PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Dr. Joshua Buch is celebrating his 85th birthday in a way like no else his age: He’s running the Masters 100-meter dash in the Penn Relays this weekend.
Listen to the full interview with Dr. Joshua Buch in the player below:
Buch, a longtime finance professor at LaSalle University, only started running eight years ago, at the ample age of 77. The last time he ran the 100-meter dash before that was in his high school days, back in 1954.
“I actually grew up in Israel,” said Buch, who now lives in Blue Bell. “I lived a mile from the Mediterranean. Next door to me lived my high school gym teacher, and he used to knock on my door and wake me at 5:30 in the morning. We used to run barefoot on sand dunes to the beach. I used to run in those days a lot.”
He’s been an avid tennis player for about 20 years now. One day, as he and others were switching court, a player said to him, “I’ve never seen anybody run like you. … You should go to the Penn Relays.”
One of the highest participating age groups was 75-year-olds.
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The La Salle track and field coach gave Buch a pair of sneakers, timed him on the campus track, and he was on his way to the Penn Relays. In fact, he won his heat in 2015.
“I was looking around and on the right nobody was there, and I told myself, ‘Oh my God, I can win this thing,’ ” he recalled.
One of the most memorable moments for Buch was the cheering from the crowd.
“I never understood what the home-field advantage is,” he said. “The energy, the screaming — it’s really unbelievable. And that’s what I’m looking forward to, not so much the running itself, but the energy there. I don’t know how to express it, it's like you can cut the air almost.”
Related podcast: The Penn Relays are back this year after a pandemic hiatus:
