Game Over 
Sports
Best Feet Forward
Paul Carrozza of Austins Run-Tex is turning the state capital into the running capital of the United States.
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To get an idea of how this translates into an actual increase in the amount of people running in Austin, consider that, in 1992, there were 300 entrants in the inaugural Motorola Marathon; in 1998 there were more than 6,000, including both the full marathon and the two-person and five-person relays. “It has been one of the fastest-growing marathons in the country,” says David Doolittle, the chairman of the race committee at Motorola. The Capitol 10,000 also keeps chugging along—it had more than 15,000 entries this year. “Austin and Boulder, Colorado, probably have the most runners per capita in the U.S.,” says Bob Wischnia of Runner’s World. “Austin is just a fantastic running town—they’ve got some really great races.”
Not satisfied with merely organizing races, Carrozza has also devoted himself to training people to run in them: “The training side—we really started getting involved about three years ago, what we call Run-Tex University, which is teaching people how to run.” This may sound presumptuous; part of running’s allure is that it seems so straightforward. Not so, says Carrozza. “People go from not running to wanting to run every day, but they’re applying too much stress, the body can’t adapt quickly enough, and it turns into an injury.” According to Carrozza, runners spend up to a third of their potential training time either injured or recovering from an injury. Sitting in his office, he explains pronation—normal foot movement—and the way the muscles work while running. Soon he takes out a plastic model of a foot and slaps it up and down on his desk to demonstrate a typical foot-strike motion. He talks about how he’d “like to see people be able to run a decent mile first” before going on to more ambitious distances—“and that might take a year. I’m talking about being able to run a mile, not in pain, but at a fast pace.”
This systematic approach seems to be the trend in running, as the focus has shifted from long, slow distance runs to interval training—running various distances to build up speed and endurance. Jeff Galloway, a 1972 Olympian and the author of popular books on distance training, says that although running fanatics of the seventies might have competed in 18 races a year, today that average is 1.8. USA Track and Field reports that today’s race runners are likely to be about four years older than those of a decade ago and that four times as many women run marathon races now as in 1980. There are more runners than ever before: 6.2 million people finished a race in 1996, according to USA Track and Field, more than four times the number in the late seventies and early eighties.
“People are getting away from just logging miles and more into quality workouts,” says Scott Hippensteel, who coaches track at Lockhart High School south of Austin and says he works at Run-Tex instead of teaching summer school.
That kind of thinking has led Carrozza to offer free Run-Tex classes, which meet every Monday through Thursday at five forty-five in the evening at the Riverside Drive store. Carrozza puts his students—both beginning and intermediate runners—through a variety of strength and speed exercises, including backward running, lateral crossovers, intermittent sprinting, and hill repeats. Also offered at the store are sports massages from the Body Therapy Center, which occupies a room upstairs at Run-Tex on workout days, and a free injury-evaluation clinic every Friday, run by an orthopedic surgeon and a physical therapist.
Classes, massages, clinics…it’s not that Carrozza isn’t interested in selling shoes, although he has admitted, “To me, retail is a necessary evil of our business.” Like everything else he does, his approach to selling shoes is straightforward and practical, with an eye on long-term business instead of short-term sales. Carrozza aims to increase the national average—one new pair of shoes bought every two years—not with fancy sales gimmicks, but as part of his simple philosophy of trying to get folks to run more, period: “If you’re only going to buy a shoe every two years, it better be the right one. Productwise, it’s really important to us to get people in the right shoes.” If a person finds the right pair in today’s high-tech shoe market, he can expect to get five hundred or maybe a thousand miles out of them. But in the wrong pair, Carrozza says with a laugh, “You might get fifty miles.”
To understand what’s unique about this philosophy, you have to visit the Run-Tex sales floor. I went to the Riverside Drive store—the Lamar Run-Tex was moved here in October 1996—one Saturday this spring. The old store typically generated an impressive $1,000 to $1,500 per hour in Saturday sales; the new one often reaches $1,875 to $2,000 per hour. The first thing you notice upon entering the spacious sales area is the enormous, almost altarlike two-sided display case of shoes in the center of the store. “I basically buy eight choices for every customer, which requires us to carry a huge inventory,” says Carrozza. (Run-Tex also sells a lot of running apparel; Shiela is the chief clothing buyer.) Indeed, as vast as the front of the store is, two thirds of its 12,000 square feet is devoted to stock space.
Carrozza expects his staff to be familiar not only with the latest brands but also with the types of runners’ feet and the ways people run. Most of his employees are marathoners or college-level runners themselves, and beyond merely pinching your toe to see if the shoes fit, they’re likely to take you outside to the custom-built track circling the store to watch you run in them. This is what Carrozza hopes will bring customers back. “We don’t have to sell the most expensive shoes to make money,” says Robert Espinoza, who has worked at Run-Tex for five years. “We have to sell the right shoes. Knowledge is the number one thing. Also, we take time with the customers.”
This holistic approach to business—teaching people how to run, organizing races, and selling shoes—has paid off nicely. Run-Tex’s sales surpassed the $2 million mark in 1995 and leapt to $2.9 million in 1996 and $3.5 million in 1997. All while Carrozza has become something of a running sage. “He’s so knowledgeable about footwear,” says Fritz Taylor of Nike. “I think a lot of people at Nike feel we can learn from him.” Carrozza sees the evaluations in Runner’s World as an opportunity to spread the Run-Tex gospel even further: “It’s like offering the Run-Tex service nationwide,” he says.
“I think what we’ve done,” says Espinoza, “is take a store that was for hard-core runners and still is for hard-core runners and make it a store for regular runners too—the people who run twenty miles a week, walkers, fitness buffs. That’s the greatest thing that Paul has done. He includes everyone, helps everyone, and most stores don’t do that.”
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