Who The Heck is TudeFitness? My name is Bob Blickenderfer and I started and run the Tude Fitness Company. Here I am completing the Cleveland Marathon in May 0f 1998. The Cleveland race is a marathon and 10K. I ran the 10K 3 times previously and this was my first attempt at the marathon. The Tweety bird shirt was so my wife and family could find me. I have a wife and a daughter. I have a 2 year degree from Kent State University. My major was in Physical Education with a minor in Health. Exercise has always been a passion with me. I've read and studied all I could about the fitness and exercise field. I was always involved in sports, and coached Little League for a year, my daughter's softball team for 5 years and another girls softball team for another couple years, pee wee football for a year and junior high football for a year. Getting the kids in shape was a big part of that coaching experience. In 1995 I began to run. It started out as helping my daughter lose weight. When she got an afternoon job and we could no longer exercise together, I continued running. I bumped into a friend of mine who was also a runner, and he suggested I begin entering races for the fun and challenge. I took him up on it and a year later ran my first race, a 10K, in Cleveland. Since then I've run in over 20 races, including a marathon. There's no chance of winning. We run to attempt to beat our previous best time. It gives a goal and helps get me out the door to the track at the park on days I don't feel like running. People have always come to me for exercise advice and I've always been setting up programs for them to follow, along with lending encouragement. Thus Tude Fitness was started. I started providing exercise advice online in 1996, and it caught on. Questions came in and the amount of exercise information grew. I began to write about my marathon training experience and received lots of nice comments, along with some training advice from many marathoners. Tude Fitness has been linked to exercise sites in the U.K., Italy and all over the world. It continues to grow. A free exercise plan and a free newsletter has brought me a large list of readers. People seem to really like the animations and cartoons. This exercise site is by no means a money making venture, but I have teamed with some companies to offer products to my readers. I try to investigate these companies as best I can before adding their products to my site and, in return, receive a small profit when anyone makes a purchase following a link from my site. The customers pay no more than they would buying directly from that site and most make certain they enter those sites from Tude Fitness if they buy in the future. I appreciate the courtesy from my readers, as that, along with the very nice comments, shows that this website is appreciated. I would like to thank all you who have supported this site in the past. I hope to grow this site even more in 1999 and have many other ideas I think all you readers might appreciate. Comments are always welcome. By the way, on the background picture on the opening page, I'm the guy in the light sweatshirt. This was from a picture a local newspaper took of us when we were training for the marathon. Copyright (c) Bob Blick