For Jannie Cox, fitness is a full-time job.
A founder of Meet Me Concepts and CEO of the Carondelet Foundation until she retired in 2009, Cox likens exercising in retirement to waking up for work .
“On Monday morning, you don’t decide whether you’re going to work or not depending on how you feel,” Cox, 69, says. “You go to work because you have a job.”
She got the idea from Chris Crowley’s book, “Younger Next Year.” In retirement, physical fitness is a priority.
And so she gets up and moves.
At least three days a week, she rides her bike — on Tuesdays, up Mount Lemmon. On Wednesdays, she hikes. The rest of the time, she walks a mile from her home to the gym at Tucson Medical Center.
“There’s rarely a day that I don’t exercise,” she says.
But it wasn’t enough for Cox to personally live an active lifestyle after reading Crowley’s book. And it didn’t matter that fitness events throughout Tucson have her fingerprints on them.
Inspired, she and her husband started the online community Rock the Ages to coordinate fitness activities for others 50 and older.
Because that’s what she does. She wants Tucson to move.
Busy MORNINGS
Cox has her mother to thank for her love of fitness.
Well, maybe.
In her teen years, her mom would drop her off at a park, where Cox would spend the day playing tennis.
“I would come home tired and happy, and I can’t say for sure that I went there for the tennis — it was more the boys,” Cox says, laughing. “But what came out of it was this really energized feeling I got from getting tired from doing something physical, so I have done that most of my life.”
Cox attended the James Ward Thorne School of Nursing in Chicago (now closed, the school was affiliated with Northwestern University). After coming to Tucson in 1971, she worked part time in labor and delivery at the University Medical Center — now Banner-University Medical Center Tucson — for about a year.
She started at Carondelet in 1984 as the director of marketing, and within three years was the CEO of the foundation.
Even as a professional — fundraising, putting funding toward community organizations and engaging the Legislature on issues of public health care — Cox made time for personal fitness.
“She worked tirelessly,” says Sally Jeffcoat, who at the time was CEO of Caron-delet Healthcare Network and Cox’s boss. “She was up at 4:30 a.m. to run and walk and exercise. She had a StairMaster in her office.”
Cox remembers leading a 5:30 a.m. bike ride in the summers for six to eight people.
The rest of the week, she hit the gym by 4:40 a.m. to work out, walk a 3-mile loop with friends and then head home to take her dogs on a 1-mile walk.
She made it to work by 7:30.
GET MOVING TUCSON
To celebrate Carondelet Health Network’s 125th anniversary in 2005, Cox decided to organize a 10-mile run down Broadway from St. Joseph’s Hospital at Wilmot Road to St. Mary’s Hospital on St. Mary’s Road.
She was told it couldn’t be done.
Instead of quitting, Cox worked with Randy Accetta, a founder of Run Tucson and now a co-founder of Meet Me Concepts, to develop a run open to individuals of all fitness levels. He already had a similar race planned.
“The vision she gave me was to get in the way,” Accetta says. “Let people see. Let them ask questions.”
Accetta, who writes an occasional running column for the Arizona Daily Star, still organizes the event, which is now sponsored by Tucson Medical Center.
“It was an amazing feat to pull this off, closing roads and working with the police,” says Debbie Rich, who worked with Cox at Carondelet as an executive of public relations and marketing. “She is a community champion for health and wellness and outdoor activity.”
Rich, now CEO of the Girl Scouts of Southern Arizona, still looks to Cox as a mentor and inspiration for keeping girls active and engaged in the community.
And she’s not the only one.
Richard DeBernardis, founder and executive director of El Tour de Tucson and president of Perimeter Bicycling Association of America Inc., raves about Cox.
And not because she has ridden in El Tour almost 20 times.
“I went to her when I couldn’t find a title sponsor (for El Tour) back in 1991,” DeBernardis says. “She said, ‘If I help you find the title sponsor, will you let Caron-delet name the primary beneficiary?’”
He agreed, not anticipating such fierce devotion from Cox.
“I remember when we were looking for that title sponsor, she brought me into a group of businessmen. … And I remember she said to them, and I hardly knew her, she said, ‘Look, this man has something for this community that I think is so great that you have to listen to him, and you have to get behind him,’” DeBernardis says. “She was the one that stood behind me all those years.”
Before he knew it, Intergroup Healthcare Corp. had agreed to sponsor El Tour de Tucson for three years. For two of the three, Carondelet Rehabilitation Services was the benefiting agency. The third year, as a founding member of the organization, Cox picked Tu Nidito Children and Family Services, which continued to be the primary beneficiary of El Tour de Tucson through 2013.
“Her desire is to help another person,” DeBernardis says. “It’s not about her. She has an intrinsic desire and passion where she wants to help people achieve a physical state of health and mental state of health.”
Cox has always served in community organizations — she is now on the board of Rio Nuevo and on the advisory board of BBVA Compass Bank. In her spare time, she volunteers in the Old Fort Lowell Live-At-Home Program, helping seniors stay mobile.
So when DeBernardis learned of Cox’s retirement from Carondelet, he grieved the loss of someone “well-networked in the health and wellness community in Tucson.”
He had no idea what was coming.
MEET ME AT THE
MEAT DEPARtMENT
In December 2008, Cox and her husband, David Syverson, were driving down one of the main streets of Colorado Springs on a dark, cold night.
“That terrible, December night, I saw hundreds of people going down the sidewalk in pitch dark,” Cox said.
They were the Jack Quinn’s runners, Syverson told her, named for a nearby pub. They met every week.
By April 2009, Cox, Syverson and Accetta had transplanted the idea to Tucson through Meet Me at Maynards, a Monday evening walk or run through the downtown area.
About 200 people gathered on that first Monday — every relative, friend and acquaintance was on order to make an appearance, Cox quips. She wanted to draw a crowd.
And it worked.
Meet Me at Maynards can attract up to 700 people on a good night, and the budget has exploded from about $1,500 for T-shirts to $30,000 every year to pay for insurance, live music by the Determined Luddites and awards for recurring walkers, to name a few expenses.
Every year, Cox approaches sponsors — including the Star — and each month she collects gift cards from restaurants for a raffle.
On Mondays, she’s downtown, and on Wednesdays, she heads to the Foothills for the newer Meet Me at La Encantada, which she started with the help of Accetta four years ago this month. Though smaller, that event attracts a dedicated group of about 100.
“She has harnessed the power of the volunteer, to empower people to be part of the community,” Accetta says, noting her early involvement with Greater Tucson Leadership. Cox was also the 1985 Woman of the Year.
“In her case, it’s a sense of, ‘Let’s get people involved. Let’s get moving. Meet me,’” he says.
Meet Me Concepts has also started walks in Phoenix and Boise — that one thanks to Cox’s former boss Jeffcoat, who worked there for a time.
“I think I was just born this way,” Cox says. “I always have to have a project.”
She attributes that to her father, who, during her childhood, set an example of volunteerism through his work with the Boy Scouts of America and United Way.
Cox would like to see Meet Me Concepts grow, but replicating it in other cities would require help.
“I can network around Tucson, but if you sent me to San Diego, I would just be another 70-year-old woman,” she says. “It would mean finding the right people to expand.”
But it’s worth it. This is no job. She calls it a gift.
She remembers one instance in the meat department at a grocery store.
“I hear this voice behind me saying, ‘Aren’t you the Maynards lady?’” Cox says. A “yes” earned her a hug.
“She said, ‘I love you. My kids and my grandkids and my husband and I meet down there every Monday night and walk together, and that would never have happened if it weren’t for you,’” Cox recalls. “I came home and told my husband, and I was all aflutter.
“That’s the nicest thing to know that you’re doing something that means so much to people.”
