When legendary LSU coach Dale Brown challenged his friend to 365 consecutive days of working out, Ryan Blair had to stop and think. They were in Hollywood, sitting at a table in Katsuya that evening. Brown, turning 73-years-old in a week, pressed Ryan to accept his challenge again and again. It would be his last.

This was no joke tossed out over sushi—this was the infamous Dale Brown Challenge. A commitment so impossible to honor, that everyone but Dale Brown had failed the challenge to this date.

Ryan said, his answer was no.

“I have a personal rule not to accept challenges that I can’t win,” said Blair. “And I know consistency has been my biggest weakness.”  

That didn’t stop Coach Brown, who continued to needle Ryan Blair to accept the challenge. He sensed something in the young entrepreneur. “Ryan was chosen because I love his competitive heart,” Dale Brown said. “I knew one of these days he’d accept the challenge.”
 
This very same persistence has given Dale Brown the advantage over the half dozen or so challengers he’s taken on over the years. It was 1972, Brown’s first year at LSU, when the challenge was officially created.

“I had this phenomenal assistant coach at the time,” Brown said. “He was a body builder. You know…he looked like superman. One day we were working out together, and he was making a lot of noises. So I was teasing him about it, and he got defensive about his workout style.”

“He said, you can’t beat me! So I said, alright, I am going to challenge you to 365 consecutive days. You must work out every day, no excuses—travel, injury, sickness, whatever. One hour of weights and one mile a day.”

Four months into the challenge, basketball season had ended, but both competitors were going strong. Brown had accepted an invitation to Reykjavik, Iceland to give a speech. That night the plane touched down at 11pm in the middle of a sleet storm. The coach sat up reading until 1am, waiting for it to end. It didn’t.

“So I go outside and I do it,” he said. “I run my mile, and I almost hyperventilate. I got frost up my nose, it was miserable. When I laid in bed shivering, I thought—man, that was awful! I hope Jack is working out too.”

When Brown got back to the states, he called his competitor to ask how he was doing. From the other end of the phone line came a telltale pause. In that instant Dale knew, he’d dropped out. The assistant coach admitted he had injured his back and taken a day off. The challenge was over, and Dale Brown had won.

But victory wasn’t enough, so he decided to finish the challenge. Brown worked out every day for the entire year.

Dale Brown’s next big challenge didn’t come until after he had retired from coaching, some 30 years later. In 1995 a former player of Brown’s accepted the challenge. It ended in a mutual concession. Then there were two film producers that stepped up to the challenge. Both failed.

The coach decided he had one last challenge left in him. His sights were set on Ryan Blair, a man whom he met while reuniting with a mutual friend in 2007. Blair, who had facilitated the contact between the two lost friends on his social networking website Pathconnect, flew Dale Brown out to meet them both at his company ViSalus Sciences yearly event in San Diego.

“That night Dale gave a speech that knocked me out,” Ryan Blair said. “I made a video out of it and sent it to all my friends and family members as a Christmas gift that year.”

The next day Coach Brown contacted him to get an original copy of the video, and they had been friends ever since. Blair liked Dale Brown’s speaking style, and invited him to present regularly at his company’s events.

Brown saw another chance to deliver his challenge. He was booked to speak at the Vitality event in October 2008 for ViSalus; he made sure he took full advantage of his time on stage.

“I saw Ryan sitting in the front row,” Brown said mischievously. “I started saying that I really liked Ryan as a leader, the creativity he’s shown and the challenge. Then I said—maybe some day this great leader of yours will accept a challenge of mine.”

“I tell you, I saw Ryan come up in his chair! He couldn’t wait to get backstage.”

The two met behind the curtain, and after a volley of heated smack talk, Ryan accepted Dale Brown’s challenge on the spot. Persistency had paid off for the coach, but would it be enough to overcome Ryan Blair’s lifelong struggle to consistently take care of his health?

Fast forward to April 2009. Ryan Blair is now 180 days into the competition. Half way there, and his only hope is that he’ll tie. For him, the consequences of failure are greater than the pleasure of taking a day off. This April he found himself sprinting a thousand laps from wall to wall in a hospital room the day after his son was born.

“So far I’ve had to work out with food poisoning, on the road, in hotel rooms. I ran through Christmas. In Oklahoma, Michigan, Europe,” he said. “It’s really a lesson in consistency and ingenuity.”  

Blair is focusing on the victory. The day the competition ends, Dale brown, Shaquille O’Neal’s mentor and hall of fame coach, has to write a letter to his last challenger. The letter will read: “Ryan is the greatest competitor I’ve faced in the history of my career.”

 “I’ll have it framed. Get it engraved on a coffee mug and some t-shirts,” Blair joked. “That’ll be all the celebration I’ll need.”

 “But no matter what, I’ll be a better man for it when I’m done.”