The number shows up on a campus track like a quiet ritual: 44 reps, 44 lengths, 44 of something that makes lungs burn and legs shake. For students hosting Phi-athlon, the workout is a way to honor lou gehrig while raising money for ALS research and family support through the Live Like Lou Foundation.
What is Phi-athlon, and why does it use the number 44 tied to Lou Gehrig?
Phi-athlon is a cause-based fitness event created for Phi Delta Theta chapters to run at a campus gym or an outdoor track. The idea is to give students a ready-to-use, scalable format for a philanthropy event that rallies a campus around ALS awareness and fundraising.
Within the event, the number 44 is used to honor Lou Gehrig and the legacy that continues to inspire Phi Delta Theta’s commitment to ALS awareness and research. Participants register through an online event page, fundraise individually, and complete the workout in a competitive, social setting meant to keep the mission visible: leaving ALS “better than we found it. ”
The initiative comes as Phi Delta Theta chapters continue their long-running support of the Live Like Lou Foundation. The fraternity’s members raised $2. 3 million for ALS research and family support during the 2023–25 biennium, and the organization has stated it hopes to leave an even bigger impact in the 2025–27 biennium.
How are students and nonprofits turning workouts into measurable support for ALS?
Phi-athlon is designed to make hosting a philanthropy event more manageable than many traditional formats. It offers built-in resources and support, including marketing materials, registration tools, and event guidance. That structure matters for chapters that do not already have an annual philanthropy event, and for chapters that want a new way to engage with the broader campus community.
Several chapters and members have already begun hosting Phi-athlons, and the framework is meant to be simple to organize and flexible in scale. The pitch is direct: every mile run and every rep completed helps advance the mission to end ALS. There is also an internal incentive: brothers who raise $444 or more through Phi-athlon fundraising move a step closer to the fraternity’s Triple Crown recognition.
At ground level, the event’s premise is that effort can be shared and witnessed—one person pushing through a workout becomes a small public act that invites others to join. In that sense, the campus setting becomes part of the message: ALS is not an abstract issue reserved for medical spaces; it is a cause that can be carried by communities that are still forming their habits of giving and attention.
What does “getting your voice back” look like for people living with ALS?
In Pittsburgh, the fight to stay heard is taking a different form—less sweat and more software. David Betts, who lives in Mt. Washington with his wife, Anne, received an ALS diagnosis two years ago at age 55. With what he described as a consultant’s instinct to solve problems, Betts took aim at something that bothered him: assistive tools and apps he encountered sounded “too robotic. ”
With no coding experience, Betts created “Talk to Me, Goose!, ” an AI-powered text-to-speech app that uses voice cloning so people with speech loss can sound more like themselves again. He built it quickly and then expanded it across Windows, Android, and iOS. The project is personal, but its ambition extends beyond one household in Mt. Washington.
Betts is partnering with the nonprofit Live Like Lou to make the app free for people living with ALS, and also for people dealing with Parkinson’s, strokes, and head and neck cancer. He has framed the need broadly, pointing to a much larger global population of people living with speech-limiting conditions who could benefit from assistive technology but lack access.
For users, the promise is not only speech but continuity. The app allows someone to create a voice clone with as little as 45 seconds of audio. It also includes a feature that lets people create and tell bedtime stories in their own voice—an idea that came from a message about a 41-year-old father living with ALS who could no longer read to his young children. Betts described hearing that the children sat listening closely, and that the youngest asked for the father to tell the story “100, 100 times forever. ”
The app has gained attention in settings ranging from bedtime routines to the Austrian Parliament, and it won the Zero Award for reducing barriers for people living with disabilities.
Where do these efforts meet: community fundraising and personal technology?
Phi-athlon and Betts’ app operate in different places—one in gyms and on tracks, the other on phones and computers—but both are attempts to lower the barrier between intention and action. The student who signs up to do a cause-based workout is choosing an entry point that feels doable and communal. The person losing speech is choosing an entry point that is intimate and urgent: to keep sounding like themselves, to keep talking to the people who know them best.
Both efforts also intersect through Live Like Lou, the nonprofit Betts is partnering with and the foundation supported by Phi Delta Theta’s fundraising. In that connection, the “big story” becomes clearer: assistance for ALS does not arrive in one form. It can arrive as money raised by young adults learning how to organize for a cause, and it can arrive as a tool built by someone newly diagnosed who refuses to accept that the available options are “far less than what’s possible. ”
And behind the motivations, there are relationships. Betts speaks of his wife, Anne, and of a voice from his past—his father’s words urging him to “be your best, do your best. ” On campus, the bonds are fraternal, shaped by chapters working together to host events and to bring other students into a shared mission. Both settings reveal the same truth: disease can isolate, but response can be designed to reconnect.
What happens next for people who want to help?
Phi Delta Theta has positioned Phi-athlon as a growing movement that more campuses can adopt, and it has encouraged participation or support where events are hosted. Live Like Lou is also part of the next chapter in Betts’ project, with the partnership aimed at making “Talk to Me, Goose!” free to people living with ALS and other conditions that limit speech.
At the end of the day, the details matter: a registration page, a set of marketing materials, 45 seconds of audio, a bedtime story recreated in a familiar voice. Each is a practical mechanism for something bigger—sustained attention and usable help. In that practical space, lou gehrig remains more than a name: a point of reference for why people keep building, fundraising, and refusing to settle.
