How will the impending sale of Run For Your Life impact Charlotte’s running community?
For the past 15 years, Tim Rhodes has split his time between two big jobs: owning and operating one of the most successful running stores in Charlotte, and serving as owner and race director of several popular local races — including the city’s marquee marathon.
At the end of 2020, he’ll be giving up one of them.
Rhodes said he has signed a letter of intent to sell his Run For Your Life stores in the Midtown and Piper Glen areas to Chris Elkins, the owner of Run For Your Life’s University location. Elkins already had a minority but substantial stake in Rhodes’ two shops. The deal will close at the end of the year.
One of the main impacts this could have on the running community moving forward is the fact that Rhodes will be freed up to focus more of his time and energy on trying to grow the Charlotte Marathon, something he has struggled to do since it was founded in 2005.
“It’s just kind of become this growing conflict, if you will, of trying to divide my time enough to where I can do both really well,” he said. “And, you know, if I self-reflect, I don’t think I’ve been able to. It’s like having two full-time jobs. You’re not gonna give either one the attention that they deserve.”
(According to the website FindMyMarathon.com, the Charlotte Marathon ranked 100th in size based on total number of marathon finishers in 2018 — in 2019, less than 1,000 completed the 26.2-mile race here — which is way out of sync with the population at large. The Observer explored the history of the event and the challenges it faces for growth in this 2018 story.)
In addition to the marathon, Rhodes is responsible for six other Charlotte races, and currently, the clearinghouse for those events is Run For Your Life’s website. So, another effect is that Rhodes will be able to fully extricate his event business — Event Marketing Services, Inc., which he created in the mid-’90s — from its ties to Run For Your Life.
His plan is to take those other races — the Shamrock 4 Miler, the American 4 Miler, the Yiasou Greek Festival 5K, the Hit the Brixx 5k, the Lake Norman 15K, and the Rocktoberfest 5 Miler & Half Marathon — and make them part of a re-branded RunCharlotte.com, which currently is the website just for the Charlotte Marathon.
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Rhodes said he hopes to turn the Run Charlotte brand into “a center for the running community to find whatever they’re looking for, whether it’s a group run, or training program, or information, or an event, or just community. ... It’s about creating great events, great engagement, year-round.”
And though he said he knows it will take time, Rhodes hopes that these races — particularly the marathon — eventually will not be perceived as having any special association to Run For Your Life.
“I think it’s really important that the Charlotte running community has a level of comfort with me, that my stewardship of the marathon extends to everyone,” he said. “I think, to an extent, my ownership of Run For Your Life has skewed that a little bit to one retail store.
“But what’s important to me, really, is making sure that the entirety of the Charlotte running community embraces the marathon and feels like they have some skin in the game. I want to make sure that people don’t think that I’m a homer for one brand over another, whether it’s a store or a club or anything else.
“We’re here for everyone.”
What’s next for Run For Your Life?
Rhodes originally bought the Run For Your Life running store at Park Road Shopping Square in Dilworth in 2003 from longtime owner Larry Frederick, and quickly pushed the idea of expansion — opening a second location in the University area and a third in the Stonecrest area.
The Stonecrest store did well, but the University shop struggled. Chris Elkins, who was already had a minority stake in the business, offered to buy it and try to turn it around in 2004. He was successful.
Over the past decade, Rhodes moved the Stonecrest location to Piper Glen, opened and closed a SouthPark location, and moved the Dilworth location to its current spot on South Kings Drive in Midtown; about five years ago, Elkins also upped his stake in the Piper Glen and Midtown stores so that it was closer to an equal partnership.
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Elkins has long been a familiar face to University customers, but in recent years he’s also been more visible in Rhodes’ stores.
“I hope there can be some peace in the fact that there’s not anybody from the outside coming in to buy out Tim,” Elkins said. “It’s kind of a continuation of ownership — just, Tim’s out, and I’m still there. I think that’s probably good to have people know that I’m still involved, I’ll still be there, and that kind of keeps it a consistent local brand.”
And while Rhodes has said he is almost never on the floor of his stores, Elkins thrives on sitting on a stool and talking to customers about shoes and about running in general.
“That’s the reason I started doing it,” he said, “and I hope that my job is never too busy for me to not get to do that still.”
As for whether competition from online running apparel and shoe retailers played a factor in Rhodes’ decision, the 58-year-old father of five maintained that it wasn’t.
“With any industry, the internet changed everything,” he said. “It changed our shopping habits, our reading habits, where we get information, how we communicate. The event business hasn’t been immune to it either. It’s not just unique to the running business. And people have been buying shoes online for 15 years now. So I think the market has settled to where we know what percent of the running-shoe business the internet’s gonna take. It’ll ebb and flow a little bit, but they’re not 30 percent on their way to 60.
“I mean, if I had to share my biggest frustration with the running business, it’s customers who come in and shop and get all the information and then say, ‘OK, thanks, I’ll be back.’ And you know they won’t. I just think that’s disingenuous. There’s some intellectual property here that is of value.”
“But in the end, it’s really not so much about me wanting to out of something. It’s that my passion’s always been for the events.”
Elkins, meanwhile, is optimistic about the future of his business.
“I do think,” he said, “that there is this resurgence of ‘I want to see it, I want to touch it, I want to feel it, I want to talk to somebody about it. And you can’t get that from a review on Amazon.”
