If you’ve ever sucked wind while pounding the pavement during a competitive race, with legions of faster, fitter people streaming past you, take heart: there was once a time when even the Mayor of Running was in your shoes.
While it’s obvious now that Bart Yasso was born to run—this is, after all, the inventor of the Yasso 800, the man who was speeding his way through sub-three-hour marathons at his peak, and repping Runner’s World magazine at events across the world—it wasn’t so obvious back in 1980, when Yasso was slogging his way to the finish line of his first competitive 10K, a race in Moore Township that he entered following some goading from his (then) faster brother, George. Bart went too hard, too fast. He wanted to vomit by mile three, he would recall later in his memoir, My Life on the Run.
But he finished the race, and something had been stirred within him. “[George] did exactly what I needed—he convinced me I could be good at the sport if I really put in my time and wanted to do it,” says Yasso. “That’s what I needed to hear, and that’s what I did.” And about a year later, by the way, George couldn’t beat Bart in a race even with a five-minute head start.
Yasso has spent all of his 69 years living in the Lehigh Valley. A product of Fountain Hill, he played sports when he was a kid, but never felt drawn to running. “Running was always that thing that was punishment if you did another sport,” he says, recalling how he and his teammates on the CYO football team at St. Ursula School used to slack off when they were supposed to be running as part of their warm-up. The only sport he played in high school—he first attended Bethlehem Catholic, then Liberty—was intramural wrestling.
A couple years after graduation, he was living on Bethlehem’s Southside and wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life. He did know he wanted to get healthier. “I used to see my neighbor running and I thought, ‘That guy looks like he’s having fun out there,’” says Yasso. He set out for his first run in cut-off jeans and an old pair of Keds, he recalled in his memoir. “I did make it a mile the first time I ran, but a mile felt like a long way.”
But running came naturally to the tall and lean Yasso. It wasn’t long before his weekly mileage totals were deep in double digits. He was winning races, too, and becoming a fixture in the local newspapers. “If there was a local race, I had something to do with it, whether I was running it or organizing it,” says Yasso. He was trying to make a go of it as a professional triathlete, working odd jobs during the week, and competing on weekends, but there wasn’t enough money in it.
Still, he ended up on the radar of Runner’s World, which had relocated from California to Emmaus as part of Rodale publishing in 1985. Yasso began working there two years later. His affable personality and genuine love for the sport made him a natural choice for growing the magazine’s brand ambassador program into a force to be reckoned with on the world stage.
As Chief Running Officer, he was constantly on the road, traveling to events around the United States and abroad to offer his wisdom to running clubs, cheer on the athletes and just generally talk shop. He became a fixture in that global community, a mix of elite athletes, weekend warriors trying to get through their first 5K, and everyone in-between. The Mayor of Running, they called him.
Of course, Yasso often wasn’t just a spectator at those events. He had to walk the walk—or run the run, in his case. Yasso is one of just a few people to have completed races on all seven continents. What other singular runner has stories of being chased by an angry rhino in Chitwan National Park in Nepal, sprinting past penguins in Antarctica, powering through the 56-mile Comrades Marathon in South Africa or braving a 146-mile trek through Death Valley in July? (The last one got him another nickname—Badwater Bart.)
But his most memorable runs aren’t all predicated on geography. Yasso once ran a 5K in the buff. It was outside Spokane, WA, he recalled, far away from the Lehigh Valley. “If you’re going to do a naked run, you don’t do it close to home,” he says. Even more nerve-wracking than the race itself was the speech he had to give the night before at the traditional pre-run pasta dinner. The runners were naked there, too, and Yasso was expected to follow suit. His plan to seek a bit of coverage behind the customary podium on the stage was thwarted by the fact that there was no podium.
Clothed or not (but mostly clothed), Yasso racked up a number of wins and accolades over the years. Among them: he won the U.S. National Biathlon Long Course Championship in 1987. In 1998 he was first across the finish line at the Smoky Mountain Marathon. Yasso is a five-time Ironman, and a member of both the Running USA Hall of Champions and the Road Runners Club of America Distance Running Hall of Fame.
Beyond his personal victories, he’s left his mark on the sport in other ways. He’s the inventor of the Yasso 800s, a system of interval training meant to increase speed and endurance. Some say it’s an accurate predictor of a runner’s marathon time. Here in the Lehigh Valley, Yasso helped launch the Runner’s World Half Marathon & Festival, which ceased in 2020, and the Bethlehem Running Festival, which began in 2023. He also designed the course for the Via marathon, which takes runners from Allentown to Easton and is a qualifier for the Boston Marathon (which Yasso has run eight times, by the way).
In the later years of his tenure with Runner’s World, Yasso was attending events up to 40 weekends a year, racking up as many frequent flier miles as a pilot. “The travel was arduous, as much as I loved it,” says Yasso. “It started to wear on me, healthwise.” It didn’t help that he also suffered multiple bouts of Lyme disease, dating back to 1990, when he started to feel sick after completing a 50-mile race in Connecticut. For a while, doctors were stumped. “Nobody knew what was wrong. It just kept going on and on,” Yasso says. “I knew nothing about Lyme in 1990. I know a lot about it now.” The disease didn’t stop him, but it did slow him down.
By the end of 2017, the Mayor of Running was ready to bow out as Chief Running Officer at Runner’s World. “There’s a time for everything, and I was ready to retire,” he says. But he’s still a fixture at races, traveling about six or seven times a year for events, and making appearances in the Lehigh Valley, too. And he is still running, Lyme disease be damned. On the day of this interview, he was raving about a 5.5-mile run he had completed that morning. “I had so much fun out there,” he says.
And he’s still inspiring other runners with the written word. His second book, Race Everything, was released as his time at Rodale was winding down. Now he’s completed his third book, 100 Runs of a Lifetime, which will be released in April. He was approached by National Geographic about compiling a list of the best runs and races around the world. Yasso says he personally has completed somewhere around 92 of them. He hopes to be able to complete the remaining eight. But in retirement, he has other destinations on his mind these days: “There’s a hammock in my backyard,” Yasso says. “It’s been there for 31 years.”
