Joe Young: An Inspiration to Run for Charity

If Joe Young could work out three times a day, the least I could do was run three times a week and finish a road race — a long-time goal he helped me complete.

When I first read about Joe Young working out three times a day, I was impressed enough to follow him on Twitter.

After finding him there, I came across several tweets containing videos of his early-morning workouts. Each was emblazoned with the time his workout began.

I was caught off-guard by the in-your-face quality of the videos, but I was attracted to the enthusiasm.

Around the same time that I first stumbled upon Young’s videos, I saw a flyer at a local Starbucks for a road race. The race was to support Vigo County CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates), an organization that provides volunteers to serve as advocates for abused and neglected children.

The race was only a 3K, which is roughly 1.8 miles. Although it had been years since I had run a road race, I had been running a mile on occasion lately, so I figured that I could gradually add some distance each time I ran.

The problem was that I always seem to find a reason not to take the time to run.

Then one day when my alarm went off at 6 a.m. …

… it triggered one of Young’s Twitter videos to go off in my head. Instead of lying in bed listening to songs I hear almost every morning, I decided to get up and run.

I eventually got to the point where I could run the distance of the race. However, there were still doubts that crept in my head. The race course had a small, steep hill that I would have to climb twice. Since I hadn’t done any hill work in a long time, I wasn’t sure how I would hold up running a hill. The last time I tried running one, it didn’t go well.

One morning, I decided to give hill running a shot. I was just going to go out for a short run and include a hill that is a few blocks away from my house. To my pleasant surprise, I got up the hill without any difficulty, and I decided to run further than I had planned originally. So I felt fairly confident on the day of the race that all would go fairly well.

It didn’t.

While I was correct about the hill being part of the race course, the course ran in the opposite direction than I thought it would. I thought the runners would go up the hill on the north side of the park, and there would be a six-block decline heading south, and then the runners would go down the hill on the south side of the park. Instead, the runners went up the hill form the south side of the park and then had to continue along a six block incline until going down the hill on the north side of the park.

I survived one lap OK, but at the start of the second lap, I developed a sudden headache along with feeling overheated, and I almost lost my balance. I was mad at Young for being an inspiration to do something that was going badly.

But his Twitter videos were still going through my head …

… and I ended up finishing the race with a combination of walking and running.

While my time of 25:40 was well above the 18:00 goal I had set for myself, I did manage to get a top 100 finisher medal.

After I got over the disappointment of performing poorly, I was glad that I went out and did something that I wanted to do for quite some time. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have bumped into a long-time friend I hadn’t seen for years. My daughter was proud of me as well, and making her proud puts a smile on her face.

I also plan to run another — shorter — race, in the near future.