“When I was asked about this job, I had a real sense in my bones what it should be and how it should be able to talk to all the different runners out there, because I felt personally that I had been all of those runners,” says Willey.

He knew where the magazine was failing readers because it had failed him.

“I had subscribed but let my subscription lapse. I didn’t feel it was talking to me anymore because I wasn’t a really serious runner. So I had a pretty deep personal connection to the magazine and a clear sense of the direction to take it where it wouldn’t have lost me as a subscriber.”

Willey set about to change Runner’s World. That led to a redesign four years ago and a rethinking of how to better serve and attract readers from all across the running spectrum.

It appears to be working. Runner’s World now has the best metrics in its 41-year history, says Willey, with a paid circulation of about 640,000, which includes nearly 100,000 newsstand sales each month. The magazine has drawn a surprisingly large number of women readers, especially for a sports title--just about half. Willey estimates the average age at 38 or 39.

“We have emphasized things like great storytelling, design and photography because these are things readers really appreciate, and they’re the things you can’t get online,” says Willey.

But Willey has also built up the magazine's web site, Runnersworld.com, which now attracts some million unique visitors each month and was recently nominated for a National Magazine Award for general excellence online .

Athletic magazines, like pregnancy or parenting titles, typically attract people at different phases of a cycle. There will always be new readers looking for tips on choosing the right shoe, but the difficulty lies in covering the basics without turning off subscribers who have read it all before.

“We realize that you can’t be everything to everybody all the time but I do think that over the course of an issue and certainly over the course of a year, the magazine can feel as if it speaks to all runners,” said Willey.

As part of this strategy, Willey tries to stock each issue with compelling narratives that use running as a jumping-off point for larger themes: articles on political strife in Kenya, where many top runners live, for example, or a dissection of the disarray at last year’s Chicago marathon, where one runner died in the heat.

“Even if in every issue we’re telling our readers about training or nutrition, what makes one issue really feel different from the one before or after is the storytelling,” said Willey. “We’ve been able to live in a vertical space but in terms of feature writing we think of ourselves as a general interest magazine.”

Willey’s previous experience includes not only Men’s Journal but also the highly vertical world of trade publications. After graduating from Williams College and Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, he took a job with a publisher of business journals.

“I really wanted to work for Men’s Journal or Sports Illustrated—those were my dream jobs,” says Willey. “After a couple of years, having given up, I went home for Christmas all depressed and I got a call the next day from Men’s Journal offering me an assistant editor job.” He worked for five different editors before getting the top post himself, and he says of his years there that it was an ideal apprenticeship for Runner's World.

He’s still something of an apprentice at the magazine, at least when it comes to training for marathons. Several of his staff qualified for this month’s Boston Marathon, but despite his attempts to win a place Willey will be on the sidelines for the fifth year in a row. With a wife and two small children at home, he has to fit in most of his running during the workday. “I would say a good three days a week I get out for a run at lunch, and a lot of the staff do the same.”

It's for the workout, of course, but also to stay connected with the sport and the readers it attracts, people much like himself.