Meet Stanislaus County’s newest track and field record holder, Hughson’s Joe Lighthall
Joseph “Joe” Lighthall doesn’t know when he is going to set a new personal record.
The Hughson High track and field athlete goes into every race with the same mindset and it’s worked so far.
In his senior year, Lighthall has worked his way into the conversation as one of the best 400- and 800-meter runners in Northern California and the state.
His approach is simple.
“Before I go in every race, I’m trying to get a PR, and I really don’t know until I’ve seen the time after the race,” Lighthall said. “It takes like a minute for some races and it’s an awful minute trying to figure out if I did PR. I’ll have someone with a stopwatch tell me what my unofficial time was, so I can kind of guess … but it’s always that nerve-racking minute where I’m just waiting for the time to roll in.”
When those times have rolled in this season, Lighthall and Hughson coach Joel Bernard rarely have been disappointed.
Entering the postseason, Lighthall has set personal records at 200, 400, 800 and 3,200 meters and set a season record at 1,600 meters.
“When I run my PR, it’s always a super cool moment and I’m like, ‘Bang! Let’s go!’” Lighthall said. “It’s a ton of fun to be able to run PRs.
“Setting PRs really makes me feel like I’m contributing to the team. It’s just really cool because I work a ton of hours going into those meets. And then to finally have all that work come together, it’s really nice.”
He will participate in the 200-, 400-, 800- and 4x400-meter championships on the final day of the Division V meet Thursday during the Sac-Joaquin Section Divisionals happening through May 12.
Lighthall enters Thursday’s Divisional championship with the sixth-best 400 meters time in California after running a personal record 47.85 at a Trans-Valley League Dual Meet with Escalon.
His personal record in his main event, the 800 meters, is 1:51.95 at the Sacramento Meet of Champions. For that event, it’s believed to be the fastest recorded time in Stanislaus County history.
According to records provided by StanCo Distance’s Scott Durham, the county’s 800-meter record stood for 63 years. Downey High alum and Olympian Ron Whitney set the previous county-best time of 1:52.0 in 1960.
A steady climb
Like many high school juniors and seniors, Lighthall’s career got off to a slow start because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
His freshman season ended after just a few weeks. As a sophomore, he participated in three sports in the spring, playing soccer and JV football while running track. He battled through a nagging injury to win the 800 at the Stanislaus County Meet with a season best 2:01.89.
“We had a practice where he did a really good track workout in the morning, and then I think he went and he lifted weights with a football team and then he went to soccer practice in the afternoon,” Bernard recalled. “Then the next day, he comes and he’s like, ‘Coach, my quad kind of hurts.’ That really hampered him the rest of that sophomore season.”
After recovering, Lighthall finally had a full off-season to train before his junior year, and the work showed immediately.
“He really started developing a lot of more aerobic power and general fitness,” Bernard said.” I still didn’t really realize where he was going to end up. I was thinking maybe junior year if he runs a 1:57 or a 1:56, we’re doing pretty good. He opened the year with 1:58 and I was like, ‘OK, well, we’re gonna go a lot faster.’”
Despite drastic improvement as a junior, Lighthall still was not where he wanted to be. He still was looking at Lincoln-Stockton senior Noah Pagaran, who took first place at the 2022 Distance Wars and 2022 Sacramento Meet of Champions. Lighthall finished just behind.
“Last season was a whole bunch of second places,” Lighthall said. “The entire season, I would race him basically everywhere I went. We would go to the same meets and he would beat me by almost nothing.”
Until last year’s Masters.
Lighthall took the 800 Masters title, finishing ahead of Pagaran and running a 1:54.25.
One of California’s best
Lighthall’s career will not end after high school. He accepted a scholarship offer to run at Brigham Young University.
“Before the season, my hopes were about where they are now,” Lighthall said. “I would get into BYU, I would break the county record for the 800. This is kind of about where my expectations have been. Now, they’re just a little higher for the rest of the season.”
He has continued to improve in his senior season while training for multiple different track and field events. Now is when his training gets specific. He will cut down on the events he participates in for the Masters and State Meets — he will compete at just 800 meters — in hopes of winning the event and recording time of under 1:50.
After the high school season, he hopes to qualify for the U20 Pan America Track and Field Championships, which are held in November in Chile. Qualifying is in Oregon in July.
Bernard said Lighthall is just the second boys Division I track and field athlete he has coached in his 25 years at Hughson and admits it is “pretty cool.” He believes the key to Lighthall’s success is his attitude toward training. He works out a lot with his teammates, trains heavily with fellow senior and relay teammate Nathan Horton and is rarely in a bad mood.
“He has fun with it,” Bernard said. “When you’re so intense and so focused or nervous, it makes going for a long time almost unbearable. You can do that for a couple of meets and then your mental energy is drained after all of that. He doesn’t get too worked up and I think that’s allowed him to just really not get too worried about any one race.”
But that does not mean he’s slacking.
“Of all of the kids that I’ve ever had run for me,” Bernard said, “he’s probably in the top three — if not number one — of taking everything as seriously as possible.
“There’s that window of when you want to run your best races and so you don’t want to do a lot of specific stuff early and run these great races in March or April, because then how are you going to maintain that for four months?” Bernard said. “Everything is geared towards being ready to run fast from the end of May through early July. That’s the goal.”
This story was originally published May 10, 2023 at 1:24 PM.
