Following a departure from an audio-visual company reeling from its inability to finish a new product for which they never completed the software, I engaged in full-time caregiving for my wife as she sank into another recurrence of the ovarian cancer that spread through her body since its first inception in 2005. We’d made it all the way to 2010, passing one of the “life expectancy” hallmarks of five years listed on nearly every ovarian cancer description on the Internet.
And yes, it is a bad strategy to self-diagnose or take anything on the Internet as stock truth. Yet that stuff still trickles back to you one way or another. By 2010 we’d been through multiple surgeries and more chemotherapy treatments than we cared to count. I attended nearly every one of those sessions. She’d park herself in a chair and nurses would tap on her arms to find workable veins. Then came the fluids followed by different sorts of poison chemicals designed to kill the fastest-growing cells in the body. Those were typically cancer cells, identifiable on PET or CAT scans by hot spots or growths. Sometimes an actual tumor would show up. Then our gynecological oncologist would dive into her abdomen or slice a bit off her liver to fight the most obvious and aggressive regions of cancer in her body.
She was perpetually tired and sick during treatments, often experiencing medical side effects as well. Rashes and peeling skin. Chemical burns and reddened ports. The vexations never ended. When treatments ended her hands and feet were still numb from neuropathy. Her hair fell out and grew back, fell out and grew back again. Then it stopped growing back altogether. Toward the end of her journey, she wore wigs that were often itchy and hot. But while she could, she made the best of the hair she had.
One summer when she felt half decent during a remission period, we took off on a trip with our daughter to visit Niagara Falls and tour wine country in the Finger Lakes of Upstate New York. That first evening, hotels were all booked in Seneca Falls where we’d planned to stay. We didn’t book ahead as our trip itinerary was flexible and we debated how long we should stay in Niagara after doing some touristy things on both sides of the falls. Linda wanted to stay longer but my daughter and were somehow eager to move for reasons I cannot recall. That afternoon, we drove west to Seneca Falls where the hotels were all filled by Upstate New York vacationers. That meant we had to move on to Auburn, where the only available room at a budget chain hotel had a single Queen-sized bed, and the room stank of cigarette smoke. I slept on the floor.
The next day we down Cayuga Lake toward Cornell and Ithaca, we booked a hotel room early and traveled out to wineries. The sun was high in the sky and the air was bright, but the summer air was thick with humidity, and hiding in the shade felt no cooler. At one of those wineries in the hills, I took a photo of my wife and daughter standing together in a field of sunflowers. It was one of those moments when mother and daughter felt bonded. That’s sometimes hard to find when young women are marching through their teenage years and mothers often don’t want to admit where they’d been and what they’d done at that same age. The fear of truth often keeps us apart, yet it’s the one thing most relationships crave. But it’s hard. For all of us.
I was born in Seneca Falls. My father was born in Cortland. He attended Cornell University in Ithaca, where in 1976 I studied at the Laboratory of Ornithology. My father had his stroke in Seneca Falls in 2003, and was taken to the Syracuse hospital but my mother was sent to Rochester and had to drive east to find dad. I flew out after months of hospital stay to fly him home from Syracuse in his wheelchair with my mother and brother in tow.
On that first day in the Finger Lakes, we discovered that the wine from that region was generally sweet. In the heat of summer, it was somewhat hard to swallow. My wife and I both liked dry wines, and there were none to be found. In her post-chemo state, those sweet wines tasted like bad candy, but she drank them anyway. We were making the best of it.
That felt about right because life itself wasn’t that sweet at the time. Gripped with a conflicted sense of conscience about my work struggles and more, I struggled with impatience during the early phases of that trip. We’d had a great visit with my younger brother and his family along the way in Ohio, sharing dinners and playing in their pool with his two girls. But after that, my sense of accumulated anxiety set in, a state compounded by the vagaries of ADHD. That angst was the result of long-term caregiving and financial struggles back home. I was also the prime caregiver for a father deeply compromised with apraxia and aphasia, both effects of his stroke. We could not talk directly about his needs, but I still called home daily to make sure his live-in helpers had everything he needed. I often felt pulled in many directions. Living in the moment was tough.
That first morning in Ithaca, I awoke early and was aching to get outside on a hike or something with my wife and daughter. Instead, my daughter just wanted to sleep in a little. Who could blame her? She was never an early riser and we’d bounced along for days. Plus, my wife was anchored next to the bed with her morning coffee and grapefruit. I stood in the doorway of our hotel room fussing about what to do, and snapped in anger, gathered up my gear, and went running in the damp morning air. I spent five miles regretting going on that trip at all. When I was done, and the anger subsided, I returned to the hotel room and apologized to my wife and daughter for my being an asshole. The hurt was still palpable. That’s one of the tarsnakes of life. It’s hard to take back the ache of words spoken harshly.
Heading south
Fortunately, that run cured the worst of my depressive mood and we agreed that the New York part of the trip should be over. “Let’s go down to visit my brother in Lancaster now,” I suggested. Off we went. Along the way, we stopped to visit one of my favorite aunts, one of my father’s sisters, in Binghamton. She was a writer by trade and we always had tons to talk about. My wife and daughter liked her manner and we shared a minty lemon tea on a shady porch for part of an afternoon.
My uncle sat down and shared a hilarious story about how he’d been carting away chipmunks from their yard that summer. He’d catch them in traps and dump them in a nearby forest. The ethics of that plan were not part of the discussion, as he’d been at it a long time and there were still too many chipmunks in the yard. One incident left me laughing the rest of that afternoon. “I caught one in a trap and was driving over to the woods when I felt something on my shoulder,” he chuckled. “I looked to the side and there was a chipmunk sitting right there,” he said, pointing to his right shoulder. “It somehow got out of the trap and I never caught it in the car. All I could do was park the car, open the door, and let it run out when we got there.” Something about that story released the humor hiding away in my soul. My spirits lifted further.
The decision to head south after the New York sojourn was therapeutic. We relaxed during the trip through the eastern mountains and arrived in the little town of Willow Street where I’d grown up going to elementary school through junior high. I had fond memories of our house at 1725 Willow Street Pike and pointed it out as we drove past on our way to my brother’s house south of town. To some degree, it felt like coming home.
Lancaster, Pennsylvania is always a place I’ll consider “home” thanks to our lives next to the Meadia Heights Golf Club, fishing in the nearby creeks and finding my first connection to the running world in gym class at Martin Meylin Junior High.
My brother’s house sat next to farmland on the east side of Willow Street. We grilled dinner and listened to crickets sing as we sat on the back lawn after dinner. His wife has a calm, intellectual manner about her and my brother wrapped my wife and daughter in studied conversation, his specialty. For years he invested in postage and cards and time, writing and sending her encouragement cards through all her treatments. He’d often find ugly cards on purpose to make her laugh, even sending particularly bad designs as “repeats” while branding them “classics.” He’d write wise or witty messages on the back of each card composed in the signatory angular handwriting that I’d always loved. To him, I’m forever grateful for the support and long-distance care that he provided to her. They’d sometimes share extended phone calls, catching up while drinking margaritas.
In many ways that trip east restored some hope for all of us. It made her survival seem possible during the middle stages of her cancer survivorship journey. That’s the right thing to do when facing life-threatening challenges. Immerse yourself in the moment and accept that nothing’s perfect in this world.
What follows is an expanded version of an essay I recently entered in the Writer’s Digest Personal Essays writing contest. It aligns with this serialized “life story” I’m writing here on We Run and Ride. This is a slightly expanded version of the 2000-word entry.
Turning in results with my first cross-country coach.
Unfinished business
I knew that I was fit enough to win at the starting line of a five-mile running race on a cool spring morning. My plan was to run a 5:00 first mile, then pick up the pace and see who could go with me. At exactly the mile marker, another runner turned to me and asked, “How fast are you going today?”
“Faster than you,” I answered, and took off at a 4:50 mile pace, leaving everyone behind. I won the race in 24:49.
That’s how we rolled in the early days of the modern running scene. Winning races meant dispensing with posers and pretenders. It was harsh but true. During high school cross country, I’d won several races in a row, prompting a local newspaper journalist to brand me a “junior sensation.” My coach sought to set the record straight in that article. “Cudworth’s a good runner,” he observed. “But not a sensational one.” He was right about that. I ran against a far superior runner the next meet who confronted me at the starting line and snarled, “Junior Sensation my ass…” He beat me by thirty seconds that day.
Running is merciless in many respects, but the results aren’t always cut and dried. I once traded leads with another cross-country runner until we crashed into the finish chute and knocked it down. He fell a few feet ahead of me and was declared the race winner. I’d pushed him to a home course record by more than twenty seconds but never beat him during our many other encounters. Years later we talked about our rivalry on a social media runner’s group. He admitted, “You were a force to be reckoned with.” Such are the little victories over time.
Racing against a rival I never beat in any races, though all of them were close.
My fascination with competitive running began with a twelve-minute time trial in seventh-grade gym class. Wearing a pair of Red Ball Jets sneakers and running on a cinder track, I covered 8 ¼ laps that day leaving most of my classmates behind. Our normally grumpy gym teacher acknowledged the quality of that effort. Yet when I got home that day and told my older brother about my time, he punched me in the shoulder calling me a liar. His doubt and insult burned inside me. I vowed never to let anyone question my running ability again. That was where my sense of unfinished business in the running world began.
The tests of will kept coming. In eighth grade, I expressed disinterest in playing badminton during gym class, so the P.E. teacher sentenced me to run laps around the lower and upper gymnasium for the entire hour. Rather than resist, I embraced that act of running rebellion. A friend pulled me aside after a full week of running laps and said, “You actually like this, don’t you?” I grinned and kept on running.
Heading into ninth grade, I was making plans to play football after winning the local Punt, Pass, and Kick contest. My father knew what was better for me in the long run. At age fourteen, I was a skinny kid at 5’10” and 128 pounds and might have been crushed playing football. On the morning of high school fall sports registration, my father walked me to the locker room door and warned, “You’re going out for cross country. If you come back out that door, I’ll break your neck.”
That was a life-changing decision in all the right ways. Forget all those pads and the smelly mess of the football locker room. All it took to make me happy was a pair of gum rubber flats, a set of running shorts, and a team tee shirt. I’d found a home in running and made the Varsity squad as a freshman that fall. The following year I was the top runner on a team that won its first-ever conference championship. Running became part of my identity.
At center with the cross-country cheerleaders at the new high school.
Our family moved ten miles east to a different town the next year. At the new school, I again led the cross-country team while making friends that would last a lifetime. Early in the season, we raced against a team that had a winning streak of sixty consecutive dual meets. Before the meet, I sat on the school bleachers immersed in a literary masterpiece titled The Peregrine by J.A. Baker. He wrote about chasing wild falcons on the English coast, and my mind took flight from worry. I won the race while our team snapped the opponent’s dual meet win streak.
At that stage in life, I’d begun taking my writing more seriously and worked for the school newspaper while publishing prose and poems in our writing club’s journal. Story ideas often popped into my head during runs. That brand of hard exercise also helped me deal with native anxiety and an undiagnosed case of attention-deficit disorder. The flipside is neurodivergent hyperfocus, the ability to concentrate on topics or tasks of interest for long periods of time. Many of the greatest accomplishments in human history are produced by individuals with this superpower. Hence the cliché of the “absent-minded professor.” The distracted genius. There’s honor in that.
The three books I’ve published since 2007. Two on theology, one a memoir of caregiving during cancer survivorship for my late wife.
Some of my earliest educational experiences stemmed from the seeming inability to pay attention or remain on task. One year we crafted construction paper ships to track our progress in the SRA Reading Program. The ships raced around the room with each book we read. I lost interest after a couple dull stories and my ship lagged. My mother showed up for a teacher conference and appealed to my competitive nature to get me reading again. “Don’t you want your ship to keep up with the other ones?” she asked. I looked at the ships ahead of mine and replied, “I’ll wait ‘til they come around again and race them from there.” That response symbolizes the nature of coping with unfinished business when attention deficit takes over. We pick up where we can and move on.
My busy brain was drawn in many directions as I pursued diverse interests in nature, sports, art, and writing through high school into college. I emerged with a Bachelor’s degree in Art and English, then drifted into an admissions counselor’s job as a means to stay close to a college girlfriend who still had a semester to complete before graduation.
During the lonely occupation of college admissions work.
I started admissions work that summer and that first month on the job required sitting in the office eight hours a day sending out recruitment cards to prospective students. My brain turned to mush. I responded by drawing cartoons to entertain myself and my colleagues. That restlessness did not amuse the Admissions Director. He pulled me aside and asked, “Is your head really in the game?” I answered that question emphatically, traveling 1500 miles a week during recruiting season to secure the 70-student quota from the city of Chicago and Illinois. During that year of travel, I stayed in the required low-budget motels and went for sullen runs to clear my head and keep my spirits up. When I complained to someone about the lack of time for running in my new job, their response was unsympathetic. “Welcome to the real world, kid.”
All that travel led to a breakup with the college girlfriend. Plus, her parents wanted her to marry a businessman, and I did not fit that mold in their eyes. Leaving the college world behind, I took a job in Chicago as a graphic designer for an investment firm. After a year the company transferred me to the Philadelphia office in a marketing department consolidation. By then, I’d fallen in love again and the thought of moving 750 miles east was another hard tug at the heart. “Oh boy, another long-distance romance,” I thought.
The college girlfriend and I later parted ways.
I rented an apartment twenty-five miles from downtown Philly in a small town called Paoli on the Conrail commuter line. There was a running shoe store a few blocks away that sponsored a racing team and I was invited to join. During the first training run, I took off running at 6:00 per mile pace like we did back in college. At two miles I was way ahead, so I turned around, ran back to greet them, and asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. What’s wrong with you?” one of them snarled. He told me, “Listen, we’re gonna run fifteen miles at 7:30-8:00 pace and do the last three miles faster. Can you deal with that?” I got the message and learned much more about proper distance training from a group rife with top-flight runners. On weekdays we gathered at the Villanova track for speed work. The rest of the week I filled with mid-tempo runs, yet still sometimes overtrained, coming down with colds and injuries. Once I achieved proper training balance my times dropped including my first sub-32:00 10K. Our team raced against other clubs almost every weekend. I’d found a new running reality.
The job in Philly ended when the marketing VP got fired and they cleaned house. I packed up and moved back to Chicago to share a Lincoln Park two-flat with a close friend and former cross-country teammate in high school and college. He was working day and night to complete his master’s degree. That meant I had tons of time to write, paint, and run. I joined a downtown track club and met some of Chicago’s best runners. The “Running Boom” was in full swing, and the Olympics were coming up in 1984. I made a journeyman’s vow to train full-time and complete the unfinished business of my running career.
Winning the Oak Park Frank Lloyd Wright 10K in 1983 (and ’84).
That fall I won the Oak Park Frank Lloyd Wright 10K ahead of 3,000 runners. A week later I won the Run for the Money 10K race in 31:52 on a course deemed “at least 200 meters long” by one of the locals. After winning more races that fall, a running store offered sponsorship for the coming year. They paid all race entry fees, provided free racing shoes, a full team running uniform, and deep discounts on training shoes. I felt like a fully sponsored runner. Running was my life for the time.
With that focus in place, I set out to surpass all my running PRs. During a May All-Comers meet at North Central College, I lined up with 25 other runners for a 5000-meter race that was delayed until midnight due to the number of competitors in all the other events. The hour was late, but the conditions were perfect: No wind and temps in the low 60s. The pace went out fast and I passed through two miles in just under 9:20 and held on to run a 14:45 5K, a PR by twenty-five seconds.
At the start of the Community Classic 10K where I won an dran a course record that stood for 20 years.
I lowered my 10K road PR to 31:10 that summer and won a high-target race in a course record time that stood for the next twenty years. All told, I competed twenty-four times that year, won eight races, or placed high while setting PRs at every distance from the mile up to the 25K. I should have run a marathon that weekend, completing those 15.5 miles at a 2:25 marathon pace. By November, my body was exhausted. I dropped out of the last race entered but felt no shame. I’d hit my limit.
I raced more in 1985 with some great results, but a January engagement and June wedding turned my attention to future goals. The woman I married had stuck with me through the Philly move and my Bohemian adventures in Chicago. She’d seen me win races and there was nothing to prove to her or anyone else. The unfinished business of my competitive running career was complete.
With my late wife Linda after winning the Community Classic 10K.
A few years later, I openly lamented in my mother’s presence that I was perhaps self-indulgent in spending those two years running full-time rather than advancing my career somehow. She turned to me and said, “I don’t think so. You burned brightly.”
I tried to burn brightly over decades of life’s ups and downs that included years of caregiving during my late wife’s cancer and my father’s stroke recovery. Those years of mapping out running goals, building training plans, surviving intense workouts, and handling race stress bolstered my caregiving abilities, which are all about discipline, patience, and focus. Upon learning about my wife’s cancer diagnosis, my high school running coach called to offer words of encouragement, telling me: “Your whole life has been a preparation for this.” He was right. I was her primary caregiver through eight years of ovarian cancer survivorship. She passed away in 2013. We all miss her.
Over time I chose to date again and met a woman through the dating app FitnessSingles.com. She’s a triathlete and we share many other interests as well. I am grateful for her low-drama approach to our relationship. She doesn’t focus on my neurodivergence as a problem, instead offering gentle reminders on the to-do list, allowing me to catch up with unfinished business before it becomes a problem. That reduces the pressure in my head.
During a golf round with Sue. We married six years ago.
To this day, the benefits of running counteract my native anxiety and attention deficit disorder. I have been better able to handle professional life and avocations, but not without costs along the way. My ADD has at times resulted in job losses and difficulties in personal or professional relationships. The challenge of living with neurodivergence is real. Yet in some respects, finding my limits in running helped me put other pursuits in perspective. I still compete in triathlons, but my life’s primary focus is on writing and art these days.
A famous runner named Rick Wolhuter once said, “Pressure is self-inflicted.” He used that mind awareness to manage competitive anxiety and set world records. That insight is a bit of wisdom we can all use in coping with fear and uncertainty in life. The ability to manage distractions and find priorities is important to all of us. In my case, tackling the unfinished business of competitive running was symbolic of other challenges I’d face in life. What felt like self-indulgence in my early years turned out to be a helpful exercise on the path to caregiving, career, and self-fulfillment. I’m grateful for that.
During the recession that began in 2008 and lasted well into 2010, the United States came to realize that there was a cost to the go-go nature of trying to run an economic engine on full gas and hot for too long. The Bush tax cuts along with the banking industry’s fun-and-games with toxic housing assets ran the economy straight into the ground. The unbudgeted costs of war in Iraq and Afghanistan were sucking the country dry as well. Eight years of daft governance under Bush resulted in healthcare insurance costs rising by 96%. In the face of all that worldly turmoil, our family situation and finances bumped along from month-to-month as I got dumped from the job at Dukane because the company lost revenue and had bills to pay for its failed capital venture into Student Response Systems.
Our friends stood by us through all that, helping out where they could, and that turned out to be almost everywhere. Most of all it was making our monthly mortgage and expenses that was tough during period when I was technically out of work and freelancing to make ends meet. My wife totaled up our bills one night and came up with an amount of $3500 to cover expenses over several weeks. That evening we said a little prayer and I put her to bed after a chemo treatment that day.
In the morning, I got up early to fix her oatmeal and heard a thump at the front door. Someone had dropped off a package. Often we received cards and food provided by people following our needs through the Lotsa Helping Hands online portal. That morning I picked up the envelope and opened it to find $3700 inside. We had not spoken a word to anyone about our bills, but that money covered them all.
Then I found work again in late winter. The challenge this time was the commute, as the agency where I landed a job was in Palatine thirty-plus miles away. That meant driving there early in the morning through traffic that was often snarly at the many stoplights.
Filling out the paperwork that first day on the job, I completed the forms for healthcare insurance. Of course, it asked for any current health conditions, and I did not want to lie. In the space for dependents, I added my wife and children and filled in the slot next to her name with the words, Ovarian Cancer.
The HR director at the company was the wife of the firm’s President. I thought about the supposed protections of HIPPA laws that are supposed to protect healthcare privacy. I proceeded with the paperwork realizing that technically my wife was categorized as a person with a “pre-existing condition.”
I’d been hired as an Account Executive thinking that I’d be assigned to manage existing business. Instead, I was sent out on the road to generate new business. Effectively that made me a salesperson, and the main strategy for approaching potential B2B accounts was going door-to-door dropping off bottles of premium incentive pepper sauce that aligned with the company branding.
By 2010, the world of sales and business development was rapidly changing, and rightly so. No one was going door-to-door anymore. Sales development was migrating to online prospecting and qualification, but there we were, another couple of salespeople and I, embarrassing ourselves barging into businesses with pepper sauce in hand. The cognitive dissonance of a marketing agency ignoring the advancing nature of business development was not lost on me.
It was clear that I wasn’t hired with any purpose in mind but the hopeful notion that my long business experience would compensate for their own lack of sales strategy. Recall that the business climate in those days was less than healthy. As a result, the sales cycles were quite long given the reticence of companies to invest in marketing when their ROIs were not looking good. “That’s when they need marketing!” the saying always goes. “Go after the ‘low-hangin’ fruit!”
I’ve always hated the expression “low-hanging fruit.” It is an insult to any potential client, suggesting they’re some sort of easy pushover or just waiting to be sold. I’ve also sat in many internal agency meetings where clients were being mocked or criticized. “You shouldn’t talk like that,” I’ve tried to advise. “That attitude comes through to the client sooner or later.”
For these reasons, I’ve often not been fond of outright cold-calling businesses. Where is the respect in that? Yet that is the “old school” way of selling that some companies wer still using early 2000s.
Challenges
The people I met were smart enough to challenge our entire proposition. One of them went so far as to hit me right where it hurts when it comes to the costs of marketing. “What do you even know about our business?” he demanded. “What makes you think you can sell our products better than we can?”
Now, the interesting part of that question is the rebound it represented when I thought about it. That agency actually did some nice work for its clients using integrated marketing strategies and tactics including online, direct response, email, newsletters and the like. But when it came to marketing the agency itself, the tactics reverted to cold-calling and sending out bottles of the pepper sauce to potential clients. In other words, the agency wasn’t listening to its own good advice.
In fact, it was worse than that. Any clients that came in through the mail marketing campaign were “off-limits” to the Account Executives and sales team. The odd psychology was that the agency’s own marketing was in some form “separate” from its sales efforts. That’s yet another example of cognitive dissonance, yet it is far more common than one might think that marketing agencies and the like don’t pa attention to their own expertise. I’ve seen that multiple times and was even hired recently on the premise that I’d get to help the agency do its own marketing. That never happened and guess what? Any leads that came in through the company’s website were “off limits” to anyone but quite-separate domain of the “business development” team.
That meant introducing account executives all over again to any new accounts. Plus, that marketing agency had not customer relationship management (CRM) software, so everyone working on account service was using their own communications methods to work with clients and conduct internal dialogue. The result was a perpetual shitshow of emails, Teams threads, video calls, client meetings and project management processes that required dozens of checks and balances to get even one thing done right.
Portrait of the author by a former co-worker at a marketing agency
Crazy difficult
This is all to point out that it’s easy for people in a competitive business environment to feel like they’re the crazy ones. When I proposed to that most recent company that it might make sense to have a CRM system that works for both Client Service Managers and Account Executives––whose functions crossed quite often and were frankly ill-defined––I was told to keep quiet because the Operations Manager had a past experience with a CRM system he didn’t like and basically didn’t want to risk any funding or affect the profit margin for which he might want to take credit. Plus, he didn’t want anyone telling him what to do.
So it wasn’t me that was crazy in that situation. It was the “don’t rock the boat” quotient at work. While many companies claim to like people that “think outside the box” that is a patent lie in most circumstances. That is particularly true for people whose brains work differently than the rote performance of routine executive functions. Folks that find new ways of doing things, or who ask questions of clients that seem outside the province of “business at hand” because it actually stimulates creative thinking are often frowned upon. That culture of conformity is massive in American business. True creativity and most types of neurodivergent thinking are deemed suspicious, even costly to consider.
Employees developing a reputation for divergent thinking or questioning the company line are often ushered out the door. That approach is the opposite of openly competitive thinking. When I worked in the newspaper business and developed a massive literacy program reaching 375,000 families, the people running the newspaper could not grasp the potential of a market exceeding the paper’s circulation by 200,000 households. Granted, it would have taken some effort to serve and develop that market, but it might have provided an alternative business model. Instead, the company focused on desperately flailing away at the churn of departing subscribers by offering new discounted sales. That was necessary, but it wasn’t progressive.
Winning ways
As a longtime distance runner and endurance athlete, one of the things I learned along the way was that there are multiple ways to compete in any event. You can win a race by taking the lead and challenging anyone to catch you, but that strategy won’t always work. You can also win a race by hanging back and “kicking” to surge past competitors at the end. The middle ground is more complex, involving tactics like drafting in the wind or water, or working with teammates to gain some sort of competitive advantage.
The cognitive dissonance of always doing things the same way because “it worked in the past” is the most dangerous and dumbest strategies of all. Yet over the years, that’s the so-called strategy I’ve seen time and again.
Fixed perceptions are also a problem in business that can gut or undermine an operation. A friend of mine once ran his own firm and that included managing the company’s health insurance program. When his wife had health issues that resulted in surgeries, his partners revolted against him, accusing their family of driving up health insurance costs. When my friend looked into the issue, the agent managing their program made it clear that the real reason why their premium costs went up was that other partners’ wives fell into an actuarial age for childbirth. That is considered a high-risk, high-cost proposition in the insurance industry.
As demonstrated, company perceptions of what causes rising healthcare rates are often wrong. When the company I worked for in 2010 unceremoniously dumped me for “non-performance,” the Pink Slip included a defensive offer to pay out $1500 for healthcare coverage going forward. This was a cynical ploy to cover up their fears and perhaps avoid being sued. Clearly, they’d freaked out about my wife’s cancer, yet small companies with under twenty employees can basically fire people for any reason without ramifications. I spoke with lawyers at that point but Illinois is a RightTo Work state and that means companies can fire you for any reason they choose.
By 2010 the controversial healthcare legislation branded Obamacare was passed on March 23. My wife’s “pre-existing” condition was technically no longer a competitive liability in the workplace. That hadn’t stopped me from being excommunicated yet again from the work world. Several companies in a row made life difficult if not impossible to manage working and caregiving at the same time. I thought to myself, “I’m not afraid to compete in this world, but at least the rules should be fair.”
However, the lessons weren’t over. The cognitive dissonance of corporate America included a healthcare system where the structure and business model of coverage were essentially a mistake of history. Add in the cynical corporate mantra “thinking outside the box” is the path to success and it all felt like a giant ruse of lies and conspiratorial conformity.
The honesty of genuine, open competition in the work world felt far away in those days.
For those of you who do triathlons, I’m sharing what it was like to do my first-ever 70.3, a Half Ironman race in Madison, Wisconsin. Those of you who don’t know the sport well are invited to find out what it’s like to prepare and do a race that takes hours to complete.Just don’t follow my examples.But you can learn from my mistakes
A short history of getting there
My wife Suzanne Astra prepping for one of more than forty triathlons she’s done in her career.
Ten years ago, I met my wife Sue on the dating app FitnessSingles.com. We’d been on a bike ride together and I quickly learned how fast she could ride in aero on her Scott tri-bike. I’d already been riding and racing road bikes for seven years by then, so I only struggled a bit keeping up with her. She was scheduled to do a half-Ironman in Racine that July, so I traveled up to watch her. At the time, I thought to myself, “I could never do this.” The open water swimming alone was daunting. I also wasn’t doing many runs longer than six miles due to some hip tightness and the like. At 56 years old, I was still pushing myself in some ways, and had explored the idea of getting into triathlons back in 2003, but tore my ACL playing soccer that year and it took time to rehab. Then my late wife got cancer in 2005 and adding anything to the caregiving menu and lifestyle at that time was out of the question.
This is what the “cockpit” of a tri-bike looks like with arm rests and tri-bars. The gears shift at the bar ends.
Meeting Sue was like changing gears in mid-life. Soon enough I did my first duathlon, and coming off the run and the bike and into the second run, she saw the look on my face and chuckled, “Keep going honey!” That first time running after you’ve biked hard is quite the slog. Yet I was excited to be competing at something new.
Still, when I watched Sue and our triathlon friends do the MOWS (Madison Open Water Swim) I stood idly on the shore thinking, “I could never do that.” Something pulled at me though, because the epic nature of swimming in front of those lakefront buildings and Monona Terrace made me want to be part of that experience.
Swim Start
Racing my first duathlon on my Felt 4C road bike
I started swimming at the XSport gym in 2014 and it was an awful struggle at first. I took some lessons and started joining Sue in early morning Master’s Swimming at the Marmion Academy natatorium. It took years of back and forth with form practice and longer workouts to get any good at swimming at all. The first race swim I did was at the Naperville Sprint Triathlon. I almost wore my new wetsuit but chose to wing it and it was rough. I passed a woman stuck in one place at the first buoy shouting “Goddamnit Goddamnit” and slapping water so hard it created a washing machine. But I kept going and it took me nine minutes to finish 375 yards.
The first time I swam actual open water in the wetsuit (750 yards) was at the Pleasant Prairie Sprint Triathlon in Wisconsin, and that experience was revelatory. Finally, I was feeling like a real triathlete. Then I moved up to the Olympic Distance and my swimming was no longer a game-ender. I swam 38 minutes for a mile and won my age group. From then on, I made the podium at several races. I’d actually improved at something entirely new to me! That was a good feeling.
Yet I was still prone to an occasional panic attack if I went out too hard in the swim. That happened earlier this year at Pleasant Prairie in fact. I started up front, swam too fast too soon, and wound up treading water to calm myself down. I’ve dealt with native anxiety all my life. Now I realize there’s a close relationship between ADHD and anxiety. Knowing there’s a reason and cause for certain emotional states is enormously helpful in building strategies for better mental health and performance. Yet despite that knowledge, sometimes things catch up with you. It took me 45 minutes to finish that mile swim in Pleasant Prairie, but I still made the podium in third place despite collapsing into a sweaty, slow run after two miles of the 10K What I learned from that is how important it is to get salt into my system before and during the race. Otherwise, I bonk.
Racing Madison70.3
My race plan was not far off except for the run, where my nutrition was lacking and my pace fell apart. The swim time was based on my lack of knowledge about the 2200 yard distance. 38 minutes was spot on for that mile.
During Covid a few years back, my wife’s coach Steve Brandes hosted a practice race of 70.3 in Madison. I swam well enough and rode the 56 miles with enough reserve to finish the half marathon in two hours. That was my goal yesterday. I’d learned enough that it was possible to move up to the 70.3 distance. Perhaps I was just a chicken about it. I’ve met people who did the distance as their first race experience! Props to them.
For those of you who have never done a triathlon, it’s an early morning proposition. Typically we rise out of bed at 4:00 a.m. to get some breakfast and take care of bathroom needs, which at my age tend to require multiple visits before the race begins at any distance. But I’m not alone. The Porta Potties at triathlons are the busiest facilities of all.
Transition is the place where bikes and gear for the race are stored. Athletes set out their riding and running equipment on neat towels and pull on their wetsuits after applying reams of Body Glide because a wetsuit can cause nasty abrasions at the seams and neck.
As a person with attention deficit disorder, the process of packing up gear bags and making sure everything’s prepared is a challenge. It’s easy to misplace or forget bottles or goggles, nutrition, or any of the other stuff you need to do the race. I’d written out the list of items in a notebook and meant to bring that memorandum along to the race but left home without it. As it turned out, that spelled trouble.
I got to the race transition in the morning and realized I had no swim goggles. I’d definitely packed them the day before but must have dropped them in the hotel room while arranging the night before the race or kicked them under the bed. I rushed out to tell Sue and she was going to head back to the hotel a few blocks away to get some of her goggles. Then I thought again that her sister Julie was swimming a relay and might have an extra pair. That’s what I used, a pair of clear swim goggles borrowed from my sister-in-law. That wouldn’t be the last thing she did to rescue me yesterday.
Seed times
Standing at the swim start I seeded myself with the 40-43 minute group. The night before at dinner, Sue had corrected my math about the swim distance. I told her I was shooting for 38 minutes and she pulled out her phone and added up the yardage to illustrate the reality of 1.2 miles versus just one mile of swimming in the Olympic distance. “It’s about 2200 yards,” she showed me. “Oh,” I said.
Earlier that week we’d driven a half hour up to Crystal Lake to do an open water swim practice. I started slow and swam really straight and smooth the entire distance. That helped my swim confidence for the 70.3. I’d covered a mile in just over 37 minutes that day and felt ready to swim the 1.2 in Madison.
Waiting for the start I did a couple mental relaxation techniques and promised myself to swim to the outside of the main group as we dove in by foursomes. Punching my watch to start the day (I finally knew how to run the thing for transitions and all) but must have missed the button. Two or three minutes into the swim I looked at the watch and it had not started. I punched the button and kept on swimming.
Within minutes I found a rhythm. That’s everything in swimming. Rhythm and form, a shallow “catch” with arms bent and sighting to swim a straight path are all important. The water was a perfect temperature, just above 70 degrees and wetsuit legal. I’d have had a tough time swimming that distance in just my skinsuit, which has “floaty” properties but not nearly the same assurance that a full neoprene wetsuit provides. I likely would have panicked and pulled out of the race had that the water been too warm for wetsuit legal conditions. I was really grateful for that.
Turning back toward the finish I raised my head to look at the Madison skyline with the Monona Terrace and the Helix ahead and thought to myself, “You’re here. You’re doing this.” What seemed impossible a few years back was now a reality. I was proud of myself for getting there.
Time out of mind
Yet I still have these moments sometimes where I’m swimming or riding or running and it’s like time stops or folds back in on itself. It’s almost like I’m not really there at all and I suddenly realize “I’m out swimming in a lake.” Then I’m dialed back in. Do any of you feel that way?
Climbing out of the water, I was grinning with gratitude and kept at it while running up the spiral helix to the transition area. That’s the thing, right there. Back when I watched Sue do the full Ironman and watched her climb that helix I was envious. “That’s so cool!” Granted, the water was much colder that day and she had some asthma issues that eclipsed her breathing the first sixty miles of the 112-mile bike west of Madison. Before yesterday’s race, my brother-in-law Mike Czarnik told me multiple times, “There’s always something that goes wrong. Just be ready for that.”
Coming out of the swim I was smiling, present, and grateful to be safely out of the water and ready to ride. The weather outside the water was perfect for the day ahead. It was cool but not cold on the body as I biked out of transition. Yet while in transition, I discovered another problem. I had no socks. I thought I’d set them out that morning, but they were nowhere to be found when I went to put on my bike shoes. Sue has teased me about slow transitions due to putting on socks and such, but now I had to try the bike shoes without them. They felt fine. “I’ll deal with the sock issue when I get back.”
The first DQ risk
We rode the bike course a few weeks back and I knew that it wound around some bike trails heading out of town. But I didn’t know the rules about No Passing Zones. A few people passed me at first and I passed a few too, but we’d been on the roads until then. At some point along the road, one of my water bottles popped out of the cages behind my seat. I did not know that I was required to go back and get it. I’d already seen other bottles along the first mile of road. A guy yelled to me, “You just popped a water bottle.” Probably he was trying to save me from getting a penalty. I thought he was just trying to be nice.
Then I got on the bike trail with a bunch of red arrows pointing the way and zoomed around a woman going modestly. When I passed her she called out, “This is a No Passing Zone.” Had a referee been present, I would have probably been disqualified on the spot. That wasn’t a safe move.
So that’s reality. There are quite a few rules in the triathlon world, and they exist for good reasons. Sue specifically warned me not to stop and pee out in the open somewhere along the road because “they don’t like public urination.” In the Tour de France, they call that a “nature break,” but not in triathlon. I was prepared to abide by that rule and will get to that and its impact later on.
Having ridden the course previously I was surprised to find that some of the hills I’d forgotten were decently steep. But once I got through the first portion of the course I was encouraged when one of my five-mile checkpoints on the Garmin read 14:39. That meant I was averaging 20+ miles per hour on that stretch. I was hoping to put some speed in the bank to compensate for poor roads and rolling hills in the middle miles. My plan was to ride quickly without strain on the early smooth roads, focus on steady riding on the middle roads marked “Rough Roads Ahead.” After the one long hill at twenty miles, I knew another waited on Whalen Road at 45 miles. Then I planned to buzz it home on familiar roads. My goal was to complete the course in three hours, a realistic yet challenging time on a course with a couple thousand feet of elevation gain. And had I not stopped to pee at the Aid Station Porta Pottie, where the wait wound up being four minutes, I might well have hit that 3:00 goal on the nose. I averaged almost 18 mph. Not bad for me.
That tie of 3:00 flat without the Porta Pottie stop might have put me in the fifth place or a “podium” finish in my age group. But that is no excuse. I had plenty of opportunity to make up time in the run. But that wasn’t going to happen it turned out.
Sock it to ’em
Transition was inside the Monona Terrace garage.
Riding back into town I was again grateful to be making good progress and looked forward to the run. My legs felt great the entire ride and my nutrition plan seemed to be working. If anything, I felt stronger the last fifteen miles than I did during the middle miles when my kidneys started complaining from having to pee. I started to worry about that as my stomach started feeling wambly the more I had to pee. It was good to grab a banana at that aid station, and I followed that with a Picky Bar to get some solid food in my stomach. Things settled down after some food and some pee relief.
After climbing the Whalen Hill I let loose a little and might have hit 40 mph on a long downhill. I keep one hand on the right brake while the other arm is in aero, giving me plenty of control over the bike if need be. Two years ago during a ride on the Ironman Madison course a guy suddenly swerved in front of me on a downhill and I barely missed slamming into him on the bike. Back in 2012, I’d crashed due to bike wobble at 40 mph and I was happy to feel the solidity of my new Cervelo Ultegra under me during this race.
We purchased my first genuine triathlon bike earlier this summer and during the race, some woman called out to me, “Your bike is pretty!” It is. It was also the only bike we could find among the bike shops in the Chicago area! All were sold out on tri-bikes in my size, and as it was, this bike is a 56 cm frame versus the 58 cm Felt I’ve been riding since 2007. Even with aero bars installed on that bike, I’ve had real cramping in my upper hamstrings during races. It has stopped me from running several times during races.
It was fun flying in the last ten miles from Whalen. The roads are alternately smooth and rough but I know them well from years of training up there in Madison. Pulling into the helix I was grinning again.
The next DQ opportunity
I trotted through the garage where transition was set up at Monona Terrace and sat down to figure out whether I could run without socks or not in the Nike Vaporfly racing shoes. I’ve worn them for a few road races and a half marathon relay or two in triathlon. They’re great shoes but I had no idea whether my feet would blister in them sans socks. I trotted toward the Run Out and saw Sue and her sister Julie standing there taking pictures. “Hey,” I said to Sue. “I need your socks.”
Now, taking aid of any kind from spectators is strictly against the rules in Ironman races. But I was desperate in that moment, and if a referee were standing there and called me on it, I’d have claimed a disability. ADHD is a mental disability that blocks certain kinds of executive functions at times. I have ADHD, which is an adult realization along with the acceptance that is has cost me at many points in life. Thinking back to high school cross country races, I lost to a notable competitor on his home course because I did not absorb the fact that during the second loop on the course, we did not have to run around the track a second time. He went straight and I ran an extra two hundred yards and lost to him by only two seconds. The lead I’d built over three miles evaporated.
Nice orange socks you have there, buddy.
Sue’s sister Julie saved me again. “I have brand new socks in here!” she said, pulling out a pair of size 11 orange socks that turned out to be too big for her husband to wear that day. “They don’t match your kit, but you can keep them!” she laughed.
I sat my sorry ass down, pulled on the socks and shoes, and took off running. At the bottom of the helix, I realized I was still wearing my cycling gloves. I don’t like the feeling of that. I pulled them off and stuffed them in my back kit pocket. And kept on running. The first two miles went great at just under nine minutes per mile. On the way back around past the helix, I saw someone I knew and handed them the gloves. “Can you hold onto these?” I asked.
That’s actually another DQ if a referee sees me doing that. I was now up to three potential DQs for the day. So much for being a triathlon pro!
Heading into the run I’d downed a couple salt pills and few Clif Shot Blocks but by four miles I was starting to slow and realized I needed salt immediately. My pace dropped from 9:00 to 10:00 per mile, then 11. At the next aid station around six miles I popped two salt capsules that were given to me a few weeks ago during a cycling ride and I said out loud to myself, “you will get a Second Wind.”
The course wound around through neighborhoods and some sneaky little hills. Coming back toward downtown my pace picked up ats the salt kicked in. I felt bad at that point because my group of informants had said my pace early on was plenty fast to podium on the day. As the temps warmed and the sun caught up with me, I slowed too much to hold that position. It no longer mattered that I’d wasted five minutes at the Porta Pottie earlier. I was running to finish now.
Mistakes incorporated
So much of what you accomplish in life is based on eliminating mistakes. For some of us that’s a bit harder than others. Had I snagged that gear list from y home desk before leaving on Friday, those goggles and socks would not have been an issue. I have plenty of coping skills for ADHD, but rushing around before leaving town made me forget that. My son found that list in my office on Saturday and asked me last night if Id’ needed it. “Well, yes, I laughed.
He’s the one who has counseled me the last year on so much information about the effects and ramifications of ADHD. While I’ve accomplished much in life from writing books to conducting art exhibitions, leading successful literacy projects and building marketing programs, to being a caregiver to my mother, father, and wife for many years, I know now how important it is to slow down in the moment, check the list of things to do and do them as they are mapped out. I’m actually good at that. I just missed a moment going into this race that could have made things go differently.
As it went, my wife’s coach had a wry chuckle about all the potential DQs. You’ll notice that I’m missing a race belt and number in all the running photos. I put the race number on the belt the night before, and set the race belt out on my shoes that morning, but did not put the belt on in transition. So that was four potential DQs. I was so concerned about the socks that I forgot all about it. That’s why we do these races. To challenge ourselves and build on our experience. Yet I was careful not to draft or commit any genuine racing transgressions. None of my gaffes gave me any competitive advantage. In fact, I spent a total of 14 minutes in transition. I haven’t had time to compare that with my competitors, but I’ll bet those are smaller numbers.
Coming into the finish line at Ironman Wisconsin 70.3, I made sure to slap a few hands along the crowd gathered outside the fencing. Perhaps that’s another DQ, but if it is I don’t give a damn. It was sweet to hear my name announced loud and clear as I trotted on the red carpet under the giant IM Finish ballon. “Christopher Cudworth, sixty-six years young from North Aurora, Illinois,” the announcer called out. ”
And that, my friends, is how you do a 70.3 Ironman. Minus the mistakes. Got that?
By the way: my socks were indeed in the transition bag, just buried out of sight in a hidden picket of the Zoot tri-bag. I just didn’t know where to dig them out that morning. It’s not just ADHD that catches up with you sometimes. It’s hard for anyone to think straight at 5:30 in the morning. The goggles I think fell off the bed and got kicked under the frame rather then making it into my bag.
My brother-in-law Mike Czarnik relished running out of the Texas heat and blasted a 148 half marathon in the relay.
If you have any IM tragic, fun or funny experiences to share, I’d love to hear and share them. Cudworthfix@gmail.com
Have you ever wondered exactly how good you really are at something? Pick anything. It could be gardening. Your job. Relationships. Marriage. Divorce. We all face these pursuits in our own way. Yet it’s really hard to judge whether you’re genuinely good at something or not.
That’s why I took to running full bore at the age of twenty-two. I wanted to find out how good I really was. I’d been competing in running from the age of twelve when I ran a sub-12:00 minute two-mile in gym class. In middle school, I ran the half-mile in sub-2:30 and went on to set the freshman mile record at 4:57. By sophomore year I led the team in season points and we won the first-ever Little Seven Conference cross-country championship. That spring I ran a 4:42 mile. Then we moved to St. Charles and I led that team as well, winning nine dual meets and taking the District cross-country title. Track was just so-so as a junior, but my senior year in cross-country saw ten dual meet wins, an invitational title, and making the Sectional meet.
My coach during those latter years of high school running put it best. “Cudworth is a good runner, but not a sensational one,” he was quoted by the Beacon News after a sports writer used the term “junior sensation” to describe my season thus far. That next week I got my ass kicked by a truly sensational runner named Tom Burridge who would go on to run at the University of Kentucky, win multiple SEC championships, clock a 13:45 track 5K, and after that set the American record in the half-marathon with a time in the 1:04s.
So I knew all along that I wasn’t a premiere runner. Yet I did help lead our Luther College cross-country team to a second-place finish in the Division III cross-country championships. I finished in 62nd place, seventeen seconds behind Steve Corson, our top runner that day. Most of the season I ran as our second and third man, truly enjoying all the work I’d put in over thousands of training miles.
That spring I ran a 9:20 steeplechase to win the conference track meet for the third year straight and qualified for nationals, but ran a laggard 9:30 in Cleveland after two weeks of basically hanging out on campus waiting for the competition.
So it felt like there was “unfinished business” when I got out of college. After a year of working in Admissions for Luther, which made it impossible to train due to 1500-mile travel weeks on the road throughout Illinois, I took a job back home in Illinois, broke up with my college girlfriend, and set a different course in life.
After a year of working at Van Kampen Merritt in Chicago and Naperville, I got sent to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for work. I met the Crooke brothers and joined the Runner’s Edge racing team. Training with those guys was an entirely different level and style of running. We did our long runs slow and our track work smart. My 10K time dropped below 32:00 for the first time. Then the job ended and I moved back to Chicago.
Feeling adrift in the world after all that work upheaval, I moved downtown with one of my best friends, met a hot Polish girl runner and dated her on top of keeping up the relationship with the woman that would later become my wife. But I got caught on that cheat and dropped the ruse.
But while I lived in the City of Chicago the running got better and better. My 5K track time dropped to 14:45 from 15:10. My 10K time was suddenly 5:00 pace, running 31:10 on a warm summer day in July. I raced 19:49 for four miles, 24:45 for five miles, 53:20 for ten miles on a really hot day, ran a 1:10 half marathon and a 1:24 25K. I won the Geneva Community Classic in a time that stood for twenty years.
I worked in the Running Unlimited store that sponsored our racing team. I won ten out of twenty-four races that I competed in that year, so I fully earned that sponsorship. It was tough to make rent sometimes, and eventually the idea of living together as friends and roommates soured a bit as he’d finished his Master’s Degree work in kinesiology and was taking a job with a big company. Our two years of living in Bohemian Chicago style was over.
I don’t regret a damned moment of that experiment, especially when it comes to the running. I’d found out how good I was, and learned that I wasn’t more than a journeyman runner. The key point in that journey was entering a race where Alberto Salazar and other world-class runners lined up in front of me. I ran with them for three miles at 4:40 pace before blowing up and finishing the five-mile distance at 25:30.
Yet I knew long before that I wasn’t a sensational runner, just a good one. But racing all those years helped erase that definite feeling of unsurety. There are few “woulda coulda shoulda” thoughts that ever follow me around. The only race that I didn’t run my hardest was that steeplechase win at the Iowa Conference track meet in spring of 1979. I ran 9:20 while relaxing the last two laps to save energy for a double back in the 5000, which didn’t produce anything. The top six spots all went to faster or rested runners. It might have been nice to find out that day how fast I could really run the steeple. The conditions and fitness were there.
This little summary is included here for context as I write about the difficulties that life presented in 2008. During that running career, the outcomes were always clear. You either ran well on a given day and accomplished a decent time or place, or you did not. Sure, we all second guess our efforts sometimes, but in the end there is an empiric outcome. That is undeniable.
By contrast, finding “wins” or success in the work world and simultaneously as a caregiver to both a wife with cancer and a stroke-ridden father was much harder. So was being a father. Part of me questioned whether I had the “guts” to do it all. On April 9, 2008, I wrote, “Here’s the God’s honest truth. I’m a success where there isn’t competition. Even that graphic facilitator gig last weekend was a muckup. Reading Rewards: A Failure. Daily Herald for 8 years: a ruse. Now I’m at Dukane where they don’t know marketing and the veil remains. Yet when I talk with people who are successful in marketing, my ideas resonate. Hard work and persistence. That’s what it takes. Now if I could just get that fan in my office fixed.”
The next day I wrote: “Last night I was tired after work. Lay there on the bed wanking my hopes in the late afternoon sun. Exhausted. Mentally and physically because I woke up at 4:40 a.m. As again today. Wanted to bike but the hassle of tacking down gear (half an hour) and lateness of hour dimmed my wishes. Yet at 7:30, there goes Howard from down the street, rolling home. The true cyclist. I am just a hopeful pretender.”
Howard was a Category 3 criterium racer. I tried riding with him once and we hit a headwind and I got dropped. Life kept reminding me that I was “good” in some ways, but not great.
I kept writing on April 9. “I did manage something of a run. Traipsed over to the high school but there was a meet. Saw Doretta, whose son Talon is running. Then Clark Zetties, the doctor, who fought colon cancer. Then Dave Perkins walking their collie. So it was a social run. Which I needed because I feel alone in so many respects.”
“Routine is a deadly force in relationships,” I observed. “Its predictability is necessary for the functions of daily life, but that sameness can kill the spirit. And drown love. We wake to sleep. Then there’s work. The unstartling dirge of activity mixed with crises. What are we doing in life, with life? It is all strife and struggle.”
Baltimore oriole by Roger Tory Peterson
I noted in my journal: “Reading snippets about Roger Tory Peterson and his efforts to become a “real painter,” and artist as it were. Those paintings he did of an oriole, flicker etc. were popular and famous. But he was unsatisfied. Locked into a style he knew was practical and ultimately uninspired and differentiated. He longed to be Robert Bateman. So do I.”
Evening grosbeaks by Robert Bateman
My point in all that was that even world-class and famous artists or athletes go through the same struggles as the rest of us. They may operate at different levels or in different ways, but the pressures to succeed and the definite feeling of unsurety resides within them as well. That is life. There are no guarantees. You only know how good you are at anything by continuing to try, and grow.
Years after my full-on racing days were through, I observed to my mother that perhaps it was self-indulgent. “Oh, I don’t know about that,” she replied. “You burned brightly.”
The lesson in all self-doubts or “woulda coulda shoulda” retrospections is that we’re supposed to learn how to “live in the moment” and make the most of it whatever we’re doing. There aren’t any other realities waiting for us. This is everything we’ve got. Let’s live.
This post is part of a continuing series of chapters to be included in a book titled Competition’s Son.
Hunting for a job when you desperately need one is never fun. If you’re old enough to think back to the days before the Internet, then you’ll recall how really bad it once was. Printing out and mailing resumes. Waiting for a reply. On and on. It was one of the most depressing activities on Earth.
By the year 2007 that had all changed. As an employee of the newspaper business from 2000-2007, I watched in real-time as Employment advertising migrated from printed pages to online listings. The world was changing. The money once traveling through the newspaper industry evaporated almost overnight. Publications lost millions of the once-easy money flowing from employers and recruitment agencies placing print ads under headings such as ENGINEERING, MARKETING or SALES.
While the world was changing and the Internet was revolutionizing job hunts in so many respects, that still meant sitting home in a basement office typing up Cover Letters and emailing resumes. That part of it felt the same as it always did. That drama in your head begins the moment you find a job you want and imagine yourself interviewing. Then it builds and builds. Then comes either a rejection letter and the deflation feels worse than ever. Or some hint of interest teases you along. Eventually, hopefully, an opportunity comes along. Sometimes the choices are great. Sometimes you must take what you can get. I’ve experienced a bit of both in life. All experiences are instructive.
Before the online jobs revolution, I once paid to have a resume done by a guy down the block who specialized in such things. He was a massive man who appeared not to have emerged from his own home in many a year. But he came with high recommendations so I thought, “Why not?”
I didn’t count on one thing. The process of sitting there while he perused my experience damn near killed me on the spot. As a person with ADHD, there is no greater torture than being confined to a room with a mostly silent man except for his heavy breathing, largely due to the fact that his lungs were quite obviously surrounded by fat. Cynically, I thought, “What could this guy know about the world out there?”
After twenty minutes, I told him, “I’ll be happy with whatever you come up with…” and excused myself to run down the block to my quiet little house. He gave me ten copies of that resume on a cream-colored paper. I paid him $150.
Making the best of it
Job hunting is also torture on a spouse. That’s especially true when something on the order of cancer enters the picture. Through all our travails and my attempts at competing in life, my late wife and I made the best of it all the time. After we got over the fact of that first recurrence, we took some money out of the bank and went out to eat at a great Mexican place called Bien Trucha. That’s a slang phrase for “on top of your game,” whatever the fuck that might mean at any given time. The Mexican street corn was astounding. She downed a margarita with salt on the rocks. Few people made a better margarita than she did, but that one was tasty, she told me.
Lost and Found
During the winter months after she’d begun chemo again and had little energy to do much else, we’d lay on the couch watching episodes of the TV show Lost on the little black Mac I kept from the job at the marketing agency. We each liked different characters in the show. I was drawn to the more complex and tragic characters such as Dr. Juliette Burke and the Miles persona. Linda liked Hurley for his honesty and effort in trying to make things right in all situations. And gosh, was Ben Linus a creepy dude. We loved that show but the last episode was disappointing beyond belief. After all that intrigue and shape-shifting worlds, the best they could do is show a light down a hole? That sucked.
We’d roar through episode after episode, each ending with a little Bad Robot icon from the production company. That got us through many a cold winter evening. It also evidenced how much the world had changed through video streaming. Where once we’d been stuck to a TV screen, now the world came to us through a 13″ computer screen. It worked. And it was one more proof that the world was changing fast.
Come January of 2008 (or so) I finally landed a job interview with Dukane, an audio-visual company with a long history in the education field. Dukane projectors were a staple in classrooms for decades. The styles and technology kept changing, and once the company manufactured its own products. But the impact of superior products from overseas manufacturers such as Hitachi made it impractical to keep up with refinements in the AV world. So Dukane threw up its hands, purchased Hitachi projectors, and slapped Dukane logos on them. For quite a few years, the brand name of Dukane kept them competitive. Eventually, makers such as Epson and Texas Instruments took over the market. Traditional lens projectors were getting their asses kicked by DLP. Dukane is still doing its thing, but in a much-reduced way from its once dominant market position. That said, I worked there during its most tumultuous period as a company.
What’s the deal?
Dukane continued trying to compete through its considerable dealer network, and kept on adding products to its line. As AV markets continued diversifying thanks to the Internet, new products such as smart boards and “clicker” presentation tools entered the education markets. Dukane bought those from other suppliers and re-marketed them as well.
By the time I applied for the marketing manager job at Dukane, the company had invested in a modular classroom testing technology they called ConVA. That acronym stood for something like Connected Visual and Audio but nobody knew how to pronounce it. Even some people at the company didn’t understand it was supposed to sound like “CONVEY.”
They’d hired a few great new salespeople to push the new product and that’s also where I entered the picture. The compensation wasn’t that great but I had bills to pay, a wife with cancer to protect and the office was only six miles from my house. That meant I was close enough to get home to my wife if she needed me. So I took the job despite the fact that the first guy they hired lasted a day before checking out.
He probably couldn’t take the weird atmosphere. The Dukane building was constructed in the 1960s during a time when military contracts were a big driver for the organization. Dukane employed hundreds of people for decades. Their cafeteria was once the hubbub of a thriving “community” of workers who prided themselves on making things in a big way.
Up to the years that I joined the firm, Dukane made most of the beacons placed on aircraft to find and identify them after a crash. Then they sold that division. The Ultrasonics division was a profit generator they kept. It uses high-grade vibration science to mold plastics and such. And while they’ve updated some over the years, during my time there, walking through the factory was a bit like waltzing through a Time Machine. If you ever watched the show Lost that I mentioned earlier in this article, the inside of Dukane felt much like the Dharma bunker. The cafeteria still had round tables covered with orange and yellow flowers from the late 60s and 70s. The kitchen was closed for lack of business since the company had shrunk from hundreds of workers in its heyday down to a skeleton staff by the time I joined the firm. I sometimes felt like the ghosts of workers past walked those halls.
Something like this
There were people still employed at Dukane having worked there for forty and even fifty years. That is a compliment to the firm. However, a few of them came to the cafeteria at their appointed break time just as they’d done for decades, and that frankly creeped me out a bit. All I wanted to do was get out of the building for an hour because it was claustrophobic inside.
The building had no outward-facing windows at all. Not a one. Rumor has it that the former President of Dukane, a brusque type named Jack Stone (could that name be any more “LOST” sounding?) was disgusted by people ostensibly competing for corner offices with windows so he banned all of them. Or, and this is the more likely scenario, they had top-secret defense contracts and did not want any security risks. In any case, that gave the entire operation a “closed-in” feel that was straight out of a science fiction movie. I’d step out of the office into the fresh air and let out a “aaaaahhhhh.”
Small scale operations
The Audio-Visual department where I worked was pushed into one corner of the building because it constituted about $20M in business while the other operations took up more office space because they were making more money. Yet there were big plans in the works with the new “clicker” system targeted for release within the year that I joined the company. The opportunity to do a launch for an entirely new product was an enticing challenge to me. I’d just come off building a literacy project reaching 175 public libraries and 375,000 families at the Daily Herald. Promoting ed tech seemed interesting.
On the first day, I met the young men assigned to the sales portion of the enterprise and was optimistic about the prospects. My family had many teachers in it. I thought that my background visiting many classrooms would be beneficial in the role.
The first thing I tried to do was clear up the whole ConVA name problem. “If no one can pronounce our product, that’s a problem,” I stated in a meeting. Everyone shook their heads. Everyone, that is, but the two longest-serving salespeople. “We want to call it A-Click,” they demanded. “That’s what we’re calling it with our dealers anyway.”
Without pause, I asked, “Who gave you the go-ahead on that?”
The room went silent for a moment. Then the President said, “I did. I kind of like A-Click.”
You can see in the photo at left that the dual name wound up being featured in our marketing materials.
I did protest at first. “So we have a product that people are calling by two different names and one of them people can’t pronounce? How are people supposed to know what it’s actually called?”
That set me on a mission to fix the basics. I came back quickly with a logo for the product calling it Convey Solutions Student Response System. That made sense because that’s what the product did. It “conveyed” information for teachers to help students learn and test their knowledge. Simple, right? At the same time, I came up with a company tagline for branding. “Education. Presentation. Inspiration.” That represented the three markets to which Dukane sold: Education, Business, and Religious.
Identity fix
To promote Convey, I begged the President to allow me to hire a professional photographer to do a classroom image capture session. He approved a $250 budget (way too cheap, I told him) and contacted a pro photographer I knew. We visited a local experimental classroom at a nearby school and he took 1000 images in a half hour. That cover photo alone was worth the $250.
Getting people on board with a holistic marketing campaign was challenging. I incorporated product line overviews in the brochure and united them in a poster-style interior piece that dealers could use on-site for sales presentations. The website, however, was still archaic and ponderous. Changes could only be made at first by submitting them to a woman working in a completely different department. She’d get around to it eventually. I insisted on learning the software and that helped a bit. But the web construct was early ’90s and it still is.
Every “new” product that came in the door, such as a new projector for the Dukane line, had an Owners Manual that had to be changed from Hitachi branding to Dukane. The only way to do that was digging around in the PDF Master document to alter and insert the word DUKANE wherever it said Hitachi. That company wanted nothing to do with providing Dukane any better assistance. They were happy to sell more projectors to Dukane but not with any extra hassles involved.
Meanwhile, there were massive delays in the software development and compatibility of testing information for Convey. It turned out that the 80,000 questions purchased for the Convey system didn’t work with the software or hardware. The Student Response System was glitchy and unreliable. The risk of putting faulty product out there was real.
A couple school districts in Texas were using the Convey systems, and those seemed to work fine. But those were directly hands-on situations and not indicators of general portability and accessibility. That meant the salespeople had nothing to actually sell. So they sold on “promise of delivery” or at least attempted to. As the new sales guys got out there in the market, the two traditional sales guys objected when the progressive new Dukane people approached potential buyers rather than working through the dealer networks. “We’re competing with our own customers,” they insisted.
Marketing research
To figure out what was going on, I dug into the sales records (requested from the Main Office) to examine the entire framework of sales logistics. I reasoned that it could be helpful to understand the full picture of who our biggest dealers actually were, and where any potential expansion potential resided. That’s what any good marketing manager will do: Understand the competitive landscape.
To my astonishment, I found an account that had done $600,000 in business three years prior and then dropped off the table. I met with one of the new sales guys and showed him the printouts. “Let’s go find out what’s up with this.”
The President gave a somewhat grudging approval to our exploration because that particular account was not a traditional dealer. Instead, it was a $3.5B company serving the education industry! We traveled to their headquarters and met with their marketing team to get the full story. The fact of the matter is that someone had really blown a previous sales call and backed out of a basic agreement to do business with the company. “All we ask is that for access to our markets, you buy an ad in our annual catalog.”
Quick rewards
We pushed that deal forward and by year’s end, the educational firm had driven nearly a million dollars in previously neglected business. Their sales team adapted to selling Dukane products quite readily. But again, there was jealousy and fear from the two traditional sales guys at Dukane who felt that the education firm was infringing on their dealer network’s business.
“Yes. Their salespeople are all over the country,” we openly agreed. “They are calling on administrators and educators that our existing dealers will never likely reach. How can that be bad? Competition is good for all markets,” we insisted.
It didn’t work out that way. In a pique of conflicted ideology, the new sales guys all got fired or dismissed. The traditional sales guys won the argument and the company lurched back into its cubbyhole of protecting dealers over driving open-market sales. They promised to service the education company but that was effectively a lie that didn’t last long. Then my sales partner in rebuilding that business left the firm for a better opportunity. I didn’t blame him. There was nothing left for him to do.
Trade Show competition
Before that, we’d attended a giant education conference called the NECC down in San Antonio. Our trade show booth was a decently designed and good-looking enterprise when it was properly set up. , But the President didn’t like paying for the trade show company to set it up. So he ordered us to set it up in the factory space and see what we could manage to do as the minimum cost for shipping and setup.
The problem with that strategy was that the connections between panels weren’t consistent. They didn’t “link up” properly when only half the booth was used. Someone from the Old School at the company even chopped off a piece to make it fit somehow. It looked bad. Yet we shipped it down there, jammed it together, and hoped for the best.
I walked the trade show floor to view the “competition” and was astounded at the sophistication of the biggest companies in the education field. We looked like a Mom and Pop store next to companies operating on a scale more like Walmart and Target. I got to know a few of the marketing people from those companies including one highly innovative AV firm. The owner took me aside and in the kindest words possible told me, “You know, in this business, it really is Go Big or Go Home.” Then he glanced at our booth and gave me a wink. “I know,” I said.
Public relations aside
I’d done quite a bit of work on the PR side as well, getting stories about Dukane products into regional, and national media. But it had been eighteen months since I joined the company and Dukane had not yet solved its software issues with the Convey system. The hardware could be iffy too, as a result. Then a national audio-visual magazine published a list of the Top Ten Presentation Student Response Systems in the United States. Of course, Dukane was nowhere to be found. The President was incensed, insisting that I’d failed somehow. “How can we not be listed here?” he demanded of me.
“How many units have we sold this year?” I asked. He stammered. The only real sales we’d gotten were through the educational company that the former salesperson and I had brought back into the fold. There was little service support for those units since the salespeople selling them through the education company were now gone. In reality, the Convey product was not even officially launched on the market. Adding insult to injury, another Midwest company posted a website for a student response system using the same name, a fact I found out after Googling Convey to see how it was playing in the open market. We sent them a Cease and Desist letter, but it illustrated how little impression the Convey product had made upon the market.
As for the sales prospects for Convey in traditional channels, dealers across the South were just not that into selling that type of advanced tech. The sales process was too complex, requiring multiple calls and followup that most AV dealers had no staff to support. They’d rather push a buttload of projectors on a school district and be done with it. One of them even admitted that an AV cart he’d borrowed from the company and kept at home between sales calls was now occupied by a family of raccoons.
By late 2008, two years after I’d joined the company, the George W. Bush recession was in full force and the economic projections for government handouts and education funding thinning out. The lag benefit of prior year school budget funding was over. Our “buffer” was gone. And the fact of the matter is that the Convey system was also not selling for shit because it didn’t yet work.
That meant my time at Dukane was also coming to an end. The President called me into his office a few days after the New Year and gave me a pink slip. I realized that being let go from the company was probably for the better. Their progressive hopes had died on the vine. The name A-Click hadn’t saved the day either. The product had gotten a resounding F in all three categories: Function, Market Timing, and Marketability. It would limp along for a year or so after I left, then fade into the ether much like characters from LOST getting sucked up by the Black Smoke Monster.
Before I left, we’d even been told to move to a claustrophobic space within the catacombs at the north end of the building where the floor tiles were crumbling. Tasked with assaying the space, I reported that I’d seen evidence of what I thought might be mold around the wall edges. I called in an expert for a walk-through only to be scolded for exposing any actual potential problems. The Dharma Effect was strong with them. It made me think back to that time when the company President insisted, “We should bring more clients to this building. It’s really impressive.” A few of us laughed at the thought of that.
In an odd portent, the former President of the overall company collapsed and died in the lobby one afternoon. He still came into work every day, and was was a much-loved director of the company for many years. I’d met him earlier in life during his late prime. His obituary read: “Mr. Stone, 81, died Friday, May 15, after collapsing, apparently from a heart attack, in the lobby outside his office at Dukane, company officials said. “Jack was an American icon to everyone that works here,” said Terry Goldman, a 30-year employee of Dukane and its vice president of administration. “He was a brilliant businessman but a wonderful person as well. He was inspiring — both professionally and personally — and brought out the best in others.”
Doing its thing
Dukane is still a big local employer and even the AV company is plodding along doing its thing. It just didn’t turn out to be the “thing” that a few of us hoped it would be when a mix of young blood and experienced people mixed together at the company.
I don’t fault anyone really. It’s hard to go from 0-60 in an all-new direction. You can’t just go out and run a race with no training and preparation, you know? It took me three full years of hard work to drop my 10K time from 33:00 down to 31:10.
Dukane was likely trying to do too much, too soon, in a market that was changing so rapidly that you had to have money to burn in order to compete. Education moved quite quickly away from classroom presentation or student response systems to in-hand Chromebooks and online learning. Once laptops became more affordable the control it put in student’s hands was absolute. I substitute teach in many public school systems and online learning is massive. Frankly I’d been caught up in changing industries in both the newspaper and audio-visual business. Yet I remain proud of the work that I did at Dukane. I loved that tagline Education. Presentation. Inspiration. It kicks ass.
The larger Dukane dynamic is still in operation. People passing by the offices often look forward to reading the witty quips on the hand-posted sign out front. Occasionally, I run into a fellow former employee and we share stories about our time at Dukane. There were many people there that I genuinely liked. But a recent employee review on Indeed kind of tells the story of how the place works to this day.
“There is little to no career development. You must have experience as an outside salesperson, a degree in engineering, or be a relative of a high-level person who already works there, otherwise, you aren’t going to progress much beyond a relatively low-paying, entry-level job. They used to have continuing education programs and in-house training when the founding family still ran it, but like a typical American corporation, newer ownership scrapped that to become focused on short-term profit growth. You need to get used to tackling the same problems over and over and over again. Despite excellent performance reviews, maximum pay increases usually only matched real inflation but sometimes didn’t, though they do have a bonus program when the previous years’ sales were good.”
For perspective on the issue of skepticism when it comes to dealing with problems in life, let’s look at a definition for the word “un·for·tu·nate”
adjective
having or marked by bad fortune; unlucky.
Sometimes it pays to examine the root meaning of a commonly used word to better understand the nature of life. The term “unfortunate” is one of those words. I love seeing the somewhat archaic term “bad fortune” as part of the definition. The word “unlucky” is also a vague reference to anachronistic beliefs that somehow the “fates” are involved in a person’s efforts and outcomes.
We often hear even world champions admit that their victories required a bit of “luck.” When a runner gets boxed in during a middle or long-distance race, yet finds the inside lane open during the last one hundred meters because all the other runners drifted into outside lanes, they might be prone to say, “I got lucky and passed them all on the inside.”
The term “bad luck” works just the opposite way, of course. A runner who has the lead going into the last fifty yards but looks to his right while a competitor passes them on the left is deemed “unlucky” or having “bad luck” in that circumstance.
As a competitive athlete for forty years by the time I turned fifty and had been in the workforce since the age of twenty-one, I’d seen my share of good and bad luck over time. Some of that good “luck” was the result of persistence. Some of the bad luck was my own damned fault as well.
The bookends of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ luck define the extremes. The term “unfortunate” falls somewhere in between. I’d been lucky to find a new job with an agency that paid well once the situation at the Daily Herald turned sour after seven years at the newspaper. Yet deep inside there were harsh doubts that the new position would work out at all. The signs were there from the start. Being dumped at an open desk with a half-assed chair rather than having an office was the first bad sign. There I was, the Chief Marketing Officer of the company sitting in the open spaces with junior sales executives, one of whom was the agency director’s son. Not exactly a construct of high respect or esteem.
By the time I was finished with that job in late 2007, I’d been through my late wife’s complete emotional breakdown after her cancer came back, and trips to the hospital with her to drain liters of fluid out of her abdomen to save her life during repeated bouts of cancer-driven ascites. Eventually, the chemo knocked those cancer sites back but it was rough taking care of her.
Then I lost that job and had to pay COBRA insurance to the agency that had just fired me. Writing monthly checks of $1700 to the company after I was let go felt like bitter irony from my perspective. What kind of country forces people to live like that? Yet without that coverage, her medical expenses would have broken our finances (and us) in two. As it was, the bills would top $50K owed to hospitals (even after the insurance coverage) before that round of treatments was completed.
Blessedly, we appealed to the non-profit hospital where the treatments were taking place and they approved a 90% reduction of all medical expenses. They wrote it off, in other words, and covered it through their foundation. My appreciation for what some wealthy people do for medical care in the United States grew quite a bit. That also made me realize how insanely bad our largely for-profit healthcare industry really is.
It was “bad luck” that my wife got cancer in the first place. But it would have been far more manageable for me to handle if health insurance coverage were not so corporatized. I spent hours and even entire days chasing down doctors that fit within our HMO plan, for example. Buying PPO coverage was always possible, but also considerably more expensive. The idea that medical care in the United States of America is determined by how much you can afford to pay is one of the most Darwinian dynamics imaginable. I found it enormously ironic that Republican criticism of the Affordable Care Act claim that there would be “death panels” deciding which elderly people got to live or die when it was Republicans seeking to block people with pre-existing conditions from getting decent coverage at all.
The principle at work up to the year 2007 was that health insurance was largely dependent upon being employed. In that construct, and this is still largely how it works––employees are dependent upon an employer to negotiate the best plans and rates. The entire system evolved out of companies originally offering health insurance as a “perk” to attract candidates. That became the “norm” in America but it is not “normal” compared to dozens of other countries where nationalized healthcare is a provision of citizenship, not a byproduct of being employed.
While reading Crain’s Chicago Business one afternoon during my late-2007 job hunt, I noticed an article that outlined a painful truth. Health insurance premium costs had risen 96% during the eight years President George W. Bush served in office. Essentially, the costs of healthcare had doubled during his dubious reign. Within a year, President Obama would win the election and soon after that, the Affordable Care Act would be introduced and passed despite ardent resistance from Republican opponents. One of the key provisions of the act was removing pre-existing conditions clauses from insurance coverage contracts. Health insurers could no longer discriminate against people with prior health issues.
Yet the ACA was itself victimized by conservative ideology claiming that it was unconstitutional to require people to get healthcare coverage. The absurdity of the claim was obvious in the fact that car insurance was already a required statute in order to drive a car. Conservatives love to ignore such facts in favor of neo-liberal ideology. The same holds true with the Second Amendment interpretation that ignores the qualifying phrase “A well-regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state…” to emphasize and proclaim “the right to bear arms shall not be infringed.”
The political Right goes after Social Security under similarly specious premises because it ostensibly constitutes “socialism” in their minds. While many Americans just want some money securely set aside for use in old age, Republicans want that money dumped into risk-driven investment markets where people can lose it quite easily, especially when Republicans control the government and its power to impact the economy. Most major recessions have taken place under Republican rule. The Right cuts taxes on the rich and doles out corporate welfare on the Reaganesque belief that these measures will fuel super-growth and make everyone rich. But it never turns out that way. And never will.
Republican policies are at best an “unfortunate” take on how things really work, and Americans are right to be healthily skeptical of their nonsense. By contrast, Democrats create and protect programs that provide social and fiscal security for Everyman. In turn, those people support the American economy. It’s that simple, but Republicans are too often arrogant, simple-minded, and driven by extreme ideological zealots ranging from Grover Nordquist to Ayn Rand. Throw in the grifting brand of Jesus favored by the Christian evangelical sect and America follows the example of the sins of Sodom depicted in the Bible. For centuries legalistic Christians have gaslighted gay people as the sinners of Sodom. In truth, the actual sins were much more like the ideologies of today’s conservative political and religious bloc:
As in Judaism… Later Hebrew prophets named the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah as adultery, pridefulness, and uncharitableness. Rictor Norton views classical Jewish texts as stressing the cruelty and lack of hospitality of the inhabitants of Sodom to the “stranger”.
No one in 2007 could predict how far this fascist ideology would spread or what it would ultimately become. But by 2016 the racist reaction to a competent Black President in the person of Barack Obama led to the hugely unfortunate election of Donald Trump. The cancer of that man’s complete lack of moral character and abusive intent spread through society like a Stage Four cancer.
That is not to say that the age of George W. Bush was any better. If anything, his fealty to Right-Wing religious nutballs set the stage for the rise of Trump. Add in the toxic impact of Dick Cheney with his snarling dismissal of governmental balance and love for the concept of the Unitary Executive and the GOP created the mold into which the slime of Trumpism could flow.
I had my share of unfortunate circumstances in 2007, but I also accepted my responsibility for my exhibited flaws and salvaged what I could to move on. I came to accept that for the time being, my main job was taking care of a wife with cancer, my father with a stroke, and and looking after my family and kids in college. It frankly stunned me that some people my employers could be so immutably insensitive during those years when I was under the gun with my wife’s first cancer treatments.
After I’d parted ways with the agency I even received a letter telling me that they were kicking me off their insurance. I’d eventually learn that many small companies fear having anyone on their plan with any kind of perceived health problems. That was a lesson I’d have to learn several more times in the future. Unfortunately, as in my case, bad luck has a tendency to follow people around. (insert bitter laughter here).
What can you take from these experiences of mine? That’s a legitimate question. So here’s my answer. I don’t write this as a “woe is me” script as much as an attempt to share the truth about how the world works, and how it often doesn’t. If what I’ve gone through helps people better understand how to compete in this world, that’s what I’m after. When it comes to your personal welfare, my advice on that front is sound and clear: never assume that people have your best interests in mind. Be happily surprised if they do, and consider yourself fortunate if that happens. But a healthy amount of skepticism is always healthy. That’s all I’m saying.
With my new Felt bike and the cool Felt kit I ordered direct from the company. Circa 2007.
During the year 2007 with all the transitions going on in life, I made the decision to expand my fitness retinue by purchasing a genuine road bike. I’d already been riding an ancient 1984-era Trek 400 for several years. That bike was bequeathed to me by my brother-in-law, who was still riding his other Trek bikes but did not need the steel-framed, shifters-on-the-downtube steed from his first days as a cyclist.
I bought some SPD pedals for that bike and rode it with mountain bike shoes to hump around the backroads as fast as I could go. I recall a ride with a neighbor friend that took us out into the cornfields where we averaged 18 mph and I thought I was a king after that.
But then I joined my buddies that were actual cyclists and within three miles I was cooked and could not keep up with the group. I peeled off and road a sullen fifteen miles vowing that somehow I’d learn to keep up.
Here’s the truth: The bike you ride really does matter. Oh sure, you can put a world-class cyclist on a shitty bike and he/she will keep up with just about anybody. But I’m not a world-class athlete and that Trek was just a grade above the Schwinn Varsity my old friend Eeker used to ride around the back streets of Elburn.
My whole life felt like I had to pedal harder than I should at that time. My wife was just coming out of an emotional breakdown after her cancer came back. My “new” job at an ad agency slowly dissolved as I dealt with the effects of all that stress. And caregiving for my father took up most of the rest of my time.
Eventually I joined the Athletes By Design cycling team to race criteriums on the Felt 4C.
Before riding the Trek 400, I’d been banging around on a silver Specialized Rockhopper, a bike I’d purchased back in 2002 or so. Something in me wanted to go faster, so I proposed to my brothers that I take a bit of my father’s dough and buy a better road bike as a bit of compensation for all the caregiving.
That summer of 2007 I visited Spokes in Wheaton and rode a few bikes around the parking lot. I recall pedaling a Specialized Allez and it felt good. But the owner plopped me on a Felt 4C and that bike was carbon fiber and light as heck. It also had Dura-Ace components, something you don’t often find on what amounts to a mid-level road bike. I spent $2K on the Felt, bought some decent road cycling shoes for $300 and some kits to go along with it. At long last, I felt like an actual cyclist.
The transformation happened quickly. I was instantly able to keep up with the Saturday morning group ride for most of the distance. We typically rode 50-70 miles averaging 18-20 mph. Sometimes I’d get dropped at the 3/4 mark but by then I didn’t care. I was part of the group and that’s all that mattered.
As the weeks went by from spring through fall I got faster and entered some criterium bike races. That was a learning experience, and one I’ll chronicle more fully in a story about what it’s like to bike race. It was far different than running, that much I learned quickly.
I’d shaved my legs since 2004 or so when I got the Trek, so that was not a problem. But I did show my rookie roots that first day on the Felt at the group ride by showing up with the reflectors still on the wheels and a visor on my new helmet. “Cud,” my best friends told me. “Take the reflectors off and lose the visor. Then you’ll be a roadie.”
Some weeks I’d do fine and other times I’d lose the wheels of everyone and wind up riding home alone. My psyche was inconsistent with all the stress going on. Over time I realized that my inability or lack of desire to compete some weeks was due to a form of PTSD from all the caregiving. The will to keep up on the bike just wasn’t there sometimes. I forgave myself for that, but my buddies were sometimes less than understanding. The fact of the matter is that my mental health went so far back and forth that there’s no way even close friends could anticipate it.
Once you start looking down as a cyclist it’s usually a sign you’ll be getting dropped.
One week a rider from their prior clubs joined us and somewhere about forty miles I was suffering and dropped their wheels. They rode about a mile ahead when the “new guy” asked where I’d gone. “Oh, he’s like that sometimes,” they told him.
“Why?” he wanted to know.
They explained how I was going through stuff with my wife and as they related his response to me, he turned to them and said, “Why the fuck are you leaving him behind?”
Now, I’ll say that I often told them to go on ahead when I didn’t feel up to the pace each day. But I always appreciated the consideration and concern of that rider. I don’t recall who he was. My journey into the world of cycling was like that. Sometimes it was fun and exciting. At other times it was harsh and disillusioning. In other words, cycling is no different from everything else of life. We’re all riding through the pain one way or another.
In the spring of 2007, toward the end of a seven-year tenure at the Daily Herald, I was freelancing with a marketing agency run by a guy named Vince. My role was serving as a creative director of sorts, writing content in collaboration with the designers and some other staff. Vince was a ‘make it up as you go along’ type who had worked several years as a car salesman before moving into the marketing world with Pat O’Rahilly, a wunderkind type who sold his auto dealerships to start up a direct response marketing firm.
I worked for Vince for a couple years at that agency before getting dumped in a downsizing move to position the company for sale. But Vince always liked my work and I’d helped him win a ton of business at the prior agency before so he brought me in to help the agency he started once he got dumped as well.
I freelanced for Vince while working full-time at the Daily Herald. He paid me really well for the work I was doing with rates over $100 an hour. I received a check or two for $6000 over time and the bank where I kept my accounts sent a young investment kid after me once they saw those deposits. Money sniffers are everywhere in this world.
Sales Junkets
My boss at the Daily Herald didn’t care if I took a vacation day or two to go on sales junkets with Vince. Frankly, I think he hoped I’d up and leave the company because his only goal was limping along until retirement. He was sick of me because I was hard to manage and actually kept trying to make things happen rather than keeping our heads down hoping no one would notice the marketing department.
So I flew out East with Vince and some other agency team members to make a pitch for the business of a company that specialized in men’s suits. That company had just been sold by three Jewish businessmen that had built a chain of more than 100 stores across the east and southern portions of the United States. They were smart for selling, as the tide was about to turn on suit sales in the nation. Business casual was about to take over corporate America and I think those guys knew it. They sold their company for plenty of dough to a Wharton School graduate and some internal managers who took it over. They were cocky and sure of themselves, and my spidey sense told me that’s never a good thing.
We met their entire management and marketing staff and the mood of our pitch meeeting was not all that pretty. It was clear that the folks working there weren’t that convinced about the new management team. They mostly sat silent during our pitch or asked pointed questions trying to punch holes in us. I didn’t really blame them. But I’d led plenty of pitches over time and knew how to turn negative comments into positive points. That wound up being a good strategy. At one point the new President of the company pointed a finger at me across his chest and said, “It’s nice to have a really intelligent guy in the room.”
What I was actually doing was convincingly selling a thick and rich line of bullshit. Our agency didn’t know a damned thing about some of the things we’d be called to do if we won that account. I think their people knew it. Yet I knew just enough to talk about the work in a way that made it look like we knew what we were doing. To my relief, the new leadership was impressed. They became our in-meeting advocates. At that point, the internal team didn’t want to challenge their authority. I felt bad about that because my honesty was going tested but like so many things in business where there’s a job to do and money to be made, honesty takes a back seat. My rationale was that we’d figure it all out once we won the account.
Victory dance
We walked out of there having won the business and Vince was ecstatic. We climbed into the rented Cadillac and he honked the horn and drove around like a madman. That night he treated us all to dinner at a fine restaurant. “Surf and Turf!” he chortled, opening yet another bottle of wine. “We just won a million-dollar account!” He turned to me and said, “YOU fucking nailed it.”
Toward the end of the meal, Vince took a look at the gutted lobster and said, “Watch this!” He called the waiter over and began stroking the lobster’s back and making an indetectable squeaking sound with his lips. The waiter froze, thinking the damned lobster was still alive. Then another waiter came over and Vince played the trick again. A look of horror locked on both their faces. Then Vince began laughing and said, “I was just kidding ya! I can make that noise, see?” Then he did it without the lobster stroking for effect. I admit that I adored that side of Vince. He was a character with often good intentions that could make me laugh in many ways.
Yet that dead lobster routine would turn out to be a grand symbol of the coup we’d pulled off that day. The entire clothing business and all hundred-plus stores in the S&K chain would go bankrupt by 2009. Google shared this review: “What happened to S&K Menswear…” and says “S&K Famous Brands is the latest national retail chain to succumb to bankruptcy. The Virginia-based company will close all 105 of its S&K Menswear stores including three in Buffalo Niagara. In spite of our best efforts, the current economic climate left us with no choice but to close down the business.”
Bushwhacked
The “current economic” climate was due in major part to the Bush-induced recession. Yet that wasn’t the only (or real) reason S&K succumbed to economic forces beyond their control. The overall market for business suits was eroding fast. Men just weren’t buying as many suits as they once were.
While chains like Men’s Wearhouse have survived since then, far fewer suits were being sold by many suit-sellers. During the early 2000s, I’d regularly shopped at a store called 3-for-1 Suits Direct and loved their prices and styles. But by 2010, the call to wear suits to work was fading and that company eventually went under too. So did a few formally successful formal wear companies.
Companies like S&K did great business for many years when suits were required business attire across corporate America. So while my business acumen wasn’t always the greatest, I witnessed people supposedly far smarter than me making huge business miscalculations, including running a multi-million dollar company into the ground. Over the years I saw plenty of “behind-the-scenes” activity that was not so pretty either. I’ve never liked how some “business” is consummated in the dark world behind the deals.
Making it happen
As for our role as an agency, to the credit of the people with whom I worked on the account, they figured out how to manage the expected marketing tactics and make it all happen. But I was forced off the S&K work by an aggressive account manager eager to protect her own job. I didn’t have the will or competitive spirit by then to fend her off. The condition of my wife’s cancer and the stress it placed on me made it difficult to play any sort of leadership role at that time. I was hollowed out and could feel my star fading at the agency even though I’d originally won the business. I did some copywriting and collaborated with the S&K marketing manager, but even he seemed to sense that nothing good was going to come from the enterprise.
By November of 2007, it was clear that things would come to an end for me at the agency. I wrote in my journal, “I’m just so tired of my heart beating through my chest. Wonder if this is how my dad always felt.” My father had his own problems keeping jobs over the years.
Brainwise
Recent drawing of Chris Cudworth by a four-year old daughter of a friend
By the age of 50, I recognized that my brain had some symptomatic problems. What they were exactly was hard to define. I wrote in my journal and called it “impatience” for lack of a better description. “I just can’t shake some old habits that bring me down,” I wrote. “I’ve noticed my impatience with everyone.”
What that really meant was a lack of ability to pay attention when I got bored, distracted, or felt that the ideas being put forward were somehow wrong.” I had zero patience for that.
I did not yet realize these were symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, a condition I’d had my entire life, but had not yet put a label on it. “There’s something wrong there,” I noted. “Anyway, go for a run and roll up to work late morning. Meet with Vince and move on in life.”
That fall I met with a psychologist who… I noted in my journal “seized on my work situation as the most serious and difficult part of my fear matrix.” She recommended I try to get back with the agency where Vince and I had both worked before. That was good advice. I tried a few channels yet in my hurried, worried, distracted ADHD state with all that caregiving burden and financial issues I actually missed an invitation to follow up on that opportunity. A possible cure for my worst problems had escaped me.
Ultimately, I stumbled on an online article and made a note about it in my journal: “Generalized Anxiety Disorder.” I wrote: “At least this feeling has a name. This quivering, low-grade fear that escalates into near panic. That debilitates my well-being. That interrupts my functions.”
I was essentially struggling with the gutted lobster of my full-time employment but couldn’t whistle away the reality that my attention and abilities were being undercut by stress and the distraction of worry. Vince once told me, “I like you better when you smile.” Then one day in November, he called me in and said, “You’re done. You can turn in your computer today.”
I said, “Fuck that. I’m keeping the computer. I’ve earned that.” He didn’t argue. I packed up my stuff and drove thirty miles home, relieved that the conflicted situation at the agency was over. I couldn’t honestly say that I “tried my best” because my best wasn’t really available that summer and fall. All I’d done is survive for a while.
A salvation that suited me
At the same time my work on a book I was writing neared completion in 2007. That book, titled“The Genesis Fix: A Repair Manual for Faith In the Modern Age” was a project I’d worked steadily on from the early 2000s. It addressed the “Effects of biblical literalism on politics, culture, and the environment.” It was my response to the insanity of conservative religiosity corrupting American politics. I wrote, “Jesus was legitimately worried that people were taking the word of God too literally. The priests he chastised used a literal interpretation of scripture to dictate the conduct and faith of others. it was a common problem then and remains so today that religious leaders focus too heavily on the law and letter of God and lose sight of the meaning behind the words. What Jesus represented was a new form of truth, strikingly rich in symbolism at its core. The religious leaders of his day were largely unable to free themselves of legalistic restraints to accept the methods and ministry of Jesus. ”
I designed the cover using a photograph taken of the metal industrial dock at the Daily Herald a few months before. For a few years, I’d advance pitched it to publishers and some said “the idea’s great and necessary…” but informed me that since I wasn’t a pastor or professor or a famous person, the likelihood of getting a book deal was nil. So I self-published.
Because you know what? Sometimes the definition of being a winner is to do something in spite of everyone else telling you it can’t be done. Finishing that book and holding it in my hands despite all the caregiving responsibilities and work challenges was a great satisfaction in life. Despite all the political bullshit I’d been through at work, I’d made this one pure thing happen in life. I’d written a book. No one could take that away from me, and that’s worth something because it means that you’re still competing in life and determined to speak some manner of truth no matter what else the world throws at you. That’s one of the tarsnakes of life. Sometimes you gotta do whatever suits you.
This content is a continuing contribution to a book I’ll be completing titled Competition’s Son.
Note: To see “through a glass” — a mirror — “darkly” is to have an obscure or imperfect vision of reality. The expression comes from the writings of the ApostlePaul; he explains that we do not now see clearly, but at the end of time, we will do so.
We’d been optimistic through my late wife’s diagnosis and treatment for ovarian cancer. From the summer of 2005 to the early summer of 2007, we did everything the doctors told us. She had surgery, then worked through eight chemo treatments followed by three intraperitoneal “injections” straight into her abdomen. The cancer was gone according to all practical measurements. CA-125 was down below 10.
The challenge in dealing with cancer is beating it at the cellular level, and cancer is adept at hiding below the detectable level until the chemo fades and the doctors get busy with other patients. Then it raises its tiny fucking little head and starts taking over tissue in its inestimably devastating habit.
Eventually, it builds back its foundations and a tumor grows or blood levels rise. Then the host body starts feeling odd and the tests show the CA-125 numbers rising. From 10-20. From 20-80. And from 80 to 800. Then the doctor goes “Well we better look into this.”
When cancer returns it is devastating, sometimes worse than the first time around when innocence keeps the facts at bay. For my late wife, the news that cancer was back caused a complete mental breakdown. I was in the living room when the phone call came through. She went into a rage, then tears of frustration and fear, and rage again. She collapsed in our bedroom and did not come out for a long time. I could hear the sobbing and when I came in she muttered “NO!” in a hard voice and kept on crying.
She did not emerge from that state of mind at all well. Her affect disappeared into a mute phase. I called a nurse friend to visit us the next day and during her visit, she told me, “She needs meds and a psychiatrist.”
Getting a psychiatry appointment when your health insurance is held by an HMO is basically impossible. I called every psych within fifty miles and finally found one that would see her. I could barely get her out the door. The world at large frightened her. All the spirit in her had vanished. No amount of prayer changed her demeanor. We entered the psychiatrist’s office to be greeted by a room full of people staring at us. That didn’t help at all. The meeting went quickly and we walked out of there with a prescription for depression and anti-anxiety medicine.
During those difficult weeks, even a visit from her parents was too much for her to bear. All the world was seen through a glass darkly.
A drawing of the author by the four-year-old daughter of a friend
This all took place while I was trying to hold that job together at the agency where I’d taken the position of CMO. The signs of weakness in my daily affect were obvious and respect for my abilities diminished by the day. The President told me, “I like you more when you smile.”
Within a few weeks, the company gave me the heave-ho and I didn’t tell my wife at first. I called our two closest friends to come over for support. By then, my wife’s mental health was at least stable, and the news of yet another job loss hit her in the numb spots. For that I was grateful. She stared at me with a strange look of sadness mixed with terminal resolve.
“We’ll get through this too,” she said.
It’s all we could do. Sometimes that’s all you can do. Just get through it. My life as a distance runner taught me that many times. It’s called “survival stride.” Art imitates life and life imitates art.
We Run and Ride 