"If we try to do the same thing we’ve always done, we’re going to lose."

The TPF Q&A with Runner’s World runner-in-chief Jeff Dengate

Jeff Dengate keeps on running. Most days, twice. Some days, three times. Before work, at lunch, after work. He’s always running. He once had a 257-day streak of running in a different shoe model every day. Which makes sense, seeing that he has worked at Runner’s World on and off since 2007, before he was named runner-in-chief in 2018. These days, Jeff oversees all of Runner’s World’s product testing, hosts The Amazing Runner’s World Show, and runs in more shoes in one year than most people do in a lifetime.

We called up Jeff to talk about how he went from flipping hot dogs at Detroit Pistons games to writing for the NBA, what it takes to cut it in media, how many pairs of shoes are under his desk, and the dumbest thing he’s ever done running.

Jeff Dengate at the Boston Marathon. Photo courtesy of Adidas.

Let’s start at the top. How did you make your way from serving hot dogs at The Palace to the NBA, and then on to a long career at Runner’s World?

[Laughs] It’s an interesting path I took, right? I was a high school kid who needed a job, and one of my cousins worked the concessions for the Pistons. He got me an after-school job working games. We’d shut down the stands at the end of the third quarter, and go sneak a few minutes of the fourth quarter before we cleaned up.

I interned in the Pistons’ broadcasting department in college. That internship turned into a full-time job when I graduated. After a couple years, I took a chance and moved to New York without a job. Slept on couches for a couple months. Something opened up at the league, and I worked as a writer at the NBA for five years.

You can’t overstate the importance of connections. Having anybody put in a good word for you and get you out of the stack, especially with everything being filtered through digital tools now, helps.

What is the difference between runner-in-chief and editor-in-chief? Is there a distinction?

My technical title here is Director of Product Testing. I work within Hearst’s Enthusiast Group, which is Runner’s World, Bicycling, Popular Mechanics, Bestproducts.com, and Biography.com. We don’t have a true editor-in-chief. We have an editorial director over the whole Enthusiast Group, and he turns us loose to make everything happen within our content silos.

I oversee all the product testing. But having been around for so long I know a lot about the business in a whole lot of different areas in the industry, and I touch a lot of what happens here within Runner’s World.

When you started at Runner’s World in 2007, the editor-in-chief was looking at the entire magazine before it went to print. Are you still fairly involved in print and the website, or do you trust the folks who work under you to do that?

There’s a lot of trust here. We don’t think of ourselves as a magazine anymore. There are a lot of different avenues and ways that we reach different people. We think about the content we’re creating and for what channel and what distribution means. We’re down to four print issues a year. It’s still a premium product. I hope there’s never a day we don’t have print, but it’s changed. But every day is fun. Every single day, I get fired up to come to work.

I find myself going to Runner’s World for shoe reviews, training ideas, and to send friends with achilles issues an old story about eccentric heel raises. What is consistently the most popular stuff on the site?

We’re a service title. We are here to help answer questions and help solve your problems. That’s what is always going to work. I love to entertain and inspire people. People come to us for that, but the number one reason you come to Runner’s World is “I just started running and don’t know what the heck I’m doing” or “something hurts, and I need to figure out how to make it stop hurting.”

The content that has always led the way is our training and injury prevention advice and gear reviews. We have this saying inside that my boss is actually the reader. They’re telling us what they want to know. Time and again, that is that service-based content.

What do you make of our current running boom?

I’m a little bit jealous, to be honest, because I grew up in the dark days of running. You didn’t have all the internet resources that we have now. We didn’t have run clubs. Now, there are so many opportunities and so many ways you can get involved. It’s not the same pre-work loop around your neighborhood that a bunch of us used to do. There’s so much opportunity to find a spot in this sport.

Running shoes are a very specific and very personal recommendation. How do you and your team balance that in product reviews?

We test. One thing I will never give up is actually putting things to use. We have 300 runners that we work with on our wear testing program to test shoes. For every model of shoe we test, we probably get 10 pairs.

Our testers go out and run for about a month in the shoes. The first run out might stink, but they’re going to keep using it, and they’re going to find out why they like it, how it worked, and how it compared to other things they’ve tested. On the front end, we try to make sure that we’re putting them in the right shoe that’s going to work for them. They have to come here to our office and try it on, just like if they went into a shoe store.

We have trail runners. We have people trying to qualify for the Olympic marathon trials. We have slower runners. They all give us info on how they use a shoe. When all that comes back in, our staff makes sense of it and then we get in the shoes ourselves so we can understand what these testers are saying.

Your job is to test shoes. If you’re doing an important workout, do you reach for your favorite shoe or do you use it as an opportunity to test something?

I’ll grab a shoe out of a box and race in something I’ve never worn before.

A marathon?

Yeah! I ran Philadelphia last year. We had just gotten in the new Mizuno Hyperwarp Pro. I had never worn it before. That morning, I slipped it on and told my wife and daughter to bring a second pair of shoes for me down to the seven-mile mark by our hotel in case. By the time I got to mile seven, I knew they’d work just fine. Last week, I ran a 5k in a pair of shoes I’d never laced up before and ripped it.

But I’m a little more durable than a lot of people. I’ve run in 98 pairs of shoes this year so far. [Ed note: Since we spoke, Jeff is up to 107… and counting.]

What’s your favorite shoe right now?

It’s impossible to answer. The shoe of the year last year is still, I think, the best shoe that you can buy: the Adizero Evo SL from Adidas.

That’s the team-issued shoe here at Three Point Four Media.

It does everything. It feels good. It’s not overly soft. It’s not overly hard. It’s bouncy enough. It’s a home run.

How much stuff do you have in your office? When I wrote about health and fitness, I had to tell publicists to stop sending stuff to my house.

You don’t want to see my desk. I’ve actually expanded to three desks here. I probably have 150 pairs of shoes under my desks.

What advice would you give to a young writer or fitness enthusiast who wants to get into the fitness media space?

You have to do it because you love it. Don’t be afraid of change. Don’t be afraid of the challenges that face the media industry. If you read the headlines and talk to people that have been in the media industry, it’s tough, it’s hard, it’s chased a lot of people away. The business has been totally turned upside down. I look at it as a challenge and an opportunity to rethink what we’re doing. If we try to do the same thing we’ve always done, we’re going to lose.

What are we in it for? For Runner’s World, that’s an easy answer. I’m here to genuinely help people. How we do that changes a little bit, but that’s still what I want to do every single day. If you can get into it for the right reasons and find the passion for what you want to do, you can have some fun and you can be good at it.

It’s also really hard to find good help. It’s really hard to find people who are passionate about what they do and are good at doing it. There are a lot of people that want jobs. The people who are the best in this business are the ones who want to be here. Because there are plenty of other jobs where you are going to make more money and have a more secure livelihood. If you want to come into media and journalism, understand you are going to take your lumps, there are going to be a lot of tough days, but even with the challenges of AI and whatever else is next, it creates opportunity if you’re open to it.

Last question: What is the dumbest thing you’ve done in your running career?

Probably a beer mile in Boston at midnight after a party. We were in dress clothes and raced down Boylston Street and a back alley past people standing out in front of a bar smoking cigarettes asking if we lost bets. The next day was rough.