One of our fully fledged YMCA’ers Vic Heaney will be 80 in July this year! In February 2020, Vic won a bronze medal at the English Indoor Rowing Championships at the Manchester Velodrome, after 6 weeks of training at his beloved YMCA Lytham.
Last December,Vic, who is partially sighted decided on an 80th birthday challenge. Being passionate about exercise, fitness and rowing, Vic decided he would enter the British Indoor Rowing Championships in December 2020 in the over-80 age category.
Vic knuckled down to start his rowing training at YMCA Lytham until he noticed that the English Championships were due to take place on February 2nd 2020 and sent off an entry form so that he could see what to expect in later in the year – A bronze medal was the result – An amazing achievement! Now the serious training starts in preparation for the big one at the end of the year.
Vic is no stranger to setting himself some challenges. For his 70th birthday challenge, Vic walked from his then home in the French Pyrenees to the house in Blackpool where he was born in aid of Pancreatic Cancer Care UK! This took Vic 70 days and he arrived at the house on his 70th birthday. This was the equivalent to two-thirds of a marathon every day for the 70 days! Wow!
His intensive training regime meant that during the whole project Vic walked 9,000 miles. Vic has given over 100 dynamic talks about his walk project and raised over £27k so far for Pancreatic Cancer Care UK. BBC coverage of this amazing achievement can be seen below. Vic has also written a book about his incredible adventure “Vic’s Big Walk”- with proceeds going to the charity. The electronic version is available from Amazon Kindle, Kobo and iBookstore.
