My younger brother Chris was going to get the store up and running once we found the right location. Chris had a bunch of fast twitch fibers in his body which helped him be a sub 3 hour marathoner and Hawaii Ironman finisher. We settled on Flagstaff, AZ 7,500’ above sea level, pure clean air and no industrial pollution. Another thing that was attractive was Northern Arizona State University was right there with a big student population.

Before finding a store front we spent spare time with Tom Fleming who owned Tom Fleming’s Running Room in Bloomfield, NJ. Tom was a local hero and had twice won the NY Marathon, was runner up twice in the Boston Marathon; we just hung out to see how he handled customers, his inventory and merchandising. Tom’s place was like a Barber Shop with characters coming and going constantly; we laughed hard and learned first hand what to expect in our new venture. One afternoon a young lady walked in and wanted to buy a pair of running shoes, Tom greets her and starts to work his magic, moving up and down from his basement with boxes of shoes. She was very curious about how long the shoes would last, what was the best color…endless questions, then she asked how do I keep the shoes clean and he looked at me with a big smile and said “You run in the rain”.

We did finally open the retail store “Mule Deer Running Center” We had everything going well except we where never able to get the Nike franchise. Lots of promises from Nike but the fact was they could not keep up with the business they had and decided to hold off any new retail clients. So we struggled for 3 years and closed up the store thereafter; we tried our best but without Nike it could not happen.

Sometimes a race turns out like that because your expectations are high but something unexpected happens to prevent you from achieving your goal. We didn’t win in the running store business but we sure had fun trying.

Jim Muehe

Hawaii Ironman 1982/83’