The Future of Running Is You: 10 Lessons from Rob Simmelkjaer

Rob came from a world of professional sports media — and his first observation when he arrived at NYRR was that they were sitting on one of the greatest story repositories in all of sport. The NBA has four teams in the playoffs and a handful of highly paid athletes with interesting stories. NYRR has 50,000 people at the starting line of one marathon alone — and every single one of them is there for a reason that would be genuinely fascinating to understand.

That insight led directly to the creation of the Final Finishers documentary, East 89th Street Productions, and the At the Pace podcast. It all starts from the same place: the stories are already there. Your job is to find them and tell them.

Rob walked into NYRR in late 2022 — right at the early stages of the biggest running boom in a generation. He didn't fully see it coming. Looking back, he can trace it to the pandemic, to the run club explosion, to the social transformation of a sport that had been largely solo. In 2019, run clubs gathering at bar corners in New York City were not a thing. Now they're everywhere.

His message to his senior leadership team: seize this moment deliberately. The boom won't last forever. Use it to build something that outlasts the tailwind.

Rob has made mental health a cornerstone of NYRR's identity — not as a PR strategy, but as a genuine reflection of what running actually is for most people. When he asks runners why they run, the overwhelming answer has nothing to do with pace or performance. It's about how it makes them feel. Psychologically. Mentally. Emotionally.

The NYRR created the Mindful 5K — a race explicitly centered around mental health and the connection between running and psychological wellbeing. When middle school runners showed up to race at that event, Rob described it as one of his most meaningful moments in the role.

When asked what barrier even the most well-intentioned races miss, Rob gave an answer I hadn't heard framed quite this way before. It's not the entry fee. It's the mental model. For millions of people, the idea of running a race — even a 10K — is as realistic as going to the moon. It simply doesn't occur to them as something they would do.

The path in isn't always obvious. Not everyone grew up in a running family. Not everyone knows how to start. The knowledge of how to begin — how to walk-run your way to a 5K, what shoes to buy, how far to go the first time — is genuinely unknown to a huge segment of potential runners.

NYRR has 200,000 kids in their Rising New York Road Runners program. Rob wants to grow that. He wants kids racing past the marathon finish line in Central Park — experiencing the same moment the elites experience, seeing what's possible, filing it away. Mo Farah ran the London Mini Marathon as a child. Rob wants a kid to cross the NYRR kids kickoff finish line and one day win the marathon.

When Rob joined NYRR, the organization had pledged to be net zero by 2040. His reaction: that's way too far out. Let's go faster. The result was Team for Climate — an exclusive entry pathway into the NYC Marathon and select other NYRR races where runners commit to raising funds to offset the carbon footprint of the event. Not just NYRR's operational emissions, but the carbon of every runner who flies in from around the world.

It sold out in minutes. The second year class is full. It's simultaneously a sustainability program, a charity fundraiser, a community-building tool, and an access mechanism — all from the same initiative.

Rob spent eight years at NBC Sports and anchored three Olympic broadcasts. He knows exactly what makes people tune in. And his diagnosis of running's spectator problem is precise: it's not that the sport is boring to watch. It's that people don't feel invested in the runners they're watching. And the way you fix that is stories.

Martinez Evans — featured in the Final Finishers documentary — went to a doctor who told him he was obese and living on borrowed time. Martinez told that doctor he'd run a marathon. The doctor laughed in his face. Less than 18 months later, Martinez crossed a marathon finish line. That story is more compelling than any elite performance. We just haven't been telling it at scale.

Rob ran Berlin last September after 11 years away from marathons. He got walking pneumonia three weeks before the race, cramped up badly in the final miles, and nearly DNF'd. He made it to the finish — and broke his PR from 11 years earlier — because two people pulled him through. His pacer, Roberto. And a stranger in the crowd who recognized him and just started cheering him forward.

He applied the same lesson to the organic phenomenon at the 2025 Boston Marathon — runners who finished hours earlier coming back to Boylston Street to cheer the final finishers. Nobody organized it. Nobody promoted it. The community just knew.

Rob dropped two future-facing ideas in this conversation that I keep returning to. The first: NYRR wants a real home for running in New York — not just the RUN Center for bib pickup, but a physical space where people come to run, to connect, to train, year-round. More tracks, more parks, more places where the community gathers around the act of running itself.

The second: the hot take. As a board member of the Abbott World Marathon Majors, Rob sees an opportunity to create a global streaming platform — a destination where marathon content, storytelling, travel, and inspiration all live together, for a sport that is genuinely global but lacks a global media home.

Rob's most lasting thought from this conversation wasn't about strategy or scale. It was about what completing a marathon actually means — not as a fitness achievement, but as a character signal. He made the case simply and directly.

That belief — that running builds the character that transfers to everything else — is ultimately why NYRR exists. Not to put on races. To build people.