From Marathons to Michelin Stars
Bobby Stuckey talks to me about training for a marathon while being an international restaurateur, and how that training schedule can help others in the restaurant industry.
I caught up with Bobby Stuckey via video just before Christmas. He’d just run a 3:10 marathon at 56 years old.
“And I worked six days a week for the entire 12-week [race] prep.”
The work that Bobby does is at Michelin-starred restaurant Frasca Food and Wine, which you can find in the trail running haven known as Boulder, Colorado. He owns the joint.
That excellent marathon time was at The Marathon Project1 in Arizona, where Bobby grew up. For the uninitiated, this was the second edition of the closed course marathon that is designed for getting fast times. It’s a flat track with no spectators. If you’re running it, prepare to lock in and run. When he was looking for a race that was “something different,” a recommendation to run a unique race in his hometown from an employee who ran the course sub-2:10 back at the first edition of TMP in 2020 was enough.
Having run all of the Majors apart from Tokyo (that’s up next), it’s reasonable that Bobby was looking for something different. He’s been running marathons for exactly 40 years now, and the things Bobby has learned over those numerous 12-week periods of race preparation have been used in numerous other parts of his life.
Bobby talks to me about getting his runs in each morning, ahead of getting into work for a full shift. We’re chatting at the start of his work day. His assistant Jodi is buzzing around organizing and helping. She arranged this virtual meeting, and was an essential component in this past training block.
At the best of times, a marathon training schedule is a feat of calendaring, assuming there’s more to your life than running. That will involve work, family, friends, and everything else in between. Maybe, for three months, you can commit a single weekday morning each week to the long run, but when you’re a top chef in international demand, things are a little different. Bobby fitted those long runs in around corporate events as far flung as Boston, New York, and Rome.
While he loves running, Bobby also loves his work. He loves the restaurant industry. He tells me how restaurants are “there for everybody.” If you’re new to a country and don’t speak the language, or you lose your corporate job in an economic crisis, maybe you’re a single mom and need flexible hours, or you’ve made a mistake and have gone to jail, you can still have a “beautiful career in the restaurant industry.”
Bobby Stuckey is a huge advocate of protecting all of that, and showing people in the industry that it doesn’t have to be a life of burning the candle at both ends.
“What we like selling in journalism and film, Anthony Bourdain was brilliant at. He did such a good job storytelling of the pirate ship chaos.”
There is an alternative, healthier narrative that can be followed.
“I don’t want to be preachy but I ran a marathon on Saturday and I am going to work 11 hours today, and it’s not going to kill me, because I’m not going out after work getting hammered and doing shots. It’s not that I’m a prude – I enjoy a glass of wine – but I want to protect my professional life.”
It’s true that Bobby likes a glass of wine. We’d met in person just a few weeks earlier over a couple of them, bonding over good food and essential music. That he’s one of less than 300 Master Sommeliers in the world is also important, of course.
He tells me that “running a marathon should be standard operating procedure for anyone who wants to be a CEO.” When he’s mentoring his team on their way to becoming sommeliers themselves, he recommends they run a marathon. (“None of them listen.”) He says that running – and specifically planning a schedule for marathon training – has helped his executive function.
Bobby was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia in college, but his running career started when he was a kid who was “out of [his] mind.”
His family moved to Phoenix when he was seven, and his new PE teacher sent the class out to run half a mile in 100°F heat. Mr. Morris’ goal was to get the class up to running a mile, and he did. They ended up running that mile three times a week for the rest of the year, and Bobby loved it.
When the rest of his class was old enough to sign up for Little League but Bobby wasn’t, his dad, wondering where to place his son’s energy, suggested a 10k. The rest is history. He ran his first marathon in high school in December 1985.
“As someone who’s self-medicated through running, a lot of things like executive function, running really helps.”
The symptoms of executive dysfunction2 include disorganization, poor time management, forgetfulness, trouble prioritizing. The knock-on effects are feeling overwhelmed and anxious, even ashamed. These are all issues that neurodivergent individuals suffer from.
If, in 2026, we are friction-maxxing3 (a silly word that means we’re doing hard things), runners could be a couple of steps ahead of the masses. If we learn the most from character-building moments that are purposefully less easy, we learn every time we voluntarily put our bodies through the rigors of a run. There are well-known ideas such as learning resilience from doing difficult things like running 100 miles in the cold and dark or using those miles to untangle our thoughts to be used in creative projects. Let’s add optimizing executive function to the list.
There are no hard numbers for what proportion of the restaurant industry is neurodivergent, but there are estimates of 1 in 24. Compared to the accepted global average of 1 in 5, that suggests that restaurants are a place where neurodivergent individuals can thrive, or are at least attracted to. Just like running, I would posit. It’s a sport that can provide sensory regulation by being a form of stimming as well as emotional release and structured routine5 – all essential tools for good mental health. It makes sense that Bobby’s advice for restaurant workers to run a marathon might allow issues with executive function to be overcome a little more easily.
“I see many great, talented people in my industry that might struggle with executive function, meaning planning hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. I see a lot of people getting way overwhelmed, and I’m like, ‘Hold on. Break this down into bites that you can do.’”
He tells me that you can cram for the quartermaster sommelier exam in the exact way you can cram your marathon training. You can’t.
“The snowball of knowledge is like the snowball of fitness,” Bobby explains. “If you build a sandcastle at the beach, the water will wash it all away. But if you build for a marathon or to be a Master Sommelier, and you’ve studied daily, weekly, monthly? Nobody gets to wash that away.”
Beginning his fifth decade of running marathons and with that Master Sommelier title, I suspect that Bobby Stuckey’s advice is worth following.
Thanks for reading
Raz x
This is really interesting, thanks Raz.
I know he mentioned not drinking to excess/intimated relaxing in the evening, but did he say what his method to relax was?
Appreciate running is part of that, but training for marathons is also hard (which is part of the point of course!)… is downtime part of his schedule?
Great interview. Much of what you wrote/Bobby said about running helping to manage executive dysfunction resonates with me. Thank you!