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Guest: Bob Roudebush @roudybob
Show Notes:
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His wife, Trena, who has also been interviewed on this podcast (EP 31)
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Prairie on Fire, a backyard ultramarathon in Noblesville, IN
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His first 100-miler attempt at Leadville in Colorado and having his wife, Trena, as his crew chief
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How he started running to quit smoking
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Dropping out of college after being valedictorian of his high school class but now working for one of the biggest software companies in the world
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Meeting Trena and running races together
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Running a half marathon with David Goggins, yes, THE David Goggins
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The time he hit a deer with his car on the way to run an ultra in Idaho
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Guiding a blind runner, “Speed Turtle” at Indy Monumental and the Kentucky Derby Marathon (and then ran Flying Pig)
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A funny Trena running story from a trip they took to Paris
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Qualifying for Boston by never going
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] This is a Sandy Boy Productions podcast.
Welcome to Finish Lines and Milestones, a podcast for everyday runners. I'm your host, ally Brett knocker, and if you run, you're a runner and every runner has a story. Join me each week as I share these stories and we celebrate finish lines and milestones together.
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So if [00:01:00] you are interested in trying some new fuel. Look no further. You've gotta try Noogs you can buy them on Amazon. Or if you wanna use my discount, you can go to NOOGON.COM and you can use Code ALLYB15 for 15% off of your order.
This is also a woman-owned and veteran-owned business. It's a husband and wife team. And don't just take my word for it. I had a friend on Instagram reach out and say, okay, I bought some Noogs. Holy bleep. They are so bleeping good. So there you go. Not just me that loves them. So go try Noogs. And now for this week's episode, my guest is the husband of a previous guest, Trina Roudebush's husband. The Bob R This was a long time in the making. And I finally got to sit down with Bob and hear all about his story. If you look at Bob from the outside in, you'll see an ultra runner who has done multiple hundred milers and you just think, man, this guy he's run his whole life.
He's so good at this. But what I [00:02:00] find really interesting about Bob is that. He didn't always run. In fact, during his professional career he got really, really outta shape. He was a smoker and he found his way to running and now does a hundred milers. So the progression of that is really inspiring
and you'll also find that Bob has some stories. like the time he hit a deer on the way to a race, still made it to the race. Spoiler alert. and also he has run a half marathon with David Goggins. Yes, the David Goggins. So great stories. Bob's awesome. I hope you enjoy this episode with Bob Roudebush.
Ally Brettnacher: Okay. We're officially here, Bob. Welcome. Thank you. It's two and a half years in the making.
Bob Roudebush: Yes. Finally. It's good to be here.
Ally Brettnacher: it's great to have you. I was trying to think. I don't know that I've had any other couples, like where I've interviewed both the husband and the wife.
So the round of bushes are the first
Bob Roudebush: we could come back for another where it's all three of us.
Ally Brettnacher: That would be way too much
Bob Roudebush: fun.
Ally Brettnacher: We, I mean, that would be amazing. sign me up for that. So, yeah. So your wife Trina was episode [00:03:00] 31, just so people know. Okay. So if they wanna get to know Trina, who I'm sure we will talk about
Bob Roudebush: Mm-hmm. That was first on the agenda that I saw
Ally Brettnacher: Yes, it was. I was like, we gotta talk about Trina just
Bob Roudebush: I asked, you know, Trina was the one pushing for this, and so I, I joked with her, I said, was this just your long play way of like being in two podcasts with Ali and
Ally Brettnacher: so smart.
Yeah. Yeah. And now three, yeah, for when we do it all together
Bob Roudebush: years. Yeah.
Ally Brettnacher: in two and a half years. Yeah. In two, in another two and a half years. Oh my gosh. So I can't remember, did we officially meet at Prairie on Fire? You probably don't remember. Probably, but I think, when you were in your tent, I went over and shook your hand and that, I mean, you ran how many miles this
Bob Roudebush: Uh, 33 yards. So that's 137 miles I think.
Ally Brettnacher: Okay. So for people who don't know. What we're talking about. Okay. Prairie on Fire. Will you explain what that
Bob Roudebush: the Backyard Ultra format. Yes. I'll, I'll do my
Ally Brettnacher: best. Okay. I mean, come on, 33 yards. I think you know what you're doing now.
Bob Roudebush: uh, Gary Cantrell of, ultra fame from Bell Buckle, Tennessee, I think is where he, where he hails from, Lazarus [00:04:00] Lake is his pseudonym. Okay.
Ally Brettnacher: Okay.
Bob Roudebush: He is the guy that invented, the Barkley Marathon. Okay.
Ally Brettnacher: Okay. Mm-hmm.
Bob Roudebush: He's also invented a bunch of other different, torturous, ultra marathon endurance event formats.
But one of those was, the Barclay Marathons and one of the others was this idea of a, a backyard ultra. And I think what he was trying to go for was like, how can people really determine their.
Capacity and like what they can achieve in a format that like has no end, right? So when you're running, um, you know, a 5K or 10 K or a, you know, half marathon or a marathon, you're like, okay, I'll be done at 26 miles.
Mm-hmm. 26.2 miles. But when you're running a backyard ultra, you could be done in 20 hours. In 30 hours. Or the, the record, I should have looked it up before I came in is I think high eighties or low nineties, somewhere around there. Yeah.
Ally Brettnacher: I wanna say it's around, is it under 500 miles? I don't know
Bob Roudebush: Yeah, I think so.
Ally Brettnacher: but not by a lot.
Bob Roudebush: And, and so the whole idea [00:05:00] is right that, uh, at the top of every hour you start in the corral and you have one hour to run, 4.16, seven miles,
Ally Brettnacher: and
Bob Roudebush: you can't take any aid from anywhere, you know, or anyone or anywhere on the course. and you can only use what you carry with you. and you have an hour to complete that. Loop or that yard and the strategy comes in where, you know, how fast you run or how slow you run that yard determines how much time you have inter loople is what they call it. Oh. Or in between the
Ally Brettnacher: yards,
Bob Roudebush: to get food or rest or, change gear or whatever.
Right. But that the race continues at the top of every hour running another yard until there is only one person left. So, everybody lines up in the corral at the beginning, you know, right before the beginning of the next hour. They run the same 4.167 mile yard or one point, you know, 4.167 mile loop. and at some point it gets down to, you know, two or three [00:06:00] people.
And, the person that either does not complete the last yard or refuses to go out, then provided. The other person finishes that yard, they become the winner. Everyone else, DNFs
Ally Brettnacher: officially mm-hmm.
Bob Roudebush: mm-hmm. Did not finish. and the, you know, second place person, they, they call the assist. Right?
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. What's so interesting about the format is it requires two people to really go, like, if you have a goal of doing it, like you have to have somebody else that's there with you.
Bob Roudebush: Right.
That's what's I think the, the genius of it. Right. And so, you know, Lazarus Lake was like trying to come up with how can I create a format that really pushes the capabilities of people and really allows them to find what they can do and what they're capable of.
And what's cool about it is, is that you can only push yourself as far as someone else is willing to go with you,
Ally Brettnacher: right?
Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: And so it's both competition and cooperation. Yeah. Right? It's a team sport and an individual sport. and, and so [00:07:00] for me, really that was what sort of. Peaked my curiosity was like, wow, what a, what an interesting concept.
And I, I wonder how far I could go Right. Under those circumstances.
Ally Brettnacher: So how many years have you done Prairie on Fire?
Bob Roudebush: Just last, uh, that's, that's not true. So I did 2025 and 2024, but 2024, I used it mainly as a training run.
Ally Brettnacher: Okay. For like a hundred miler that you were doing or? Yeah. I, I
Bob Roudebush: I think it might've been no business.
I was running that year in the fall, and so it just worked out that it was a great sort of long run Yeah. Weekend. I think I did 40 miles or 44 miles, I can't remember
Ally Brettnacher: yeah. Still incredible. I loved being able, this year, last year, 2025 was the first year I went and actually saw the race. I wanted to go spectate. I brought my girls. We did some chalk art, which was so fun, but I had never really, you know, seen the format and it was so cool.
Like tent city. Yeah. Where everyone has everything set up. Mm-hmm. It is just a huge. Ordeal. It's
like a party. Yeah. And that,
Bob Roudebush: right? Yeah, for sure. And, [00:08:00] and, and I think, you know, I'm sure you've talked to tj, but even
Ally Brettnacher: the difference between
Bob Roudebush: 2024 and 2025 was huge.
Just to line up last year and see, I can't remember exactly how many people he had, but I think there were 150
Ally Brettnacher: mean, it
Bob Roudebush: I mean, it
Ally Brettnacher: was a lot.
Bob Roudebush: There were, there were a lot of people in that starting corral. Yeah. Right. And, and you know, as such, there was this whole city of tents
Ally Brettnacher: that mm-hmm.
Bob Roudebush: You know, crept up that day or overnight. It was pretty interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I,
Ally Brettnacher: I have to plug the film that just came out. Did you get to go to the premier?
I,
Bob Roudebush: I did not go to the premier. I had, and I have not seen it, so no spoilers. I dunno how it ends,
Ally Brettnacher: but, okay. Well, so
Bob Roudebush: I
Ally Brettnacher: You do. I was, yeah. I was like, you were there. I mean, you might not know you were in, I mean, I don't know how you know what's going on when you've run that far or been awake that long, so I wouldn't be surprised if you're like, I have no idea what happened.
Bob Roudebush: of it. I remember most of
Ally Brettnacher: That's pretty impressive. Yeah. So it, it highlights five women, four who ran a hundred miles and it's so good. John Coon, who's been on this podcast too.
Bob Roudebush: Yeah. And it was great to be there and, and see [00:09:00] that, and, and witness it, right? Yeah. Because they all sort
of
stuck together
Ally Brettnacher: and supported
Bob Roudebush: each
other. And everybody else that was still in the race at that point was supporting them back to the, the idea
Ally Brettnacher: of mm-hmm.
Bob Roudebush: mm-hmm.
Cooperation and, you know, competition. Yeah. It's a race, it's a competition, but at the same time, we all are trying to like, lift everybody else up and support everybody else and what their goals
Ally Brettnacher: Yes. Yeah. You hear a lot of people like, okay, come on, you can do, you are coming out for this last one. One more.
Yeah. Go one more. Yeah. Yeah. So how many yards off were you from the winner? I don't remember how many
Bob Roudebush: Abe and Angel got to the night
Ally Brettnacher: loop,
the second night.
Bob Roudebush: the, yeah. And then stopped and Abe and I had talked a while. We ran together most of, most of the race.
Okay.
And
I won't speak for everybody, but at least a, and I couldn't stand the night.
Course not because it's awful. It's just, it's in the dark and it's out and back on the bike trail and it's just
Ally Brettnacher: You might as well be on a treadmill.
Bob Roudebush: Yeah,
exactly. You just, and it's, you know, you're just, you've got, all you've got is your [00:10:00] headlamp. Yeah. And you're on this, you know, paved path and you're just going out and back and out and back and out and back.
Mm-hmm. Um, so I, I think I, I had heard Abe talking about, and, you know, hey, I don't know. I think I'll probably, I'll, I'll go until we have to switch to the night course and then I'm, I'm done. So I think both of them did one loop on the night course. Okay. And then they were done. And so, Jeff,
Ally Brettnacher: it's so interesting, like, how do you decide who's gonna win?
Like, 'cause you both wanna win. That's so crazy to me. So interesting. I'll have to talk to both of them at some point too. why the difference in the night loop or like the night course? Is it safety?
Bob Roudebush: I think it's safety for the most part. Okay. the other Backyard Ultra that I've competed in regularly is grind on the grid.
Ally Brettnacher: Oh yeah. Can trail is the, okay. Didn't you help you started that right? I
Bob Roudebush: don't know. If I didn't do any work, I was there for the first one.
So
if that counts as helping start it, then Sure. But you know, Matt's probably if he's watching this, laughing
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: Because I didn't do anything. Matt had to do all the work.
Yeah. but that [00:11:00] was the same course the entire time.
Ally Brettnacher: Okay. Well, it seems like, I just think about other races you've done, which we will talk about where it's like, okay. those seem a lot more treacherous and dangerous than little Noblesville, Indiana. I don't know. I have not run the loop, the, uh, the day loop before, so I don't
Bob Roudebush: know.
I, it's as far as a backyard alter course, it's almost perfect. because it's the crushed gravel at Twee Park. So it's easy on the, the joints. there's a little lollipop section that you do where, you know, everybody goes out, does a, a, a smaller loop and then comes
Ally Brettnacher: Oh, I see what you're saying.
Yep. Okay.
Bob Roudebush: And so you get to see folks coming and going, right. Which is always good for the, for the spirit. Yes. And then, uh, you come back into, into camp and you've got all the stuff you need right there. You've got, you know, bathrooms, you've got your tent, you've got the, you know, all really close to the start line.
So, I mean, it's almost ideal conditions. Yeah, I would say.
Ally Brettnacher: What was your strategy did it vary in terms of how fast you would run to get certain amount of time?
Bob Roudebush: I, I just tried to stay [00:12:00] as consistent as possible. and I had a sort of a run walk method I was using. So I, I think it
Ally Brettnacher: was
Bob Roudebush: run five minutes, walk two or run six minutes, walk two and I might switch
Ally Brettnacher: it up.
Okay.
Bob Roudebush: just to sort of keep me around 48 to 50 minutes a yard. Okay. Which gave me 10 minutes to sit down, change any gear, grab something to
Ally Brettnacher: eat.
Yeah. It worked pretty well. 10 minutes seems so short. I'm sure it feels long after the first one you're like, okay.
Like, I just wanna keep going. But what do you, and, and Trina was your crew chief,
Bob Roudebush: the amazing crew chief that she is?
Ally Brettnacher: Yes.
Yeah. Mm-hmm. what food did you have in your tent?
Bob Roudebush: A little bit of everything. Okay. So your typical like potato chips, um, you know, energy bars.
I, I, I've stumbled on fruit pies, you know, the hostess fruit pies that you can get at the convenience store or whatever. They come in a box
Ally Brettnacher: or kind of sounds really disgusting, but I feel
Bob Roudebush: uh, either
apple or cherry, but I'm telling you what, it's 400 calories of like pure sugar.
[00:13:00] Yeah. Right.
That works.
Um, and it tastes great when all you've had are gels or potato chips or, you know, pretzels or peanut butter and
Ally Brettnacher: jelly. Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: they had a, somebody was. Grilling burgers, at the, at, at the Prairie event last year, so I can't remember. It might've been sometime in the afternoon.
Day one, I sat down and Trina's like, I got you a cheeseburger. She hands me this cheeseburger and it's, oh, it was probably one of the best cheeseburgers I've ever had in my life. Yeah. Yeah. So downed an entire cheeseburger. The whistle blew time to get back in the corral and off you
Ally Brettnacher: go.
Yeah. Wow. And, People oftentimes will switch shoes out. Did you do that?
I
Bob Roudebush: think I did. No.
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. I feel like that'd be so hard. It would take me like 10 minutes to get my shoes on
and off.
Yeah.
Depending on how far along you are, I suppose, in the race.
Bob Roudebush: and I've switched shoes in a hundred mile events where. You know, your feet are wet or, you know,
Ally Brettnacher: moving That makes sense. Or whatever makes, okay. You've
got,
Bob Roudebush: if you've got foot issues going
Ally Brettnacher: Mm-hmm. Uh,
Bob Roudebush: Uh, and you need to deal [00:14:00] with those, you've gotta take your shoes off anyway,
Ally Brettnacher: so
why not,
Bob Roudebush: you know, put a fresh pair of shoes on.
Yeah. And, and sometimes like it's a mental boost more than anything else. To put a nice, fresh pair of dry shoes on. You're like, oh, I feel great starting fresh. I can go, yeah, I can go forever now. I'm good.
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. Did you wear the same clothes?
Bob Roudebush: I, I, I, same shorts if I
Ally Brettnacher: if I remember right
Bob Roudebush: now. I think maybe you're right.
I don't remember as many
Ally Brettnacher: details
as
Bob Roudebush: I
thought. Same
Ally Brettnacher: shorts. You're like, maybe I wore four shirts.
Bob Roudebush: I
think I put a longer pair of pants on for you overnight over them. And then I, I changed out my top a few times. Okay. Yeah. Just put a fresh short sleeve shirt on, or a long sleeve shirt for the overnight
Ally Brettnacher: loop.
Yeah. It's, it's so fascinating. Yeah. Like I've seen people had like.
Bob Roudebush: like.
Ally Brettnacher: Tubs, like the, uh, not Tupperware, like the plastic, big plastic drawers we had. Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: We had, uh, I think four or five of those. And each one was for a different thing. So one had food, one had clothing, one had, you know, race gear.
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah.
The only thing that I've done that's anywhere close is a Ragnar. Okay. Where we had stuff in, in our, in a van. Mm-hmm. And we saw other vans that did have those plastic. I'm like, that's so [00:15:00] smart. Yeah. I mean, I feel like you'd learn something, pick up on something every year that you'd see somebody else had done.
Uh, did you walk around at all though, like to other tents or were you like, strictly I'm in my tent. I'm back at the start. Exactly.
Yeah. I
Bob Roudebush: would, come back through on that loop. TJ gave me a good tent position. Either or, either
Ally Brettnacher: that
or, yeah. You had a really nice one. Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: So I would be able to run by the tent and I would ask Trina for whatever I needed that time. I'm like,
Ally Brettnacher: Hey, oh, perfect. Get it ready. Yeah. Get my pie ready, ready.
I'd
Bob Roudebush: cross the finish line and then walk the 15 feet back
Ally Brettnacher: the
Bob Roudebush: the tent and sit down and. Wait until the
Ally Brettnacher: whistle
Yeah. I didn't even really think about the tent petition. That makes a huge difference. Huge differe in some cases, I'm sure. Mm-hmm.
Yeah. And so has Trina, I'm sure crude you in other races before Oh, yeah. All the time. And so what kind of things do you, tell her like, okay, don't let me quit until I've done at least this, or don't say this. You know, she might at this point know what to say or not to say to you, but I feel like that's such an important relationship.
Bob Roudebush: I'm surprised she didn't tell you this story. Okay. [00:16:00] Okay. So, the first hundred I attempted was Leadville. Oh,
which is pretty, I
Ally Brettnacher: mean,
Bob Roudebush: for somebody from Indiana who has, doesn't have access to like a lot of elevation
training and doesn't live at Altitude.
Yeah. To decide that they're gonna run. Their first a hundred miler at Leadville, which starts out at 10,500 feet and I think climbs to like 12,165 feet over Hope Pass. I mean, maybe not the best decision I've
Ally Brettnacher: ever made
Bob Roudebush: in terms of signing up for a race. but that was, that was my first a hundred Trina, was obviously gonna help crew.
I convinced Todd Oliver and Jenny Blake also to come
Ally Brettnacher: out there Okay.
Bob Roudebush: help crew as well and pace. And so we spent a lot of time ahead of Leadville training coming up with a, you know, a, a training to crew in addition to like, training to run.
Ally Brettnacher: Right. Yeah. So
Bob Roudebush: we had maps of the course, the course and all the, you know, aid stations and what the plan was for each one and what I [00:17:00] was gonna need and, and all of that.
and so there were two rules. In terms of crewing, and that was
just two,
just just two. But the, the first one was, once the gun goes off, I'm no longer meaning me. I'm no longer in
Ally Brettnacher: charge,
Bob Roudebush: Trina's
Ally Brettnacher: in charge.
Bob Roudebush: And the second rule was,
Ally Brettnacher: uh, I mean, Trina's always in charge, let's be honest. Okay. Because you're
Bob Roudebush: absolutely right when you're, you know, sleep deprived and tired and
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: dealing with altitude and you're not thinking straight.
Mm-hmm.
You shouldn't be the one making decisions. Right? Like you should, like Trina was capable of making those decisions. So Trina was in charge once the gun goes off, Trina's in charge. Uh, and then the second one was, you never ask, you know, how you feeling? It's always, Hey, you look great. What do
Ally Brettnacher: need?
Yeah. Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: Hey, you look great. What do you need? Not, Hey, how you feeling? Because
Ally Brettnacher: Oh, how do you think I'm
Bob Roudebush: fricking Yeah, I'm
Ally Brettnacher: feeling, I feel like shit. Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: Yeah.
Ally Brettnacher: Okay. And.
Bob Roudebush: and
Ally Brettnacher: Leadville is Colorado. Correct. Okay. And what was the furst furthest that you would run? Did you kind of make the [00:18:00] progression
Bob Roudebush: from
Yeah, I did.
The, I've heard you talk about it on previous podcasts, the, you know, stair steps. So half marathon, marathon, 50 K, 50 mile a hundred k, and then a hundred
Ally Brettnacher: a hundred mile. A hundred Mile.
Bob Roudebush: And I signed up for Leadville 'cause I had this vision in my head, like, oh, I love the mountains. And I do, I love the mountains. I love being out west.
Yeah. it's beautiful out there. and I'm like, how great would it be to run a hundred miles in Colorado? That would be great.
Ally Brettnacher: Mm-hmm.
Bob Roudebush: And, you know, signed up, it's a lottery
Ally Brettnacher: Okay. That's got selected. Couldn't remember. Yeah. I was like, oh my
gosh, I got in,
Bob Roudebush: I'm like, well, I'll go to, I'm gonna go run. And then you get there and you're like, oh, now I get it.
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. Oh, this
is hard. Yeah. I mean, and Yeah. Especially for us flat landers.
Mm-hmm. Man. Yeah. So did you go out days in advance to adjust to altitude?
Bob Roudebush: Well, there's sort of two trains of thought. Okay. On that. Uh, and I'm, No physiologist or anything, so I'm, you know, uneducated, it's just based on experience and what I've read.
Right? Yeah. Which is you either go out two or three weeks or more ahead of time, which gives your body a, a chance to acclimate [00:19:00] and to start producing more red blood cells so that you have more oxygen in your blood because you're at altitude or you go out right before, so that by the time your body figures out what's going on, you're
Ally Brettnacher: done.
Okay.
Bob Roudebush: Right. And so we, we opted for that.
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: strategy. So we went on, I think a Thursday, Friday was packet pickup and everything. And then the race starts on Saturday, if I recall correctly. Right. Okay. But I had gone out for run camp, so they do have a run camp you can sign up for.
Ally Brettnacher: Interesting.
Bob Roudebush: And, and that was really fun because I think that's in June.
The race is in August.
Ally Brettnacher: So it's a
Bob Roudebush: a perfect sort of, they put together this whole weekend. It's basically a supported training run where you do the entire course, not all a hundred miles, but you do the, you know, 50 miles Wow. Over the course of three days. Okay.
Ally Brettnacher: Okay?
Bob Roudebush: So they start you out on the first day at night, running from May Queen back into Leadville.
So it'll be dark, which for most people that are finishing in a decent time, that'll be the [00:20:00] conditions you're under, you know? And then, uh, they do a, a training run from May Queen to Twin Lakes the next day. and then, they do a training run from Twin Lakes to Winfield and back, which is over Hope Pass as one of the other
Ally Brettnacher: days.
Bob Roudebush: So over the course of those three days, you run the entire course.
Ally Brettnacher: Wow. But in that case, you don't get any buckles.
Bob Roudebush: No, no
Ally Brettnacher: Even though you're running so far,
Bob Roudebush: But it's, it's, I've, I've, I met people on, at the, I've done the run camp there three times. Cool.
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. Um,
Bob Roudebush: that I've met people in those run camps that I'm still friends with today.
It was, it's just, just a great experience and you get a lot of time with people and you're doing something hard together so it builds a bond. Yeah.
Ally Brettnacher: I mean, run camp in general sounds like an absolute blast. Yeah. Like people should create more of those. I mean, certainly I see run retreats and things like that that exist, but yeah, I would love to be able to go do something
Bob Roudebush: like that.
Right. And if you're running it there, if you're running the race, then you have an opportunity to see the [00:21:00] course and Yeah. Understand what you're getting into and enough time to maybe adjust strategy or do different kinds of training,
Ally Brettnacher: but
yeah.
Bob Roudebush: So, yeah, so that was our strategy for Leadville. You know, uh, get in, hopefully get the race finished.
Spoiler alert, I didn't
ID Nfd, Um,
before your body, rebels against you. Yeah. Uh, and once the gun goes off, drain is in charge and it's never how you feel and it's, Hey, you look great. What do
Ally Brettnacher: you
need?
Yeah. Okay. So at what point did you DNF
Bob Roudebush: uh, at Winfield, at the turnaround, the 50 mile mark, so it's an out and back course.
You start in Leadville, uh, you run, uh, down around Turquoise Lake, you know, at the base, around the base of Mount Ebert into Twin Lakes, and then Twin Lakes over Hope pass into Winfield, which is an old abandoned mining town. You turn around there and then you do the whole thing in reverse. and I felt great through Outward Bound, which is the first, it's the second aid station you go through May Queen at Turquoise Lake and then Outward Bound.
I felt [00:22:00] great there. Um, SA Trina and everybody there. and then I felt by the time I got to Twin Lakes, the altitude sickness had sort of set in, which was weird because I really didn't experience that during run camp,
so I
Ally Brettnacher: yeah, you'd, you would think.
Bob Roudebush: You would think? Yeah. Yeah.
So couldn't keep anything down was just nauseous headache.
And so it's this death spiral you end up in where you're not eating, you're not drinking.
Ally Brettnacher: Uh, yeah.
Bob Roudebush: and so I, I rolled into Twin Lakes raging Headache and the crew was there and, you know, stuffed a bag full of salted potatoes in my hand
and
a, a couple of Tylenol and, you know, uh, some water and a flask,
Ally Brettnacher: and
Bob Roudebush: slapped me on the butt and sent me out.
Yeah. The opposite way, right. Or the on my way. Yeah. So then you go over Hope Pass, which is a huge climb. You go from like 9,600 feet to 12,165 feet in, I wanna say three miles. I, I, I don't know for sure, but I think, I think that's my recollection. Uh, and it's a tough climb. I mean, you're, you're going
Ally Brettnacher: like,
Bob Roudebush: almost, I can't, it feels like straight[00:23:00]
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: And, I got into Winfield and I was way behind schedule at this point because I had put together a plan that was based on the fact that, you know, I'm just gonna go run a hundred miles in Colorado at elevation and everything will be great. and based, based all my like, estimated pace times on previous 50 milers and a hundred Ks I've run, which is like comparing apples to
Ally Brettnacher: oranges.
Bob Roudebush: And so I, I remember this, it's, it's probably one of the things I feel worst about in terms of, you know, Trina and I and our relationship in the time we've known each other.
Ally Brettnacher: It's like,
Bob Roudebush: I felt like I disappointed her so
Ally Brettnacher: Oh. 'cause
Bob Roudebush: I rolled into Winfield and already in my head I was like, I'm not going back out.
I'm done. Like I, I can't do that all over again. There's no way. It's not physically possible. And Trina is standing there ready to go. She's got her shoes on 'cause she was gonna pace me back starting from there. Oh, she's got her shoes on. She's got her hydration vest. She's got my drop bag. Like she's literally standing there at the [00:24:00] eight 10 waiting for me.
And I, and who knows how long she's been standing there? Maybe a half an hour, 45 minutes. and for the crew, one of the challenging pieces of Leadville is like logistics. Mm-hmm. Because the aid stations are. Far apart from each other. There's really, there's, these are old mining towns, so it's like washed out, rutted out roads
Ally Brettnacher: and Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: There's no way You can't just, everybody can't just drive to these aid stations, otherwise it would be a disaster. Right. So they have a shuttle system,
Ally Brettnacher: but
Oh boy.
Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: never works out how anybody ever plans it to. Um, and so she had probably spent, most of the time I was running from Twin Lakes to Winfield, just trying to get to Winfield,
Ally Brettnacher: Just
Bob Roudebush: to be there in time for me to
Ally Brettnacher: be there.
Yeah.
Right.
Bob Roudebush: And she's just ready to go and it's, you look great, what do you need? And I'm like, I'm done. And so she sat down. We, we talked about it a little bit and I, I did the math, which was a mistake. and [00:25:00] we can talk about that. But I did the math and I said, wow. It took me 13 hours. I had made it, I had a cut, a cutoff by like 45 minutes.
Wow. So I said, it took me 13 hours to get here. I did this last section in, I wanna say four and a half hours. It took me four and a half hours, I think, to get from Twin Lakes to Winfield. So about 10 miles. maybe longer than that, I don't know. and I did the math in my head and I'm like, I can't 'cause the climb back over Hope Pass is actually a little bit more technical than the one outta Twin Lakes.
There's a lot of scree and rocks on that side
Ally Brettnacher: what is
Bob Roudebush: Hope Pass. Oh, scree is like, large rocks and like pieces of rocks that you see on the top of a mountain caused by lightning
Ally Brettnacher: I've never heard that term in my life. I learned
Bob Roudebush: like loose rock. Imagine like really big, like plate sized or like small boulder sized rock
Ally Brettnacher: just, obviously you don't wanna kick that in the face of the person down
the mountain get
Bob Roudebush: footing and like it's loose and it's pretty precarious.
Like you could twist an ankle, break an ankle pretty easy. and so I'd convinced myself. To get back over and make the cutoff out of Twin Lakes. I had to do it in four hours and [00:26:00] 15 minutes. So I had to do it 15 minutes faster than I had, and I just, ID
Ally Brettnacher: dfd. Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: and then Trina and I spent another hour and a half, hour and 45 minutes trying to get back to Twin Lakes, to Todd and Jenny.
They have no idea I've dropped at this point. They're, they think I'm heading back into Twin
Lakes. Because
there's no cell phone coverage in the middle of nowhere. Right. So logistically it's, it's really tough at, at Leadville. And, so we did end up finally making it back, but I think what I realized, because it was my first a hundred miler, is when I got to Winfield, I'm like, I've never felt like this before.
I feel awful. This is impossible. I'm never gonna be able to
do this.
And then once you do another one, or you finish a hundred miler, you're like, oh. You always feel this bad at some point during the race, you're like, that was perfectly normal, but I had no, no context for it.
Ally Brettnacher: it.
Bob Roudebush: Yeah. And you're like, oh, this is awful.
Something's wrong. You're like, Nope, everything's perfectly normal. That's exactly how you should feel after running 50
miles. Yeah. In the [00:27:00] mountains at elevation.
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. Geez. Shea, Alan,
Bob Roudebush: Ano, do you know what I name? Mm-hmm. Yeah, I know
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. Shea. She, when she was on this podcast, she said it never, always gets worse. And I was like, oh, Right.
You're at a point where it's really, really bad, but it can't just like, keep getting worse. Yeah. At some point it's gotta turn around, which I thought was really interesting to think about, especially in the context of those types of races. Right.
Bob Roudebush: Which, back to the Backyard Ultra format, is why I think a backyard ultra in, in a lot of respects is actually harder than a hundred miler.
So, oh boy. in, in a typical a hundred
Ally Brettnacher: mm-hmm.
Bob Roudebush: Mm-hmm. Because a hundred milers have cutoffs. And, at aid stations and, you know, cutoffs at the finish line, but they're fairly generous for the
Ally Brettnacher: most part. Mm.
Bob Roudebush: Mm. And if something's going wrong, if you're nauseous or you've got a, a niggle somewhere
Ally Brettnacher: Mm-hmm.
Bob Roudebush: your
hip, or like something's going on with your, your, your feet and you can walk for 20 minutes and like problem solve and sort it out.
Yeah. Which is what I love about Ultra is, is it's, yes, it's physical, but it's [00:28:00] mental. Mm-hmm. And it's problem solving and it's logistics. And that's just super Yeah. Interesting to me and cha and, and fun. And so if you're running a hundred miles, like at Leadville,
you afford, to just take 15, 20, 30 minutes and walk for a while and just sort it out.
Like, okay, let me think about this. Let me problem solve, this is what's going on. Here's what I can do about it. Here's what I need at the next aid station. But to your point earlier, when you've got 10 minutes in between yards at a backyard, you've got 10 minutes to figure stuff out.
Ally Brettnacher: Oh yeah. So
Bob Roudebush: if you can't problem solve and figure it out in 10 minutes, you're done.
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. So, wow. Well, I'm, after watching the latest documentary, I'm like, okay, I really wanna sign up.
Bob Roudebush: You should. I know. I think there are a few more spots
Ally Brettnacher: I know. And TJ would, I mean TJ's like egging me on for the full MO as well. Have you ever done the full mo?
Bob Roudebush: not, but Tri has, obviously Katrina's around everything.
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. So, well, when I interviewed her, she hadn't done the full
Bob Roudebush: mill. Yeah. I think she did it last year with her sister.
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. I was trying to remember if I saw her when I was cheering, but yeah, for people who don't know, that's a 50 k that's on a rail trail, which is our paved path mm-hmm. Through [00:29:00] town. So obviously very different from like a Leadville
Bob Roudebush: type
of, it's still challenging.
I mean, it's 50 k,
Ally Brettnacher: I mean, yeah. Two,
two miles.
Yeah. So I'm also thinking about like, okay, I never thought I'd ever consider running an ultra, because maybe this is a good time to kind of go back too, because I'm sure people listening who don't know you at all are like, wow, this guy is like, must have always been a runner, huh. You know? I mean, to run a hundred miles.
did you ever think in your life you'd be running a hundred milers? Yeah. I mean,
Bob Roudebush: anybody? No, I didn't even know, like people did that. Like, I
Ally Brettnacher: Like, I didn't know
Bob Roudebush: it was a thing.
Like obviously you grow up and, you know, you see the Boston Marathon on the news and you're like, okay, a marathon is a thing. But, growing up I, I didn't even know running a hundred miles was a thing. in, I played little League baseball growing up. I was never really any good. I was decent enough and capable and so got to play and it was, it was fun.
once you get into middle school, especially in like little, you know, little league baseball, you, you start to weed out the good players from the bad players. And I obviously was not a good player, so I had to go find something [00:30:00] else to do. and played football in
junior
high and high school. I, I went to Brown County.
Junior high and high school. So grew up in Brown County, bean blossom area, just south of Morgantown.
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. People dunno, that's Southern Indiana ish. Yeah. Southern little hillier there. Indiana,
Bob Roudebush: Southern. It definitely is. I
Ally Brettnacher: love it down there. It's beautiful.
Bob Roudebush: and so, you know, I was in good shape physically, obviously, to play high school football.
like I said, I, I wasn't really great. I, I think the coach kept me on the team because like I did whatever he asked and I was a hard worker
and yeah.
Like,
sometimes means more than anything else.
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. I can see
Bob Roudebush: that. If
you're not naturally talented, at least you, you know, try to work to pay, you know, make up for it.
Mm-hmm. but running as part of like conditioning for football
Ally Brettnacher: was the
Bob Roudebush: absolute worst. I hated
Ally Brettnacher: it. Yeah. I
Bob Roudebush: hated
it. Yeah.
Like, especially you do an August two a days, which is where you have two practices a day before school starts. A morning and an afternoon practice, and you're out running in full gear.
In an open grassy field. It's nine, you know, 85, [00:31:00] 86 degrees. Mm-hmm. With like 80% humidity. It's just miserable.
Ally Brettnacher: Awful. Yes.
Bob Roudebush: and so I hated running like that was like, I, once we got done with the running part of practice, it's like, okay,
Ally Brettnacher: good. Yeah. Like
Bob Roudebush: we don't have to run anymore. I, I, you may have seen those bumper stickers.
I've seen 'em where it's like, my sport is your sports punishment. Oh
Ally Brettnacher: Oh yeah. Runners. That makes a lot
Bob Roudebush: sense. Yeah. It's
like running is other sports punishment. Yeah. And that's, you know, and when we got in trouble, quote unquote
Ally Brettnacher: Right. Run laps,
Bob Roudebush: you'd be like, oh, take off, do
Ally Brettnacher: a lap.
Yeah. Yeah. That's, I mean, I was a soccer player growing up, so it was exactly that. Hated
Bob Roudebush: it.
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: and so after high school then, I mean, I stopped being athletic altogether, right?
Because, and I, I'm, I'm sure this is a common thing for folks is like, in high school, you, you play football, and so you have a reason
mm-hmm.
To stay in shape and a structure and you know, a, a place to do that. And then I didn't play sports in college, obviously, because I wasn't gonna play football in college.
I, I mean, I, I barely was on the team in high school. There's no way I was gonna do it in college. and, and so I just [00:32:00] got way outta shape. And then that turned into. you know, working in it, doing some consulting work and traveling a lot,
Ally Brettnacher: which turned into like,
Bob Roudebush: tra you know, on airplanes all the time in airports eating bad food, like not.
And so over time,
like,
I eventually got in awful shape. and I think I told you a little bit about this is like that, you know, one of the things that I'm, I'm most proud of is, is probably that I saw where things were going and I was
Ally Brettnacher: like,
Bob Roudebush: Bobby, you gotta do something about this buddy. Like, if you don't get this under control, you're gonna end up, like a lot of your fam my family and folks I know, you know, older folks that I, I grew up with who are just not in great shape and they're relatively young in terms of age, but like they don't have their health.
And I was, smoking at least a pack of cigarettes a day at that
Ally Brettnacher: point.
Yeah, geez.
Bob Roudebush: And eating fast food all the time and not exercising and. Drinking way too much
Ally Brettnacher: and yeah. probably not sleeping great too when you're on the [00:33:00] road all the time. Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: And you know, staying out late at the bar
Ally Brettnacher: Oh yeah. I mean that lifestyle
Bob Roudebush: that life. It totally was catching up with me. Right. Yeah. And so,
I had dec I had finally decided I was gonna quit smoking and, and so I did, I, I, I wanna say it was Halloween of 2007. I'm almost certain it was, that was the year. I know it was Halloween. ' cause I had decided November 1st was
Ally Brettnacher: my date.
Okay. Like
Bob Roudebush: everybody starts with January now. New Year's, it
Ally Brettnacher: was
like start of the month.
whatever. I'm just gonna
Bob Roudebush: start on the 1st of November.
Ally Brettnacher: Was this your first time trying
Bob Roudebush: quit?
I had tried to quit before. Okay. A couple of times. It didn't last very long. Yeah. and
Ally Brettnacher: it,
Bob Roudebush: I don't know why this made sense to me at the time,
but
in my, in my head. I had decided that you can't both be a smoker and a runner at the same time, not physically possible. And so if I become a runner, then that will help me not be a smoker, and it will also help me get into shape and, and all that. And so I started running on the treadmill at the y for [00:34:00] like run walk
Ally Brettnacher: on November 1st.
Bob Roudebush: Yeah. And
I would do like a mile and it would take me 30 minutes or whatever it
Ally Brettnacher: was. Right. Wow.
Bob Roudebush: and then it just sort of, I mean, it worked, stopped smoking, started getting better shape, started taking better care of myself, and then it became a mental thing. Right? It's like, oh, okay,
could I
run a half marathon?
Is that, is that even possible? And so I, Rob Beeler, I don't know, folks in tech in in Indianapolis would recognize Rob's name, but I worked at double Take software at the time. Rob, uh, was the VP of engineering there, and he had gone through like a, a, a similar transformation, probably even more than, than I had and had become a, a runner and a triathlete.
And we had talked about me starting to run and he was very encouraging. I owe a lot to him in terms
Ally Brettnacher: wow, it's amazing that you getting started.
How great that you reach, like, said something. I mean, that'd be so intimidating. Yeah. I think in a lot of ways to be like, Hey, look at me, I'm. So outta shape, like, can you Can you help me? learn how to do that advice?
Yeah, that's, yeah. Right, exactly.[00:35:00]
Bob Roudebush: Uh, and I could like look to him as an inspiration for like a variety of reasons. Yeah. And you know, that being one of
Ally Brettnacher: them,
wow.
Bob Roudebush: and I think I've got this correct, he had signed up for the mini marathon in 2009. Okay. But something came up and he couldn't run it.
And so he said, well,
Ally Brettnacher: hey,
Bob Roudebush: you're doing this running thing. Why don't you take my bib for the mini marathon? And I was like, I can't run a a half marathon. What are you talking about, Rob? And he's like, no, you could run a half marathon. And so he transferred the bib to me and I paid the fee to get it
Ally Brettnacher: Okay. So you did it officially
Bob Roudebush: And, and I was like, okay, now in six months, you know, I'm running a half marathon, so
Ally Brettnacher: well at least you knew a six months.
I was thinking, uh, six
Bob Roudebush: weeks. No,
it was, it was, yeah. It
Ally Brettnacher: wasn't like that.
Bob Roudebush: And so then I, I, I, I signed up for, at the time, I think they still do it, they have a miler series where you do a 5K, a 10 K, a 15 K, and then you do that.
So I signed up for that. I was all in, and ended up running my first half. And like that was pretty special. And that led to the next half, which led [00:36:00] to another half. And then sudden, all of a sudden you're like, well, can I. Can I run a full marathon? And then you run a full marathon, you're like, okay, what can I run a 50 k?
Right. I started to hear about these things called ultra marathons. I
Ally Brettnacher: don't know. Some people like me are like, oh, okay, I've run a marathon.
Yeah, that was great.
Bob Roudebush: Yeah.
Okay,
Ally Brettnacher: I run a few more. I, yeah, that's my husband one. And Donny says, okay, we'll see about
Bob Roudebush: that.
So yeah, so that's, so I was growing up not super athletic.
maybe the opposite of that, but
Ally Brettnacher: running was,
Bob Roudebush: I think a big part of like helping me sort of get back on the right path. Now I'm by no means like, like I still eat horribly and I have all sorts of bad habits I probably should fix, but in general, I'm in a much better place than I
Ally Brettnacher: was Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: Yeah. Before I started
Ally Brettnacher: running.
Yeah. And um, what I also find so interesting about your story is that you went to college. Mm-hmm. But you didn't finish
college.
You dropped out. I dropped out. Yeah.
And today you work for one of the biggest software companies in the world, if not the biggest. Yeah. Yeah. So what was that decision? What caused you to do that? And where'd [00:37:00] you go to undergrad, did you
Bob Roudebush: say?
Rose Holman.
Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
In Terre Haute. Great school. So I, I graduated valedictorian from my class in high school. And so of course when you graduate valedictorian, you have to go to the best school. And so Rose Holman, you know, is consistently rated the best undergraduate engineering school in the Midwest and, and the us.
And so of course, that's where I'm gonna go. and when I got there, I, I think I may have had a version of like a midlife crisis at the age of 19 because I had lived so much of my life,
trying to live up to other people's expectations of what I should do. Oh, you need to get straight A's. You need to play sports.
You need to be in, you know, on the honor roll, and you need to be in this and in that. And, I think it just culminated in getting to college and having all of this newfound freedom
Ally Brettnacher: and
Bob Roudebush: figuring out, oh, wait
Ally Brettnacher: a second.
Bob Roudebush: I get to decide what I wanna do. Yeah. And, and so for me, and, and I would not recommend the choice I made to [00:38:00] anybody, and I, you know, Trina and I, we have, you know, two kids.
and you know, I, I felt really strongly that I wanted them to finish college. Yeah. Because it, it, it's hard if you haven't, and, and I think there's an experience that you get and learnings that you have that aren't sort of academic by going to college. Right. but I got lucky because the, the, you know, this would've been the early nineties and so information technology or IT, or tech, like was just getting started and you weren't learning in college to do the kinds of things I wanted to actually do in a career because there wasn't a curriculum for it.
It was all being invented. And so part of me was like, why am I wasting four years? Studying theory and a bunch of classes that don't have anything to do with what I want to do. And meanwhile, like the industry is being born
right now. Mm-hmm. And there's so much happening and, and so I decided, well, I'm gonna go the route of getting some, industry certifications and getting an entry level [00:39:00] job and sort of starting there.
And so that's, that eventually led to another job, which led to another job, which, you know, eventually led to, you know, working at Microsoft and Google and now back at Microsoft.
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. Which is, I mean, a, I mean, a smart decision at the time seems, I mean it worked
Bob Roudebush: now it seems like
Ally Brettnacher: smart decision, right?
Like in retrospect
Bob Roudebush: did not seem like a smart decision
Ally Brettnacher: right? I'm sure Your parents, yes. Yeah, were
not
Bob Roudebush: I was gonna be the first of my kids to go
Ally Brettnacher: Oh, okay. How many siblings
Bob Roudebush: do you
have? Uh, two
Ally Brettnacher: sisters. Okay.
Are they older?
Bob Roudebush: Yes. Both way older. My older, my oldest sister's 13 years older than me.
Oh, okay. And my middle, my next oldest sister is 11 years older than me.
Ally Brettnacher: Okay. Yeah. So you were gonna pave the way Oh, you were?
Bob Roudebush: I was a great. oops.
FLAMS BOB R: Oops.
Ally Brettnacher: Oh, okay. Oh wow. And you were gonna be the first to go. Yeah. And then,
Bob Roudebush: yeah, and it ended up being my the younger of my
Ally Brettnacher: sisters.
Yeah,
two
Bob Roudebush: sisters.
Yeah, two sisters.
Ally Brettnacher: Wow. Okay. So at what point in this life did you meet Trina and how did you meet?
Bob Roudebush: so that would've [00:40:00] been, so I was, I had been married and that's where, we had my two kids. Uh, and then we split up and it was a, a couple of years after that that I was working at, double Take Software, which is was a software company here in Indianapolis.
And we had put out a bid for a, a web project that I was managing to a local, like web consulting firm, and the account exec we were working with invited me out to lunch to discuss the project. And it just so happens that Trina was going to a meeting with this person after our lunch, and so they just came together because it was easier than Trina
Ally Brettnacher: waiting.
So, or Yeah. I mean, right. Exactly.
Bob Roudebush: Trina meeting up later with them. Right. and I remember leaving lunch. it was at Kona Jack's.
Ally Brettnacher: Oh, I love Kona Jacks,
Bob Roudebush: uh, which is, uh, seafood
Ally Brettnacher: restaurant. Yeah. Sushi. Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: In, in town. And I remember thinking wow, I really like her. Like there's something about her that I really like.
And so, I of course instantly went to stalking
Ally Brettnacher: her,
Bob Roudebush: like trying to [00:41:00] figure, I went to their website and went to the About section and it talked about. how, you know, Trina has all these hobbies and spending time with her boyfriend and her dog. And I'm like, well, okay. Guess Oh, dang, dang, bad timing.
Ally Brettnacher: put the boyfriend on the website.
I
Bob Roudebush: know, right? She was, she was invested.
Yeah.
and so I, I can't remember exactly how it came up,
Marker
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Bob Roudebush: and so I, I can't remember exactly how it came up, but, I'd had some conversation with that account, Zach, again, ex exec again, and somehow Trina came up and I don't
remember exactly how it happened, but somehow she let out that
Trina was no longer
with
Ally Brettnacher: this person.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And
I
Bob Roudebush: like,
Ally Brettnacher: like, interesting.
Bob Roudebush: And so I, I came up with a couple of sort of manufactured reasons to have work [00:43:00] meetings with Trina.
Ally Brettnacher: Oh, that's so
Bob Roudebush: you know, lunches and whatnot and, you know, eventually got up to courage to. ask her out on a
Ally Brettnacher: date.
Bob Roudebush: And that was 17 years ago, last December, I think.
Okay.
Ally Brettnacher: And I'm trying to remember her timeline of running now.
Bob Roudebush: She's
Ally Brettnacher: she was already, yeah, I was gonna say she had to have been running at that time.
Bob Roudebush: She was. and it used to frustrate the heck out of
Ally Brettnacher: me
Bob Roudebush: because when I signed up for that first mini marathon, Trina had run the mini marathon several times before.
Yeah. But Trina's, training regimen for the mini marathon, I don't know if she shared this with you, was to do no running until the six weeks before the mini marathon and then go to the Y five or six times and just make sure her legs still worked and then show up at the race and
Ally Brettnacher: run.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Bob Roudebush: Yeah. And it, and here I was like, with a notebook tracking my mileage and my time and like regimen and scheduled and and just frustrated me. She would just show up and run the thing and I'm like, I've gotta do all this training and hard work, and you just show up and make it look so
Ally Brettnacher: easy.
[00:44:00] She does. I mean, she, to this day makes it look so easy. Yeah. Yeah. Just running a million marathons. Yeah. Wow. Okay. And so now you've been together for a long time. Do you still have your Sunday run dates?
Bob Roudebush: Not usually. Okay. it depends on whether, I like to joke. It depends on whether she has a better offer or
Ally Brettnacher: not.
Bob Roudebush: Um,
and so,
as you know, Trina's a very social person.
Yes. She's got, you know, a really tight knit group of friends that she runs with. And so if there's not a planned run that she's a part of on a Sunday, I might be lucky enough to get a run date on
Ally Brettnacher: Okay. There you go. Well, I, I remember her telling me that.
It was so cute. I was like, that's so nice. I miss running with my husband. We did the Chicago marathon together. I can't remember the year, but it must have been like 2012, something like that. But you and Trina have done Chicago together. Is that, how many races have you done together?
Bob Roudebush: That's a really good question. We, so Chicago Marathon, I think it was 2013, was her first marathon.
Ally Brettnacher: Okay.
Bob Roudebush: And we did literally run together the entire [00:45:00] time, and we did a lot of training through that cycle together. And she had asked me, because at that point I had run a couple of marathons and
Ally Brettnacher: Okay, so you ran marathons before Trina.
Okay.
Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: and so she had asked me to help sort of put together a training plan for her and share what worked with me.
And I can remember we were on a long training run one Saturday leading up to, to Chicago. And, Trina is very stubborn in a good way and sort of like knows what she wants and she's set in her way. And so, we had had some disagreement about her mileage for a particular weekend, and she had decided to sign up for some race, I think, which was always a frustration for me as sort of her couch, you know, her, her armchair quarterback type
of coach. Yeah.
It was like, I, I put together this training schedule for you and you just often signed up for this silly thir, you know, half marathon race and it's gonna mess up your training
Ally Brettnacher: plan.
Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: And, uh, at one point I was like, you're just not coachable. And, and so at that point we decided it was probably best if, like, I [00:46:00] didn't try to be her run coach and that we don't necessarily like need to always run together to enjoy running together.
Yeah. Right. And so, so we did run Chicago together. We talked about having a safe word.
Oh,
but not that kind of safe
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: Yeah. And, and basically the safe word was. At some point, one of us is not gonna feel it and the other will be feeling it. Mm-hmm. And we don't wanna limit the other person's, potential. Yeah.
To have a good race. And so I, I, I think our race word might have been banana.
And it was like, so if, if I say banana, then she knows she can drop me. It's okay. We don't have to stick together.
I'm not feeling it. Go do your thing and vice versa. Yeah. And, and so since then
we've run together on occasion, but most of the time if we're running the same race, we're just doing our own thing. Yeah. And she does a lot of pacing, so
she
Ally Brettnacher: does a lot of pacing,
Bob Roudebush: So it, it works out really well that way. So we can still enjoy the experience together.
Mm-hmm.
But we don't necessarily have to be together the entire
Ally Brettnacher: Yes. Right. Yeah. Yeah. No, it makes complete [00:47:00] sense. Okay. So have you crewed her then in a race ever?
Sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's so cool. You guys are so cool.
Bob Roudebush: Thanks.
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. So, I remember you telling me that there's a David Goggins story. Oh,
Bob Roudebush: Oh, there is
a David Goggin
Ally Brettnacher: which I think would be pretty cool to share.
So what is your David Goggins story?
Bob Roudebush: Um, so I'm sure everybody at this point's familiar with David Goggins. and I think some people ascribe to his, his,
Ally Brettnacher: you love it or you don't
Bob Roudebush: Like Yeah, exactly. You either love it or you don't. I totally respect what he's accomplished, and he's obviously mentally tough and physically
tough.
Ally Brettnacher: If people don't know, if people maybe don't know in a few words, maybe describe like,
Bob Roudebush: I mean, he's got two books out, don't Hurt me. I think it was his first book and he's got a second book out.
I just listened to that audio book and I, I can't remember the name of it, but I mean, definitely go look him up. But essentially the very short version of the story is, is that. You know, he had been in the Air Force and had left the Air Force and in, [00:48:00] after that had sort of gotten into really bad shape and was like 300 pounds.
And just again, like me in some
respects mm-hmm.
Uh, in more respects really going down the wrong path. And just, just saw a Navy SEAL commercial on television was like, I'm gonna go be a Navy Seal. And everybody laughed at him until he became a Navy Seal. But I think he had to go through hell week three times.
He had like stretch fractures and got yanked the first two times, but eventually became a Navy Seal. And it's like, it's a really cool story.
Ally Brettnacher: Right. Yeah. I probably should listen to his books. Yeah. Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: and so, the David Goggins story is sort of one of those. Sort of happen, chance, things that happen.
So I was at Google at the time. Okay. Google worked for Google Cloud, managed a team of, technical sellers there.
Ally Brettnacher: Have you always lived in Indy, you and Trina? Yes. Okay. Mm-hmm.
Bob Roudebush: I've always lived in Indy. was working for Google at the time. the team I managed was, you know, covered Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky.
Okay. So we had a few of my team here in Indiana, and then the others were in, you know, Cincinnati area, Louisville [00:49:00] area,
Ally Brettnacher: and
Bob Roudebush: we were doing a customer event. you know, one of those things where you have an evening, you bring a cust, you bring customers in, you have a motivational speaker, business speaker, and then you have hor d'oeuvres and you know, drinks and like it's a networking type event thing.
And Rick Strom, who was one of the sales managers at the time, I can remember sort of on this planning call for this event we were having in Detroit, threw out, well, hey, if we're looking for a speaker, we should get David Goggins. And I remember thinking, there's no way these Google Marketing folks are gonna go for bringing David MF and
Ally Brettnacher: Goggins, Yeah,
Bob Roudebush: right?
Yeah. He, uh, to the Google Cloud, like this business event with a bunch of CTOs and IT managers and all these people for him to speak, there's no way that's gonna happen. And they're like, huh go find out how much it costs. And so Rick went and found out, I think it was like 20, $25,000 or whatever it was.
And I'm thinking, okay, well that'll put the end to that. There's no way we're gonna pay 20, $25,000 to have David Goggins come speak.
Ally Brettnacher: And
Bob Roudebush: no. Sure enough, Google was like, [00:50:00] yeah, no problem. They wrote the check. So we set up the event. It was gonna be, you know, David Goggins was going to do this motivational business.
See. Talk in the evening, at the Google offices in Detroit, which were really cool. And so we ended up on this planning meeting, Rick, me, a partner we were working with, and David Goggins and his person sort of planning out the logistics. Like, you're gonna get in on Thursday morning, the event's Thursday evening, here's what time it's gonna be, here are the expectations.
Like what questions do you have, where are you staying? All of that. And so Rick, in typical Rick fashion pipes up on the call, Hey
David,
what's your mileage on Thursday? And David's like, well, I'll, I'll probably run like 10 to 13. Rick's like, Hey, you want some company? We can show you a running round.
Rick,
Rick is a runner too. And, and I'm thinking, what? And so. Coggins is like, thinks about it. And I'm sure he's probably gotten all sorts of requests like that. And so, you know, I would imagine his instinct is to say no. Like, I don't wanna have to deal
Ally Brettnacher: I don't know who
Bob Roudebush: you
Yeah, yeah. Who are you?
Yeah. Like what? I'm not gonna, he's like, all [00:51:00] right, meet me at the hotel at 10:00 AM on Thursday
Ally Brettnacher: morning.
Gosh.
Bob Roudebush: So Rick and this, this other guy, and I show up at the hotel Thursday
Ally Brettnacher: How were you feeling?
Bob Roudebush: I was hungover because we were all out Wednesday night, like partying up the night before, after work.
And so we show up and David's ready to go at 10:00 AM and we take off from the hotel and the plan was to go out and run Bell Isle, which is in the river there. Okay. In, in Detroit. And do a loop on Bell Isle and then come back and, I remember at one point, I think the guy's name was Cameron I was running with, so Rick and David Goggins were out front.
Okay. Cameron and I were behind. I remember looking down at my watch and we're like three miles in and we're doing six 15 a minute
Ally Brettnacher: miles.
Bob Roudebush: Okay. We're moving. Yeah, because Rick's pretty competitive. And so Rick would go a little bit faster. David would try
Ally Brettnacher: up with, oh my gosh.
Bob Roudebush: You know, Rick, Rick would even go faster.
And so we're just hanging on for dear life and we get to Bell Isle
and
at that point, I, I, [00:52:00] you know, I look at Cameron and I'm like, I cannot do 13 miles at six 15. I was not in that kind of shape at
Ally Brettnacher: that time.
Bob Roudebush: And uh, he's like, yeah, I agree. And so we said, Hey, go ahead and go without us. Like, we'll, we'll meet up with you, whatever.
So they continue to run around. you know, they do the full loop at Bell Isle and they come back and get us, and then we're heading back to the hotel. And sure enough, I looked down at my watch and here we are at like 6 0 5, 6 10, 6 15. I'm just like, these guys just will not let up. and so we ended up getting back to the hotel.
I looked down, we had run 13 miles on a Thursday morning at 10:00 AM and it was the fastest half marathon I'd ever run. It was like a hour and 28 minutes, an hour and 27
Ally Brettnacher: minutes.
Wow.
Bob Roudebush: And David, the entire time was just like, you and I are sitting here talking, not, not even breathing hard,
Ally Brettnacher: just, gosh. He's
Bob Roudebush: pretty, pretty amazing from a physical, you know, physical perspective.
Yeah. Yeah.
Ally Brettnacher: And you were hungover a little
Bob Roudebush: That's crazy. Like not feeling
Ally Brettnacher: great. Yeah. I mean.
Bob Roudebush: and it was just like a random Thursday. It, it's, I didn't taper
for
Ally Brettnacher: You didn't go through your like morning race day [00:53:00] routine. You didn't
Bob Roudebush: Just showed up. I'm
Ally Brettnacher: you have any fuel on
Bob Roudebush: you?
No. None, zero, no water, no gels,
Ally Brettnacher: right? Yeah.
Right. I'm surprised that when you turn, you and Cameron were like, okay, we'll see about, I'm surprised David Goggins didn't give some sort
Bob Roudebush: like,
oh no. He gave us plenty of crap about it. Okay. Yeah, a hundred percent.
Ally Brettnacher: But not even David Goggins could get you to keep going with him. Like that's pretty,
Bob Roudebush: I don't think it was physically possible at
Ally Brettnacher: that point. Right? Yeah. Um, um,
Bob Roudebush: but what was interesting is, is that, I, I had had a chance to talk to David because that he was, he was running Leadville the year I attempted Leadville, and so it would've been 2019. Oh. And I remember seeing David come back over Hope pass into Twin Lakes as I was going out. So I told him that whole story.
and then he just, he broke it down into like coach mode. At the point, he's like, okay, here's what you need to do. You're going back next
Ally Brettnacher: year.
Bob Roudebush: You, you know, you, you need to do a thousand lunges. You need to do this, you need to do that. And so like, so he was breaking it down for me exactly what you need to do to finish Leadville.
Ally Brettnacher: but
you get like the notes out, out on your phone. Yeah. I'd be like, I'm not gonna
Bob Roudebush: I'm not gonna remember all of this. Uh, but it was great. And so I [00:54:00] think afterwards at the, he signed his book or whatever at the event, and so I, I had my Leadville bib with me from 2019, so I took it, he
Ally Brettnacher: So I decided,
Bob Roudebush: Bob, stay hard. David Goggins. It was, it was pretty cool.
Good, good
Ally Brettnacher: Uh,
that's pretty cool. Do you have it framed?
Bob Roudebush: I don't have it framed. It is tucked away safely
Ally Brettnacher: You should frame it. That's so cool.
Yeah,
Bob Roudebush: it was. It's a cool story.
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. That is a really cool story. So have you since beat that
Bob Roudebush: time?
No, no. It's literally to this day, the fastest half marathon
Ally Brettnacher: I've ever run on a
Bob Roudebush: on a random Thursday morning in Detroit.
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. I mean, I guess why would you, I mean, you could leave that there. That's a great way to say, yeah.
That was my, that's my
Bob Roudebush: fastest, fastest marathon
was David Goggins.
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. That's a pretty mic drop. Yep. Yeah. Um, okay. You've got some other crazy stories too, where one, where you were on the way to a race and you hit a deer with your car.
Oh, right, right.
Like, these are insane.
Bob Roudebush: Right? Uh, so this would've been the Beaverhead Endurance a hundred K,
Ally Brettnacher: Okay. What state is that? It's in Idaho. Okay.
Bob Roudebush: It's in Salmon, Idaho, which is up in the panhandle of Idaho. So up between Washington and
Ally Brettnacher: Montana. Oh, yeah. Okay.
Bob Roudebush: And so it's [00:55:00] in the middle of nowhere. The, the entire course, like 95% of it is run on the Continental Divide Trail.
So most of it's at Elevation. and it, you fly into Boise and then you drive three and a half miles or three and a half miles, three and a half hours. Three and a
Ally Brettnacher: Okay. miles like,
like, woo. That's
Bob Roudebush: Three and a half. That's wow. Three
Ally Brettnacher: and a half miles.
Bob Roudebush: Uh, you drive three and a half hours, middle of nowhere Idaho to get to salmon. And I, I had stopped for gas and a snack and stretched my legs and I was like 45 minutes from salmon and I had, had booked a bed and breakfast. It was this, it was literally, an older. Couple who owned a farm, who rented out two rooms in their farmhouse, like it was a working farm.
Ally Brettnacher: And how did you find that?
Bob Roudebush: because I couldn't get, there was no hotel rooms. 'cause this, there's nothing in this town. Wow. And so I had found it on Airbnb or VRBO or something like that and, and, and booked it. And so I, I stopped to get gas stretched my legs, get a [00:56:00] snack, come 45 minutes, like, we're good here. Speed limit in that part of Idaho is like 85 miles an hour on the open and, you know, state highways because there's literally nothing around there.
And, so I'm in this town, I start to leave speed limit goes, you know, 35, 45, 55, 85. And so I'm just coming up to speed as I get outta town. And I remember seeing the 85 mile an hour speed limit. And so start to accelerate as we're coming outta town and out of nowhere, a mule deer. Comes out of the, culvert, like the, the side of the road.
Yeah. The ditch in the side of the road and I don't hit it. It ran into me into the front, left quarter panel of this Toyota Corolla. I think that's what it was. Rental car that I was driving that literally had 400 miles
Ally Brettnacher: on it.
No,
Bob Roudebush: the car is smashed up. There's blood and guts and deer poop all down the side of it.
The deer is laying on the side of the road. I don't know what to do at this point. I'm in the middle of
Ally Brettnacher: of nowhere.
What time is
Bob Roudebush: this?
Uh, it was like in [00:57:00] the afternoon, maybe one or two in the afternoon.
Ally Brettnacher: it was light
Bob Roudebush: light. Yeah, it was totally light out.
And deer don't usually
Ally Brettnacher: I was picturing it being like crack of
dawn or like dusk.
Bob Roudebush: Okay. So
totally. So again, completely surprised
Ally Brettnacher: me.
What? And from the left, so it had to cross the
other
Bob Roudebush: to cross the other
Ally Brettnacher: the other lane.
Bob Roudebush: Um, and so I turned the car around and drive back into the
Ally Brettnacher: You could drive the car still.
Bob Roudebush: I was, when I got out, I was super surprised that it actually made it, because the entire front of the car, I think you've seen a picture
Ally Brettnacher: of it.
Yeah. Trina sent me a picture of it. It's insane. Smashed.
Bob Roudebush: and the driver's door wouldn't open.
Like that's how bad the damage was. So I had to climb out through the, the passenger side and um,
Ally Brettnacher: um, it didn't look like there were airbags deployed.
Bob Roudebush: Uh, I, you know what? I don't think the
Ally Brettnacher: did, which is kind of nuts. Yeah, nuts. A little
concerning maybe '
Bob Roudebush: cause of where it hit, it was a side impact
instead
Ally Brettnacher: but usually you have side airbags. I don't know. Yeah.
I don't know.
Bob Roudebush: And so I, I go inside and. The attendant at this, you know, one pump gas station in the middle of nowhere, rural Idaho is like, well, I guess you should call the sheriff. I don't know what to tell you. And so he gave me the number. [00:58:00] I barely had cell phone coverage. I had to stand on like one leg in the parking lot in a certain way to have, you know,
enough bars. Yeah.
And so I call and he's like, oh, I'll be out there. It was literally called the Sheriff.
Ally Brettnacher: That's, I mean, that is funny.
That's, that
Bob Roudebush: is
who comes out in his pickup truck. And he's like, what's going on? I explained to him, he's like, oh, all right, let me go check it out. So
Ally Brettnacher: he
Bob Roudebush: takes out off out of town. Five minutes later he comes back and he's raring mad at me.
And not at me specifically,
Ally Brettnacher: just
upset. I was like, what? And he's like,
Bob Roudebush: did you cut the antlers off that deer? And I'm like, uh, no. He's like, he's like, well damn, I'm gonna have fill out paperwork. So apparently somebody had come along right after I had hit the deer. Took its antlers. No. Which at that point, from like, I guess a natural resources perspective was considered like some form of poaching.
I don't know the
Ally Brettnacher: time. Yeah. And
so what,
Bob Roudebush: had to now file a report with the dnr, oh God. That I had hit this deer
Ally Brettnacher: and, and somebody had come along with a saw like [00:59:00] what? Just
Bob Roudebush: cut the antlers off of it. And, so he was upset, had no, no mercy or like empathy for me and my situation, which was I was in the middle of nowhere and trying to figure out how am I going to
Ally Brettnacher: get
Bob Roudebush: either back to the airport or hopefully to this race.
Luckily, I'd gone in a day ahead of time, so I had a day, so I'm on the phone with Avis Rental at that point, and the poor person in the customer service was trying to be helpful and was like, well, could you just call an
Ally Brettnacher: Uber?
Bob Roudebush: I said, ma'am, I don't know if
Ally Brettnacher: you
know what the state of Idaho is, but
Bob Roudebush: I'm like, I am two hours from three hours maybe from the nearest major city.
I, I can't just call an
Ally Brettnacher: Uber.
Bob Roudebush: I need you to call a tow truck to come and like get the car. Yeah. Somehow I figure that out. Geez. Um, I wait around four hours, maybe five hours. About nine o'clock that night. Thew truck finally shows
Ally Brettnacher: up.
Bob Roudebush: The gas station's long been closed. The gas station sitting in the parking lot
Ally Brettnacher: with nos.
I [01:00:00] mean, there's nothing for you to do. You,
Bob Roudebush: I'm just sitting there
Ally Brettnacher: Oh,
Bob Roudebush: for four or five hours. Guy finally pulls up in the tow truck flatbed. And so the plan is he's gonna put the, car on the flatbed. He's gonna drive to Twin Falls, Idaho, which is a two and a half hour drive. And there's a small airport there with an Avis rental car facility.
And I'm gonna ride back with
Ally Brettnacher: him
Bob Roudebush: and get a hotel room. Wake up the next morning, get a rental car, drive back to Salmon. Through most of the same route that I took to get there. and so this tow truck driver and I got to be really good friends for two and a half hours in the middle of the night in his pickup truck.
He was sharing
Ally Brettnacher: with me
Bob Roudebush: stories about his ex-wife and his current wife and like his kids and how he's planning on leaving her. And I'm just like, man, I'm so tired right now. I just, I just want you to get me to Twin Falls and Wow. so I get to Twin Falls like two in the morning, had a room at the Hyatt. Get three hours of sleep, four hours of sleep. Wake
Ally Brettnacher: up,
Bob Roudebush: go to the Avis rental car, get a new rental car, get back in the car, drive another two and a half hours to get to [01:01:00] this little town where I had hit the deer and drive the same stretch of highway outta town. I was very diligent this time. Yeah. I was looking in every ditch, and make it to salmon, but I think the, Funniest part of that story was after I had gotten back to the gas station, I needed to call the Airbnb person and just let this lady know, I'm not gonna make it tonight, but keep my room because I'm gonna be there eventually.
Yeah.
And so I call her up and I, I explained
Ally Brettnacher: because Did you have stuff
Bob Roudebush: there
Yeah, yeah. I had my bag and all
my Right,
my clothes
Ally Brettnacher: and,
Bob Roudebush: and, and so, you know, I said, Hey, you know, this is Bob. I'm renting the, the room one of your rooms tonight. I just wanted to let you know I'm in, I can't remember the name of town I'm in, so-and-so, but I hit a deer. Car's totaled. I'm working on trying to get a tow truck driver and I'll, I'll still be there, but it's probably gonna be tomorrow.
And she's
Ally Brettnacher: like,
Bob Roudebush: is the deer still alive? And I'm like, no, no ma'am. It's, I'm, it's pretty dead. And she's like, will it fit in your car? And I, I said,
what
Ally Brettnacher: it with these people? And
Bob Roudebush: I said, I said, no, it, it won't fit in the [01:02:00] car. It's the to little Toyota Corolla. And the, the car's pretty much totaled. I don't think it's gonna make it there.
And. I was hoping maybe you could give me a ride, and she's like, no, we can't give you a ride. But it's, you know, it's a damn shame that we, we can't harvest the meat off of that deer. so that's why I was asking whether it would fit in the car or
Ally Brettnacher: I mean, they probably already, somebody probably already
Bob Roudebush: it, probably.
And so I, and in retrospect, maybe I should have told her yes, it would fit in a car
Ally Brettnacher: and
if
Bob Roudebush: one of them drove to get
Ally Brettnacher: Oh, somebody else
Bob Roudebush: could ride
back with them. and, and so, you know, long story short, I get to the Airbnb, uh, on Friday afternoon,
get
a fairly decent night's sleep. And I wake up at, you know, three in the next three o'clock the next morning on Saturday because race time started at five and you had to take a bus to get there and, ran the race.
So it's a good thing I went out a day
Ally Brettnacher: early.
that, that story is wild. Yeah. Wild. The antlers. I didn't expect that
Bob Roudebush: twist. Yeah.
me either. Yeah. He was not happy. 'cause he was like, now I gotta fill out
Ally Brettnacher: Right. He's like, I didn't wanna fill out a form for this, so, geez. Oh my [01:03:00] gosh. And so what, what distance of race was
Bob Roudebush: this?
It was a hundred K and that's where I learned the term scree to go back to earlier. So, this is a beautiful course. like I said, most of it is on the Continental Divide Trail. Most of it's at Elevation. You, you go through Lehigh Pass, which is this, this amazing, section of the course where you, you make this really big climb outta the Lehigh Pass aid station and you look back down and you can just see the entire like valley below you and it's just green and, and beautiful.
And then at mile 54 there's this section they call the scree field, which is they literally send you straight up for two and a half miles over nothing but rock and. Okay, scree. And it's marked with tiny stakes, with little pink flags. And you're spending the, well, first of all, you're not running, you're, you're basically hiking, you're walking and like trying to make sure you don't get lost because this scree field, you're on the [01:04:00] top of the mountain essentially.
And so it's two or 3000 feet down either direction. Your footing's not very good anyway. You're 54 miles into this race, so you're tired. Oh my gosh. You're done, you're ready to be done. and got through that section and it was just beautiful because you get to the top and you see this, you know, Alpine Lake, that's Bluegreen.
And it had been a little rainy at that point. And so there was some cloud cover, but there was this. Beautiful rainbow. Oh. That you feel like you can just reach out and touch. And I remember I had cell coverage, so I FaceTimed Trina
Ally Brettnacher: Oh wow.
Bob Roudebush: to like show her like the rainbow and the, you know, glacial lake down there and, and all of that stuff.
It was really cool. So. Wow. And she's it was
Ally Brettnacher: glad you were alive. Yeah,
Bob Roudebush: So it was
Ally Brettnacher: worth
it. Wow. Yeah.
That is, that's nuts. Gosh, I just can't with that.
So have you had any other run-ins with wildlife that we should know about?
Bob Roudebush: Uh, I'm trying to think. No, probably not.
Ally Brettnacher: Well, that's good.
Bob Roudebush: Yeah. I think on a training run once in Washington, in the [01:05:00] Cougar Mountain State Park one morning, uh. An owl tried to grab my hat off my head.
Ally Brettnacher: thought,
Bob Roudebush: have thought I was a squirrel or something.
Ally Brettnacher: That's weird.
Bob Roudebush: but outside of that, generally I try to stay away from the wildlife and they try to stay away from me. Yeah. Uh, there's enough danger when you're, you know, running a hundred miles that you, you don't need the added element of risk from like a wild animal,
Ally Brettnacher: Right. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I feel like most of 'em probably stay away when they hear probably. Yeah.
Yeah. Alright, so Trina, one of the things I love about Trina is just how she gives back. Mm-hmm. Like, she's pacing, she's volunteering. you have volunteered, was it with Achilles that you ran with a blind runner at Flying Pig.
Oh,
Bob Roudebush: right. I don't know if it was with Achilles or not. The, the way I remember. The story going down was, somebody had reached out this, the monumental marathon. I don't remember which year it was.
I was running the, the marathon. Dave Wilkinson, who was the guy that I paced, guided, had reached out to the race director and said, Hey, I'm a blind runner. I, I want to [01:06:00] do this run. do you have anybody that could do it? And it was literally, I think two weeks before the race. Oh. And so obviously somebody reached out to Trina because Trina knows everybody.
Yeah. Right. And so Trina was like, Hey, you should, do this. You could, like, you're totally his pace. You could totally guide him. I'm like, okay, I'll do it. It be, it'd be fun. Good experience. And so in a matter of two weeks, I had to figure out like all what's involved and what he needed and Yeah.
Yeah. All of his stuff. And so Dave was an amazing guy. We ran the race in the monumental marathon. it was a lot of fun. Got to know him. He's got a great story. he's an amazing individual because he's, he's not let. His, the loss of his sight sort of keep him down. Wow. Uh, he worked at, for a technology company that built software that worked with like, people that need seeing assistance.
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. And
Bob Roudebush: so he would travel and do customer meetings and speak at conferences and everything else. And he, he did it all by himself. He did not have anybody
Ally Brettnacher: with
him.
Geez. It's
Bob Roudebush: amazing what he was able to accomplish and navigate. And, and I can [01:07:00] remember, I don't know all the features, but the iPhone has a lot of sort
Ally Brettnacher: of
Bob Roudebush: like seeing assist functionality built into it.
And he could work that phone as well, or better than I could, like being able to see perfectly well. Interesting. And so David, Dave and I had a, had a good time. We finished that race. and then he called me up, I think the following spring. To see if I would guide him at the Kentucky Derby Marathon. He wanted to run in honor and memoria of a good friend of his who died at a heart of a heart attack.
And I think there was an anniversary of, it might've been his birthday. Okay. If I recall correctly. So
Ally Brettnacher: I'm like,
Bob Roudebush: yeah, sure. I'll, I'll do it. Like, when is it? And he's like, oh, it's Saturday. The whatever
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. First Saturday, first Sunday in May, probably, or,
Bob Roudebush: and I, and I realized that I already signed up to run the Flying Pig the next day on Sunday in Cincinnati.
Ally Brettnacher: Okay.
Bob Roudebush: Trina and Trina had signed up to run the Half Derby marathon or half marathon and, at, at Derby and then run the Flying Pig Marathon
Ally Brettnacher: Okay. Those are different,
Bob Roudebush: different [01:08:00] races, but same
Ally Brettnacher: weekend. Okay.
Bob Roudebush: Okay.
Ally Brettnacher: I did not know, I just like rolled derby. I don't know
Bob Roudebush: why Yeah. So I guided him at Derby on Saturday.
Ran a marathon with
Ally Brettnacher: Dave. Right.
Bob Roudebush: Trina finished the half marathon at Derby. We packed up our stuff in the car, drove to Cincinnati, had dinner, woke up the next morning, and then both of us ran the flying pig the next day. So that was the first time I had sort of done marathons back to back.
Ally Brettnacher: And I think
Bob Roudebush: part of that was sort of the like entry drug for me for ultra marathons.
Like, ooh,
Ally Brettnacher: I can do that,
Bob Roudebush: I can do that, I could run a 50 K in a day. Right. Or 50 miles. Sure. But wow. Really great experience. very, a lot more difficult than you would expect. It requires teamwork and coordination to guide a runner. Mm-hmm. You basically have like a two foot stretch of
Ally Brettnacher: rope.
Bob Roudebush: And you have a loop that goes on your arm and they have a loop that goes on their arm, and you both have vests that everybody knows what's going on.
Mm-hmm. Stay outta
Ally Brettnacher: yellow I've seen.
Yeah. Stay out. These,
Bob Roudebush: these, these folks' way. [01:09:00] Right. Because
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. Don't
cut this guy off. Like,
Bob Roudebush: And I remember at one point in the Derby marathon, it might've been two or three miles ahead, uh, in, into the race, some runner ahead of us drops their ID and just instinctually, like, reaches down
Ally Brettnacher: Oh God. Okay.
Bob Roudebush: And Dave and I are right behind her. I thought for sure, like our race was over at that point, because we were gonna go down. He was be gonna be injured. She was gonna be injured. I was gonna be, but luckily, like we were able to avoid that. Wow. Um, but yeah. What a, it was a really cool experience.
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. I bet it would be. I, I'm so curious about the process of like learning Yeah.
How to have that teamwork and like what kind of cues to say. Yeah. Was there, like, did they give you like a video
Bob Roudebush: to
watch? No. Nothing. Right. I, we basically figured it out in the first two miles of the monumental marathon. Okay. I was like, okay, Dave, help me out here.
What do you need? What do you not
Ally Brettnacher: need?
Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: Like, what shouldn't I do?
Ally Brettnacher: Right. Okay. Well, and talk about the pothole
Bob Roudebush: situation.
Yeah, exactly. For monumental. And so I would, you know, I would be like, Hey, pothole in your left, we're gonna go to [01:10:00] the right or whatever, runner ahead, or we're coming into an aid station, it's gonna get crowded here, so.
Okay. Yeah. Wow. We, we basically figured it
Ally Brettnacher: out.
Okay. And what, what kind of pace are you running these. Uh,
Bob Roudebush: I think Dave was like around the four hour
Ally Brettnacher: mark. Okay.
Bob Roudebush: Four hour, 10 minute mark, I think is what he ran, Derby in. And I think his goal was to finish four hours at monumental, if I remember
Ally Brettnacher: right.
Okay.
Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: So
That's so cool. You're moving.
Ally Brettnacher: So were those the only two races that you did together?
Bob Roudebush: Yeah, exactly. He's gone on to other things. People should look him up.
Ally Brettnacher: David. I was, I'm, I'm like, wanna look him up. Um, he's,
Bob Roudebush: uh, his nickname is Speedy Turtle.
Ally Brettnacher: Okay. Um,
Bob Roudebush: but I think he's right now raising money to do a a, across the America bike ride with
Ally Brettnacher: Okay,
cool.
Bob Roudebush: As a, as a blind cyclist. So,
Ally Brettnacher: well, it's, it's interesting. His name is so similar to, I did, I interviewed Dave, I think his last name was Wilkerson.
Bob Roudebush: That might've been him.
Ally Brettnacher: No, he's here. He's local and I interviewed him. He's not blind. Okay. He, he had a heart transplant though. And he still runs, but their names are
so [01:11:00] similar.
It's crazy. His last
Bob Roudebush: wrong too.
It might be Wilkerson now that you mention it.
Ally Brettnacher: interesting. Anyway,
I don't know. Anyway, I'm gonna have to look that up. That's, that's fun. That's wild. Yeah. I would love to do something like that for sure.
Yeah,
Bob Roudebush: it was
Ally Brettnacher: really cool.
Bob Roudebush: Yeah.
And it, it really helps you put things in
Ally Brettnacher: perspective mm-hmm.
Bob Roudebush: because you're out there and you're like, this is hard, but it's really hard for
Ally Brettnacher: Dave.
Right. He can't, I mean, literally cannot see.
Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: And the. Like the community support
Ally Brettnacher: Mm.
Bob Roudebush: Was just it like, man, I was on, I was on a high the whole time because everybody would go by and it would be like cheering, supportive. Just, it was, it was just a really good experience. Yeah. Yeah. Made you, made me remember like why I fell in love with running and doing races because it really is sort of about that energy and that community
Ally Brettnacher: support. Mm-hmm. Like,
everybody's
Bob Roudebush: out fighting their own battle, chasing their own goal. Like none of us are, very few of us are here trying to win the whole thing or set a [01:12:00] record. and, you know, it was just a really good experience.
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. That's really cool. I'm gonna add that to my list. Should do it. Mm-hmm. Yep. Okay. Um, you also in your career traveled a lot. Yes. So what are some of the coolest places that you've run?
Bob Roudebush: So. Uh, let's see here. I, I had to go to a, had to go to a conference in Nice France
Ally Brettnacher: once.
Oh yeah. That sounds
Bob Roudebush: Uh, so running on the beach and Nice. Was pretty amazing. running in Paris, along Theen.
Yeah. I can tell a funny Trina story if you'd like. Okay. Yeah. Um, so I'll come back to that. Uh, one time Trina and I, we were in Monaco for, oh, an award trip for
Ally Brettnacher: watched a documentary on Monaco and
Bob Roudebush: we ran from our hotel in Monaco, out of Monaco, into France and to Italy, all in the course of a Saturday morning, 10 mile long run.
It was pretty, pretty, cool. that's pretty cool. So, yeah.
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Those are some cool places. Yeah. All right. Tell me the funny Paris story.
Bob Roudebush: So if, if you're not familiar with Paris, uh, like sort of
Ally Brettnacher: like.
Bob Roudebush: in terms of like the [01:13:00] monuments and, you know, all of the architectural points of interest there.
There's the arc de triumph, of course, which everybody knows,
Ally Brettnacher: Mm-hmm. The arc.
Bob Roudebush: Uh, and then there's the arc de ies, which is over by, uh, the Louvre, which is a smaller arc,
and
they line up with each other, so like you can see from one to the next. And then there's a third arc, which is called the a de la Deon.
Okay. Which is a new modern arc, you know, building that was built in the sort of commercial like newer section of Paris. And all three of them sort of line
Ally Brettnacher: up
That's cool. I didn't know
that they,
Bob Roudebush: you know, and they were designed that way. They were planned out that way. And so one morning, when we, Trina and I were in Paris, uh, we were, we decided, I think maybe we had different mileages or something like that.
And so we were gonna do our own thing. And, Trina doesn't speak any French. I speak a little bit of French and so I think I gave her like 20 euros and a piece of paper that I had like handwritten the name of our Airbnb on Smart and said, keep this with you. Have fun. Like we've been here for a few days, you [01:14:00] know, in general terms how things are set out.
And so she had found, she first started out at the Arcta ies, the Small Arc, the the petite arc, and then ran up to Arcta Triumph. And then she sees the arc de la de font in the distance. And she's like, how freaking cool would it be to have a Strava map where I ran all three
Ally Brettnacher: arcs.
So cool.
Bob Roudebush: What I don't think she realized was that would be like standing in downtown Indianapolis and being like, oh, I wanna run to the Carmel library
Ally Brettnacher: or the Pyramid. I could see the pyramids,
like I'll run there run there.
Bob Roudebush: And so I think she had made it a few miles in Paris traffic. Before realizing she was never gonna make it to the ARC phones.
Oh my God. And so
somehow turned around and figured out how to get her way back. and you know, she'd obviously been gone way longer than I expected.
And so I'm worried to death and she finally gets back and she's like, I'm like, well, thank goodness you're okay. I thought maybe you got lost. And she was like, well, I was trying, do you know there's a third arc? And I was trying to, I'm like, you mean the arc de la de font? Like the one that's really far out [01:15:00] town?
She's like, yeah, that one. She's like, I was trying to run there 'cause I thought it'd be cool to run to all three. And I'm just like, of course. Yeah.
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. It's like 10 miles. That's gonna be like 20 more miles to your run. Yeah, exactly. Oh, that's adorable. I love that Trina story. Yeah, that's a good one. Okay, well I could talk to you all day, but I, but we need to be mindful of of time. Alright. so I'm gonna ask you my two end of the podcast questions now.
Okay. Unless, do we miss anything that you wanted to make sure you shared? Uh, no, I,
Bob Roudebush: No, I, I mean, I didn't think I'd have. This much
Ally Brettnacher: content
Bob Roudebush: to
talk about. Uh, it's probably the longest I've ever talked about running with somebody without like completely annoying them.
So,
Ally Brettnacher: well, you, I'm sure you've done that in a marathon before
Bob Roudebush: too.
Yeah. But they, those, they, they kind of know what they're signing up
for
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah, that's
Bob Roudebush: true
When they do that,
Ally Brettnacher: but, okay. alright, so the first question is, what is your favorite running mantra and or song?
Bob Roudebush: I don't usually listen to
Ally Brettnacher: music.
Okay.
Bob Roudebush: I do usually listen to podcasts or audio books. Um, my mantra is, it's, it's a weird one. It is, well, not that weird, maybe it's weird for me, [01:16:00] but everybody else's mantras are like inspirational. Like, you are amazing and you can do anything. And mine, mine is you've got nowhere else to be
Ally Brettnacher: today
Bob Roudebush: because, oh, for me, when you're out running a 50 mile or a hundred miles, like there becomes a point at which you're like, you know
Ally Brettnacher: what?
Bob Roudebush: I'm tired of this. Like, I'm, I'm done. I don't wanna do this anymore. I could go, I could be at home, I could be doing this, I could be watching this movie, I could be working on this thing. And I have to remind myself, dude, you got nowhere to be today. Doesn't matter how long this is gonna take,
just
keep moving and you will get it done.
And don't think about like anything else. And so that's, that's kinda my mantra when I mentally get to that place where like, I'm kind of over this and mm-hmm. Like, maybe I should drop or like, maybe I'm done after this yard or whatever. If it's a backyard, it's like, you got nowhere else to be today, man.
Ally Brettnacher: Just
Bob Roudebush: hang out. Enjoy it. Yeah. Be in the moment.
Ally Brettnacher: That is a good one. Yeah. I, that's one of the sleep meditations I listen to is like, says like, you have [01:17:00] nothing else you need to do today besides go to sleep.
Bob Roudebush: Maybe that's where I got it from. 'cause like in, uh, Shavasana and
Ally Brettnacher: Yoga. Okay.
Bob Roudebush: That's one of the things they're like, you're done.
There's nothing.
There's nothing more to do. Yeah. Just be, yeah. Maybe that's
Ally Brettnacher: where
pick it up. Yeah. I like it a lot. That's a good one. Um, do you have like a pump up song or like a walkout song that you would have
like No,
probably not.
Bob Roudebush: Okay. But I mean, if you had to pick one as cliche as it is, it'd probably be like ac, CDC something.
Yeah.
Ally Brettnacher: Right. Yeah,
of course. Right. 'cause that works. Yeah. Okay. And then next finish line or milestone. You have a milestone birthday coming up? No,
Bob Roudebush: be 50
Ally Brettnacher: this year or this year.
Bob Roudebush: Yeah. This, this
Ally Brettnacher: I'm turning 40 in July. Oh yeah. Birthday. Look at us in our milestones. That's right. Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: Uh, so I'm trying not to think about that
Ally Brettnacher: one,
Bob Roudebush: but in terms of, uh,
Ally Brettnacher: ' cause your age group, you know,
next
Bob Roudebush: yeah, exactly. Next age group. But here's the thing, everybody else is also getting older too, ally.
right.
That's what's so frustrating is like you move, you're like, oh, I'm in a new age group, and you're like, oh, all
Ally Brettnacher: So is everyone
else
Bob Roudebush: fast guys I was competing with before are now older too.
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah, that is a good point. Um,
Bob Roudebush: but yeah, new [01:18:00] age group, so that's something to celebrate. and I think I get some extra minutes in my Boston
Ally Brettnacher: Right? There you go. I ever
Bob Roudebush: decide to try that again.
Yeah. Um,
Ally Brettnacher: gosh, we didn't even talk. That's so funny. You know, we can talk this whole time, not even talk about, you know, that
Bob Roudebush: I did qualify for Boston in 2020.
Ally Brettnacher: That's amazing. But
Bob Roudebush: it didn't go because of COVID. Right. Great. Yeah. So I spent two and a half years training with Matt and PBT and ran a 3 0 7 at Monumental and got into Boston. Trina bought me the jacket and everything, and then they didn't have the race. And
Ally Brettnacher: So you've never gone?
Bob Roudebush: Never gone. I've gone with Trina. Okay.
Yeah,
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah. Trina's run it. What? Oh yeah. Okay. And
Bob Roudebush: then when they opened it back up in 2021, right? Uh, you could, they took your qualifying times from the last two
Ally Brettnacher: years,
FLAMS BOB R: maybe
Bob Roudebush: maybe it was 2022. But anyway, they took two years worth of qualifying times for the folks that had missed the 2020 race because it didn't happen.
Yeah. And I'm like, I was disgruntled at that point. Okay. Disillusioned. I had moved on. I'm like, I'm doing trail running stuff now. I'm running Leadville. Everything's good. And decided, eh, I, I probably wouldn't get in anyway because there's gonna be twice as many [01:19:00] people applying and Yeah. Like, I won't have enough padding and like why bother?
Yeah. Uh,
Ally Brettnacher: I, Matt
Jacket, I looked
Bob Roudebush: the times afterwards and I would've gotten in, I could have run it in 2021 or 2022,
Ally Brettnacher: whatever the,
okay. Yeah. So you could, and you probably could if you wanted
Bob Roudebush: to. If
I, yeah, I'll say save that for
Ally Brettnacher: later. Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: so, so yeah, new age group. I'll turn 50 in August. Uh, and then from a race perspective, I already signed up, like we talked about for Prairie, so you should sign up
Ally Brettnacher: too.
Okay.
Bob Roudebush: We can share a tent if you want. Trina's a great crew person.
Ally Brettnacher: Oh my gosh. Learned that.
Bob Roudebush: Um, but I'm doing, uh, grind on the grid Ultra or the, the backyard in May this year. Okay. Some folks should check that one out. If you're local. It's a super great race. Matt Cantrell's, the RD organizer.
Really good dude. it's a very, sort of grassroots type of backyard ultra.
It's just a good time. Good people, good time. so I'm signed up for that. And then, I signed up for Prairie, so I'm eyeing that for September. I, I think I'm not signed up for my Western states qualifier this year, so I'll have to pick one.
I may pick it a hundred later
Ally Brettnacher: [01:20:00] the year.
Bob Roudebush: cause that's really my Boston is I want to run Western States. Yeah. One time. But I, who knows, I, I may have,
Ally Brettnacher: Do you have any tickets?
You have some tickets
Bob Roudebush: Yeah. I'll have 16 tickets next year if I, if I qualify this year, I'll have 16 tickets for the
Ally Brettnacher: last. Yeah. That whole process is so crazy to me. Crazy. Yeah.
Bob Roudebush: So, so yeah, I haven't decided on what my Western states qualifier gonna be this year, but I'm sort of focused on those two backyard ultras. ' cause I kind of feel like last year I unlocked another level, like cracked a code. Yeah. Like once you run 32 or 33 yards, you're like, oh, wait a second.
So I've gotten well past a hundred at this point. Right. And I understand what that's like. So I'm curious how I get to one 50 or, or
Ally Brettnacher: more,
Geez. So that's wild. Yeah. This and this all makes marathoning seem so easy. It's like, oh, just 26. It's not. But anyway. Well thank you so much
Bob Roudebush: Bob,
Oh, thanks for
Ally Brettnacher: It was so much
Bob Roudebush: much fun.
You, you were right. It was
Ally Brettnacher: fun. It was fun.
Bob Roudebush: fun.
Ally Brettnacher: Yeah.
I'm gonna have to, you're gonna have to show me the medals or the buckles. Sorry.
Now. And I'll have to share pictures of '
Bob Roudebush: em.
Ally Brettnacher: Okay. For after. But, and thank you to everybody who [01:21:00] has listened and happy running.
Bob Roudebush: Yep.
Ally Brettnacher: Hooray.
If you enjoyed this episode of Finish Lines and Milestones from Sandy Boy Productions, please go share rate, review, comment. Your engagement is so greatly appreciated, and a reminder of an upcoming event that is for Gallant Times's Day, which if you're not aware is. The day before Valentine's Day to get your girls together.
I'm hosting an in-person run during my usual Friday run with Friends, which is at 9:00 AM You can find the details in the show notes. There's also a virtual option where you can run a 10 K anytime in February, and if you choose to, you can donate to free to move.com when you register. Otherwise, it's just, it's free.
I wanna raise awareness for this incredible organization that is helping to ensure the safety of women no matter where or when they run. Oh, and also the new episode of Catching Up with Coach for the month of February just dropped.
So if you're interested in hearing more about my training and how I work with my coach, go check that out. Alright, see you next week.[01:22:00]