our 513C and decided if anybody needed a piece of equipment or training or travel to stay in a game of life through sport, that we be there. It's been 30. This is our 30th anniversary. We've raised $147 million. We've sent out over 40,000 grants to challenged athletes in 50 states, all in 73 countries, and more importantly, in 104 different sports. SLED hockey, wheelchair basketball, beef baseball, which is baseball for the blind. There's so many sports out there that I didn't know existed, but that's what we do. And right now, where this is, we're heading into March. We'll be sending out last, we sent out 3,256 grants totaling about $6.2 million. And we'll be doing this the same in a few weeks. And we've, like I said, we've raised 147. We've got 26 million in our endowment. Being fiscally responsible, my partner, Jeffrey Essekow, is brilliant when it comes to dollars. And we complemented each other really well. I'm sort of a marketing guy. Jeffrey's a financial guy. Rick Kozlowski, our third partner, race director. So it was like the three of us, we did our own thing, but we worked together and we bought a building a dozen years ago. And Jeffrey being very into architecture, he says to the architects, listen, our athletes are all missing body parts or they're in wheelchairs. We want this building to be as flawed as they are. We don't want one straight line in this building. And everything in the building is a little off kilter. We, we just had a party there Saturday night for a woman's 50th birthday party. 50th birthday, one of our cyclists. And, you know, we had 150 people there for the party. And at that, in the same room where we have the Party. We have shown, done movie viewings. We've got a huge screen that drops out. We've done a movie premiere there for a number of the movies we've been involved with. And we can do wheelchair basketball in there and we can do sit volleyball in there, and we can, we can do. We have 25 staff upstairs and downstairs. Our mixing chamber can serve a lot of different purposes. So it's been, it's been a great journey watching our athletes. I think in the last Paralympics, 60%. No, 50% of the participants from the US had received grants from, from the caf. And if we had been a country, caf would have been sixth in the medal count in terms of people who had received grants from caf or competing. So it's. It's been really cool.

Absolutely. It's inspirational. It's brilliant. Really, really brilliant.

1. It shows the power of our sport. It shows. I always say the triathlon is a small sport with a huge heart. And it really, if you look at it, it, yes, it's a competitive sport, but where else can you be treading water with Jan Frodeno and Kailua Bay before the start of the most important event in the world, the Ironman World Championship? You can't go out to the Masters with Tiger. You can't go with Federer to Wimbledon and say, let's hit it around a little bit and then, you know, you'll play and then I'll play a little later. No, it does. This doesn't happen. Our sport is incredibly unique that way.

Oh, this is exactly. So I was in Kona and I. Last October, Claire was racing in Kona and this is exactly what I came back saying. You give me a night, you could, if, you know, you could go play St. Andrews in, but you can't place Andrews even from the same teas that the professionals are using, let alone on the same day. But to be in the World Championships, and, And this is one of the. So this leads me on to the code, the obvious Kona question, the elephant in the room of Iron man at the moment. And that is the split between taking the men to Nice and. And for me, it takes some of that. I mean, I've only witnessed it once, but it takes some of the magic away. But what are your thoughts on. I understand that it's a difficult balance between expanding the sport versus keeping the magic of Kona, but what are your thoughts on what Iron man have done with that race?

Well, I mean, obviously, from my perspective, I wrote the coffee table books in the 25th 30th and 40th anniversary of Ironman World Championship, you know, from Kona. So obviously, I love Kona. I love last year. The two days I thought was spectacular because you had the women out there cheering the men on. You, the men out there cheering the women on. I look back and go, okay, in 2019, there was never a con. In fact, I interviewed Andrew Messick. He's either 19 or 18. Because at that point, they must have been 19, 19. They had done the nice where they had women race one day and the men race the other day. Right. They. That was.

That was.

They had the two separate days of racing. And I interviewed Andrew and said, andrew, would you. You know, is it important for you to have those two separate days of racing? And. And, you know, at that point, nobody thought you could do it in Kona. I think his words were, you know, I wouldn't. Or. No, actually, the point was, would you ever move the Ironman off of Kona? And he goes, I don't want that on my tombstone, that I'm the guy who moved Iron man off the big Island, Hawaii. Now, I thought the two days was phenomenal. And I understood why they needed to do it. Because you had this backlog from 19. Because, remember when. When Covid hit and the Ironman was supposed to be in October of 2020, right? And then they moved it to February of 2021. So you. You had people, you know, there was no racing for a while, but then when racing started and in 2021, you had, okay, February of 2021. Now we're gonna have October of 2021. Well, that didn't happen. So all these. They had this backlog of people qualifying, plus they've got this legacy program. All these people who've done 12, 13, and 14 Ironmans, they get in, so they need to do something, which is why St. George happened. Right? You. You. You did. You did St. George and you had the, you know, you were able to. To do that. But my gut is that I don't like the separate. Right. I understand it. Why not go back to what you did in 2019? You had the men and women racing. You had 2500 participants. You have them both on Saturday, and you race. Now, when I talked to Daniela Ryf about this, she was like, well, obviously it's going to be cheaper for me to go to Nice or wherever they decide to do it, because I go to Maui. I'm there for a couple weeks. I've got people to trade. It's expensive. But she goes, you know, you don't get into the sport to do the Ironman World Championship. You get into it to do Ironman Hawaii. So the thing I feel bad about and I. I get it if you're in Europe. And I. When I was over at that Global Triathlon Awards, I talked to a number of folks, you know, about racing at Nice, and it certainly is way better for the European pros. Way easier to get to, way easier to go train there. But there's, you know, there's something special about Kona. The people I felt the worst for were Jan Frodeno or Lionel Sanders. The clock is ticking. They want to win. Jan wants to win again in Kona. He win his fourth and, you know, Lionel wants to win in Kona. And that event means a lot to a lot of people. But I get it from a business perspective, if you're the Ironman, to have the men's race in one place and a woman's race in another place, you're able to double the amount of money you're getting. Niece is paying them. They're getting money from Kona. I get it. It makes. It makes sense. So it's always hard to sit on the outside when you don't know you're not another person's shoes. You don't know exactly all the details. Now, you know, you were in Kona and having 6,000 people. There was a crowded in the town. Yeah, but was it overwhelming? I didn't think so. I thought it was. I thought it was great. I thought the. The Thursday racing seemed fine to me and the Saturday racing seemed fine. We did our thank God I'm not racing party on Friday night and had a blast doing that. And, you know, and the great part was all the pro women came to the party, right. Because they raced on Thursday. So you had Daniela Ryf, and it was great having all the. All the top pros there on Friday night made. Made the party way better. So now from my perspective, I would like to see everything on Kona. I'd like to see that either the two days or go back to one day with men and women together.

And Claire, just bringing you in on this because you did, you experienced racing on the two days and the benefit of supporting the men on the Saturday, would it make it big? Does it make a big difference to you for that to be, you know, a day exclusively for the ladies and a day plus a few men and then a day exclusively for the men?

Or does it?

Or it would. If the island can only cope with one day, is that sufficient? You know, Are you happy with that?

I think it's difficult. And Bob, as you know, you were saying, like, you can. You can see the business side of it in terms of what Iron man are trying to do. I think there may be an opportunity for women to be showcased a little bit more that if it's just the women racing on Kona this year and then just the men and niece, I think both women and men get their own races, so to speak. But I also think there's something about, you know, Bob, you were right. The very beginning of the. The, you know, the history behind Iron man. And, you know, you were describing in that. That picture behind you, you know, describing the very beginnings of this race and that is to go. I know it didn't start actually on the Big island, but to go race at the island, and that's the kind of pinnacle for. For, I guess, us age groupers racing and qualifying and that suddenly becomes slightly different or that feeling becomes slightly different. But I think there's. There's pros and cons to it, I think.

Yeah, and things change. I mean, you look at it over time, things change. And. But I can't imagine moving the Boston Marathon out of Boston or moving the Berlin Marathon out of Berlin and calling it, you know, the Berlin Marathon and calling it a world championship. I mean, that. That to me is maybe you do two separate days and you do Kona in September and Kona in October, you know, for one. And you rotate it. Men and women, if you feel you need to do just the one. I totally understand the impact on the island Thursday, but if I. In St. George, they raced on Friday and they raised Saturday for the 70.3. And what was great about that was this. The. That area has embraced the Iron man to the point where they've got a statue in the town square for the Iron Man. The kids are out of school on that Friday, so they cheer everybody on. So, you know, I think the island. I don't think the island embraces the Ironman enough in terms of the island itself, because they. There was a lot of, hey, you know, I couldn't get to the school. I couldn't get here. I couldn't get there. I don't know. I just. I feel there's a feeling against events over there that that's a problem. So, you know, I. You want to go where you're wanted. We. One of the things I remember I was with Lou Friedland was a President Ironman. We went Camp Pendleton, which is here in Oceanside, had. We had a full ironman there in 2000 and 2001. And when Lou went, you know, and spoke, I was with Lou when he went and spoke to the commander and his team and said, sir, what I want to make sure I understand because normally when we come somewhere we, it's because they want us there because they have hotels, they want to fill up, they have restaurants they want to fill up. We have financial impact, but to be honest, we're a pain in the ass. People won't be able to get to church, they're not going to be able to get to work, they're not gonna be able to do whatever other things that are happening. Why do you want us here? And the commander was very succinct. He said, listen, I want to be a good neighbor to Oceanside, to Carlsbad, to San Clemente, the cities around us, and fill up their hotels, fill up their restaurants. So you know that. And so they had the, the triathlon was a big, the swim was on the military base, the bike ride was primarily on the military base. And then a run went onto Oceanside and back. They did it just for a couple years and it was too big an impact for, for the base. They're not set up to be an athletic event location, they're set up to be a military base. So I get that. And you know, I, there's, you know the, there's are some other things with the Big island in terms of first class medical treatment. You know they had that when you had some, you know, pretty horrific bike crashes there that they had to get them off of, that they had to get them over to Honolulu, right, that, that they don't, they don't have that type of medical treatment available on the Big island. And this is a world class event with athletes from around the world and you sort of need that if you're, if you're going to move forward with 6,000 participants.

Yeah, it surprised me actually on the day that Claire was racing I, I seen Claire swim head out on the bike and I was walking up Polarney sort of above, above the race and, and this lady was walking down the hill towards me and she said, what's going on? And I said, oh, you don't know? It's, it's the Ironman World Championships. She said, where are you from? I said from the U.K. she said. And I said well, where are you from? She said I live here in Hawaii. You don't even know that the Ironman World Championships is on in your. She was coming in to go to the bank. I Said, right, good luck. You're gonna have, you're gonna have, you know, you're gonna find no joy in there today. But like it totally blew my mind that she could live there and not know that the Ironman world championships was on.

I know, I know. It's, it's. You need to be in places that embrace you, right? Our company, when we owned all the rock and roll and Rock and roll, from a business perspective, Rock and roll and Ironman have a business philosophy is that is different from anybody else. Rock and roll goes to a market that pays them to be there. Ironman gets paid by these cities because they fill up hotel rooms and they, you know, you bring revenue in. So when we were just in Vegas is the best, is the best example. Rock and roll Vegas was last night in, you know, in, in Las Vegas now nighttime, it's, you know, it's Strip at night, right. And when we owned it back in the day, we had 44, 000 people participating in that event. Now you start doing the, the dollars on that. Where the city is paying you to come. They're, they're now a partner and they're blocking off the strip. And why are they doing that? Well, if you got 44, 000 runners a 1 mile circumference from the, the, the finish at Mandalay Bay, it was finishing manley back then. Those 50, 000 available hotel rooms within one mile of that finish. Right? Which is why they were paying to have the Iron man come there. So then you've got, you know, then you've got merchandise sales, you've got entry fees. But the advantage that Ironman and Rock and Roll have over your local 10k, if you go to the city and say I want to put out 10k there, okay, road closures cost you this. Medical cost you this. Police cost you this. You need to get engineering drawings. You do this, you do that. So compare that to, okay, we're paying you because you're filling up our hotel rooms. That's a business advantage that Ironman and Rock and Roll have that very few others, maybe Spartan race has that because they don't block off roads, but they do fill up a lot of hotels. But that is. And actually what was fascinating about it back in the day, you, you know, with rock and roll, the only events that were sort of competitive, you know, Boston Marathon, New York, Chicago, those were one offs. Nobody was doing a series of marathons until rock and roll came around. And so rock and roll is doing this series of marathons and it's changing all perceptions about what somebody. Of how you run a business. And then you're able to look at all the profit centers, which is you're selling rock and roll merchandise. You're, you know, you're selling rock and roll merchandise. The extra hotel revenue, because originally that event was in the morning. Well, all of a sudden you're putting the event on on a Sunday night. And so you're adding 44,000 people. None of those people are from Vegas. Everybody's coming in for the event. So 44,000, plus their families and friends. You're doing 160,000 hotel nights and you've added probably 50,000 by ad, by make, putting it on Sunday night. Because now people are coming in. They're still coming in Friday, like I said, Friday, Saturday. Now they're standing Sunday night. So it's an additional hotel night with 44,000 people participating. It's, you know, it's good business.

It is.

It is.

It strikes me that, that you. There's a business book that I don't know if you've ever heard of called Blue Oceans and it's where businesses have come from.

From.

You've taken two successful businesses or sectors and, and you've created a hybrid. And in fact, triathlon is the perfect blue ocean. You've got runners, you've got swimmers, you've got cyclists, and triathlon is that space in between. It strikes me that you've got a history of doing this, whether it be taking the, the story that I'm not going to ask you to tell it now because we're running out of time. But, but where you, instead of you, you had people running and riding a horse and you brought that in with bikes and cuddly toys and all this sort of stuff. But I heard you talk about another blue Ocean, which I love the idea of because as a golfer I, I like golf, but it doesn't make. It's not the best bedfellow with triathlon because triathlon takes up loads of time. Golf takes up loads of time. You seem to have solved a problem of fix of finding. Tell us a bit about speed golf.

So speed golf came about. A friend of mine had a. A golf course called Rams Hill out in Gosh, where they are Borrego Springs. And he was telling me, hey, I'm. I've got. We did this little thing where we were running the golf course and.

We.

Had some of our caddies running and I thought it'd be sort of fun to have some celebrity runners. And so I brought in Steve Scott who would run 136sub4 minute miles. Adam Johnson was a golf, was a beach volleyball player. St. John Smith was a beach volleyball player and had a big wave. We brought in a bunch of different folks to participate in this, in this event. And it was actually nine athletes. And because of my relationship with Outdoor Life Network, got them to cover it. And I was a commentator with a, with a golf commentator by name of Charlie Jones. And it was like, okay, we're going to film this thing and we'll create the Power bar Speed Golf Open. And it was, it was awesome. And a guy named Jay Larson, who finished 11th in Kona, he won it. No, actually, I take it back. Tom Hunt won it. Tom Hunt was a, he held the American record for 10,000 meters. And his whole philosophy as a golfer was he played for, he tried, he played for bogey, right? His thought was, I'll hit my three iron. I'm not going to even take the woods with. And I'm just going to hit the ball down the middle. And I'll be, if I chip well, I'll be putting for par. If I don't chip well, I'll be putting for bogey. And so he shot, I think he shot an 82 in 40 minutes, something like that. Well, it got to the point where we had. When Jay Larson won the tournament here in San Diego, he shot par in 38 minutes. Yeah, but so then we started playing and I put on a tournament here in San Diego and I had 60 people playing. And what's hard about putting on a tournament? If I'm putting out a tournament, I can go by your running time. If I'm putting on a running event, I sort of know what your PRs are and you know what your golf score is, but your golf score, when you're add running to it, your golf score can go all over the place, right? Because people start hockey, pucking it around the green and it becomes a little bit of a nightmare. But we, we started playing and I, I call it the Dr. Kevorkian theory of golf. Because why be out there five hours when you can, you can be just as crappy a golfer in an hour, right? I'm still going to be crappy, so why not finish in an hour? And so we would play would be myself, Ironman champion, Greg Welch, Paul Huddle. The three of us, we'd line up across the tee box. We'd play an executive course. And we have these golf bags that we design, have. They're black plastic golf bags with spikes on the bottom. And carry balls in our pocket headlamp because we tee off at 5 in the morning. Right. You got to be the first guys out there. Allows you to leave, leave dimples on back of people's heads. And we'd spread out across the tee box. And my favorite thing is because you're, you're teeing off in the dark. And the line you'd hear most often, that sounded right.

And we all know as golfers, just because it sounds right, it can go anywhere.

Who knows where it goes. But the best I've had playing that course, I've had two hole in ones running. And I'm a horrific author. I mean, just awful. But you also get really good with, you know, like I, you carry that eight iron rather than a lot of people have a full bag of clubs that a lot of them haven't hit in 10 years. Right. Well, you're eliminating using a lot of clubs. So you use your eight iron and you're hitting your, you're doing punch shots with it. You're hitting it from the tee. And the best part is we're one time we're coming towards the 18th hole and we've played 36 holes. We usually play through 13 and cut back over to six and then do that again. We do that until the real golfers get to six and usually it's like three. We'll play sometimes 44 holes because. So we're coming to the last hole and it's myself and Huddle and Welchy and we all hit our drives within, you know, 15ft of the, of the hole and we're jogging and you towards the hole and you see this lineup of people with their carts for the hole one which is right there. And they're all sort of looking at us with their mouth open as we all tap in for pars. Right. In 38 seconds on that hole, you know, we're, we're playing where we're, we're playing, you know, in 90 minutes. We're playing 38 holes and it's, it's just the best thing in the world. And it's, you know, again, because of the way we play on the part three, you never have a bad hole because you pick up after par. A par is a point, a birdie is two points. Anything over there doesn't count. So here. Yeah, so.

And I had, I'm liking this even more now.

I had one buddy who'd been playing golf for 40 plus years, had never had a hole in one. He had his first hole in one running with us, Right. It's. It's the. It's.

I suppose if nothing else, you're just upping the ante in terms of the number of holes you've got. I mean, I can't remember the last time I played 36 holes. So, yes, you can get 36 holes done in 90 minutes. You've got more. Essentially, you're giving yourself a better chance of getting a hole in one. Just.

Well, and you'd wear your. Where your. Your monitor and everything. So you go, okay. I ran four miles, you know, as you knew. Exactly. Did the best one was I put on a golf tournament, the Red Bull Open in Maui, around the Xterra World Championship, and had teams from different sports, two big wave surfers to beach volleyball players, Tinley and Mark Allen. From triathlon, Jimmy Riccitiello and Ned over. And from mountain biking. And the way it worked, if we were a team. You played hole one running, I caddied for you from the cart. As soon as the ball went in, we'd switch. So we're running nine holes, were riding nine holes. And I had a DJ at hole one. Right. A DJ on the golf course. People are chest bumping, people are diving across the line. It was more fun than you can ever have. It's like you want to change perceptions out there.

Yeah, I think this is great. I definitely. I need an invite to that. That the next time that happens. That sounds like my type of golf, actually.

You love it.

Awesome. Awesome. Now it's the tradition of the triathlon podcast, or has become tradition to get the previous guest to ask the next guest a question without them knowing what who that's going to be. So, Claire, I think you've got the question from Didi Greasebauer, haven't you?

Yeah. And having not talked about food at all, I was gonna ask you all sorts of things about nutrition, but actually, Didi, who we had on last week, had said, if you were trapped on a desert island, what one food would you take with you?

Ooh, one food I would take with me. Well, you know, my favorite is I'm a. I'm a big Pop Tart fan. Which you might not even have over there. No. So what's great about Pop Tarts is when you ride your bike, right, you put that, that brown sugar cinnamon Pop Tart in the silver packet they come in in your back pocket while you're riding. And it's like being in a toaster. It's like toast. It's heating up as you're riding. So then when you get to a point where you're eating that Pop Tart. There is nothing better because it's already toasted while you're, While you're riding. So being on desert island, I certainly have some heat.

I could.

I'd bring a bunch of Pop Tarts and I just lay them out there in the sand, toast those puppies up and eat them whenever the hell I want.

Good choice. And actually they fit very well, as you say, in the back of a cycling pocket, don't they?

They do. Little Debbies are good too, those Little Debbies, because if it's chocolate, it melts. The Little Debbies with the cream filling, I mean. And the great thing is they have the shelf life of forever.

They.

It doesn't.

Debbie.

Little Debbie is actually a sponsor of that Chattanooga Iron Man. It's a Little Debbie's, like an oatmeal cookies with a cream filling.

Nice.

Very yummy. Very unhealthy. But, yeah, but they're, you know, who cares?

When you're riding, it sounds better than the. What was it you had on one of your Iron Man's? The Hawaiian sweet meats or something?

Hawaiian sweet bread? Yeah, Hawaiian sweet bread is very filling, but it's, It's. You know, back then we just knew we were supposed to use carbs, so that's that. I figured that's carbs, right? Straight Hawaiian sweet bread.

Excellent. I love the fact that you gained weight during the Ironman. And, and last question again. We can't get anybody on the podcast without talking about books. I know you're a serial author, so. But I'm not actually asking about your books. I would like to ask, are there any books that you find yourself recommending, finding you found that were really helpful in your sport, in your career, in your business? What books do you find yourself recommending to others?

You know, what's so funny is I'm a big World War II guy. And, you know, it's not like I learn a lot, but I like, I, I find books just is a way to escape. And one of my writers at Competitor magazine, Marty Dugard, he. He basically pitched me. He was doing corporate writing and pitched me an idea of writing for a competitor. And he became. It was myself, a guy named Kenny McAlpine. And Marty who wrote the books, wrote the magazine. And Marty became an author and started writing books with a guy named Bill O'Reilly. And he wrote these books, killing Lincoln, Killing Kennedy. And imagine when these books, killing Lincoln, Killing Kennedy, killing Patton. So killing Lincoln and killing Kennedy were number one and two. On the New York Times bestseller list at the same time. And here's a guy who had been writing for Competitor magazine and those books, those books he wrote with Bill O'Reilly, I think they sold over 18 million copies so far. And then he just started a new series, taking Paris, 1939, 1944, and then taking Berlin, which I'm in the midst of now. And they're just phenomenal. Marty's. I'm just so proud of the writer he's become. He's just great. I. I assigned him back in the day to cover an event called the Raid Gal was which adventure race series that we cover for Competitor that became Eco Challenge. And the guy who started the Eco Challenge and was involved with Ray Gawaz, a guy named Mark Burnett, created the TV show Survivor, Shark Tank, all that type of stuff. And yeah, it's, it's fun to seeing where people we worked with way back in the day, because we first knew. Knew him, he was selling shirts out of the trunk of his car and trying to make a living. And the next thing you know, he's creating this, creating Survivor, which is still on 25 years later, I think.

Fantastic. Oh, brilliant. Well, that's definitely not a book that's been recommended by anybody else on this podcast.

Taking Berlin. People like it.

Taking Berlin, Taking Paris, Killing Lincoln and Killing Kennedy. I'll be looking excellent. Another. Expanding the reading list very rapidly. Bob, it's been absolutely brilliant getting you on. I love listening to your stories. There's a reason why you're known as such a brilliant storyteller, because it's so fantastic to listen to particularly the stories of the origin of a sport that, that we both absolutely love. So it's been fantastic getting you on and I can't wait to come to see you in Kona at some point and, and come and see Breakfast with Bob.

I love it. And if you get to San Diego while you're out here, let me know.

I will do. I will do. Whether it's. I'm toying with trying to work out whether I can get a train down to San Diego and then, yeah, back or whatever it is. I've definitely got to do some long rides while I'm out there, so. Amazing.

I'll give you a tour of the CF building. You'd love it. Brilliant.

Amazing. Well, Bob, it's been. It's been absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much for your time and yeah, we'll. We'll keep in touch.

Thank you so much. Appreciate the time.

If you want to find out more About Bob, best place to head to is babbittville.com you can also find him on Instagram as Babbittville. And if you want to find out more about the Challenged athletes foundation, it's www.challengedathletes.org. So what did you make of that interview with Bob?

Amazing. He is such a storyteller. And actually, it just. It just kind of proves how, you know, when he's interviewing people, how you're so engaged in that conversation. No, it was. It was fantastic. And also, you know, the depth and he didn't go into it too much, but he did, you know, start off very much at the beginning of, like, where Iron man originated.

Yeah.

And, you know, I think a lot of people forget, like, he was right at the very beginning, you know, and that, that, to me, was just amazing. And also, you know, how he's made a business out the sport. And, I don't know for you, I mean, you, you know, you're a businessman and, you know. So what were your thoughts behind the kind of business side of things as well?

Well, I think so. Firstly, I think he was incredibly brave at the start to go all in on a sport that was, you know, essentially 115 people once it had gone into Sports Illustrated. So I think that was. That was very bold. But I think what. What became really apparent both in the interview just now, but also listening to Bob other times, is he just got it right from that first Iron Man. He was like, I get this. This is going to be amazing. This. Other people are going to feel this. I've got to go all in. And how he's created multiple businesses out of that passion. And, and it always strikes me as that it was. It was for the good of the sport. It wasn't. I'm going to do this because I think I can make lots of profit out of it. It's. I'm going to do this because this is going to make this sport even bigger, even more popular, even better. And as a result, he's made money out of it and made business, you know, made a successful business out of it. So I thought that was really good. I love the Blue Oceans, which I mentioned, is a really good book in the sense that. So it's, for example, Cirque du Soleil is one of the. One of the businesses that's used because essentially what that is, is it's part theater, you know, play production, and it's part circus, and it's that sort of middle ground, that blue, blue ocean space where the two overlap. And it just. The number of times I've sort of seen that with his. The different elements that he's brought to triathlon is. Is absolutely brilliant. So I thought that was really interesting. I also think just telling stories is so powerful in business. And his point around it doesn't have to be, you know, the everyday story that's compelling within it is often the most powerful story. It's not necessarily about the winner, it's about the stories that are happening within it. And I think that's really powerful in all walks of life. So, yeah, I thought it was really interesting and.

And, you know, listening about his. About the charity as well and, you know, being able to help and support people who are more like physically challenged and bringing those people into sport and, you know, you know, the drive and the success of the. Of those people as well. So it was fascinating to hear about that.

It was. And I think so. We've heard other people talk about, particularly when we've talked about females in sport, we've talked about, if you can't see it, you can't be it. And that's exactly what he seems to. I mean, as well as actually providing the financial funding to help athletes that need, you know, prosthetics and all that sort of stuff be able to compete is that. That's amazing. But also to give people the. The inspiration and, you know, so that they can see what other people are doing with similar disabilities is. Is incredible. I think it's absolutely brilliant what he's done for the sport and for. For the Challenged Athletes Foundation.

What do you think?

So many questions that we. We had for him that we haven't asked. We could have spoken to him for hours, I think.

I know. He's a professional storyteller, isn't it? I mean, you could have literally asked 15 questions and he'd have been. It had been carrying on for four days, I think, and it would be brilliant to continue to listen to him for days. He's just got such a wonderful way of telling those stories. And I have to confess, I'm really. I really like the idea of speed golf. Golf takes too long for my liking.

Somebody who doesn't play golf, whatever. It sounded actually quite fun. I had no idea partially what he was talking about, but the running in between, I probably could do that.

Yeah, I think. I think it's a great idea. You only take three clubs. You just run every time. As soon as you hit the ball, you run. You're less stressed about hitting bad shots because you just pick up after you've had three or four shots on one hole. If it's not going according to plan, my only worry would be that if you have to, if you have to pick up after four on a par four, I might actually never get to the green. I might just continually pick up and it would therefore make for a very quick round of golf.

Yeah, it sounded, sounded, sounded really good fun. I might stick to triathlon.

I think I've got a chance with speed golf. I might beat some of the golfers that can't run and I might beat some of the triathletes that can't play golf. So Although, although when he started saying that people were going around in level par but in sort of 38 minutes, that is. I've got zero chance in that world. That is, that is unbelievable. Yeah, I can't quite get my head around that. That's amazing. But yeah, brilliant. And, and how's your training going at the moment?

Yeah, okay. I'm. No, it's, it's, it's all going, it's all going well and yeah. Hopefully getting ready to, to race in a don't know, a couple of months time.

Have you decided, have you decided when you're racing next? I know it was up in the air.

I do have some races already in May. Um, but just, just kind of trying to, to reorganize a longer or a couple of longer distance races. So yeah, that's, that's something that I'm, I'm thinking about now and kind of where to go. But it's, you know, it's coming up upon us quickly, isn't it in terms of race season? Yeah. How about you? Are you feeling ready?

No, I'm not feeling ready even slightly. It's a good job we're not doing Ironman South Africa because I'm definitely in no place for that. In the last two weeks I've had an MRI on my ankle and my knee. I've got tendinopathy which the specialist has basically said you're not going to do any more damage by carrying on so you've just got to take the pain. So it's basically just man up and crack on really. So I think, I think my plan.

Our Ultra race last year, didn't I.

I think you probably did. But at least when I got like an injured ankle last year I'd done something stupid over the close the off season to justify having an injured ankle. This, this year I was sensible and canceled the ultra and I've still got the injured ankle so I feel I feel slightly robbed. But I. Yeah, so I think I'm still going to do Lion Man Lanzarote, which I did until I saw this specialist I wasn't sure I dare do, but I think I'm okay to do that. So. So yeah, the training's not going quite according to plan, but I'm hoping I can up it now.

Fantastic. I think it's good to have. Good to have a goal in mind as well, isn't it?

Yeah, it is, it is. Absolutely.

Right.

Well, good luck with your training, good luck with planning the races as well. And for everybody else, keep on training. And remember this podcast was sponsored by 33 fuel, so rethink your sports nutrition with 33 fuel award winning natural sports nutrition for your performance, health and a fitter Future. It's the 33 Fuel Fuel Osophy. Get yours@33fuel.com and if you use the discount code Tribeathlon or the link in the show notes, you'll get a discount at the check. If you enjoyed this podcast, please do review it and share it because it helps other people find what we think is really valuable learning lessons from amazing athletes. So please do that. You can also find the whole back catalogue@tribathlon.com and you can also find out about the Tribe Athlon app which helps people find events, find people to train with and enjoy their events through their tribe. So check out tribathlon.com.