By the time I had entered my fifties the portrait might have appeared complete. To the world it portrayed me as a respected member of the medical community, acknowledged as being in the top tier of practicing psychiatrists in New York’s Capital District. My reputation benefitted from the fact that most of my peers, who were not all that competent at psychotherapy to begin with, had abandoned it. Almost all the other shrinks tailored their practices around brief drug focused sessions with patients who were referred for medication management by social workers. Why? This model of “care” was financially rewarded by insurance companies. Also, drug companies wined and dined us and paid big shot researchers to indoctrinate us with overblown claims about their products.
Other shrinks even mocked me for continuing to offer psychotherapy to my patients, but I doggedly, in the face of significant loss of income, continued to believe in its healing power. I devoted hours of study to improving my therapeutic skills. This was what I’d gone into the field to do, not only because it was effective, but because it was infinitely fascinating and intellectually challenging. Drugs do help, but they also have their limits. Along with the drugs many of my patients needed, I provided whatever sort of therapy was appropriate for each of them. While others talked about “treatment resistant” depression and threw the whole pharmacopeia at such patients, treatment resistance was something I rarely encountered. Usually the first drug I tried worked. After the fact, I believe what really worked was the psychotherapy.
Even as I divided my energies among my many pursuits, I never lost sight of the fact that my medical practice was job number one, a job I loved. While the others treated symptoms, I treated people, formulating a comprehensive diagnosis on which to base a coherent treatment plan while fostering a strong working alliance. The relationships thus forged mutually enriched our lives.
This became more and more difficult to do as insurers refused to pay for therapy. Rather than providing inferior care, I decided to retire at the relatively young age for a physician of 64.
During my fifties I continued to swim for exercise but not competitively. I geared my workout routine toward longer swims, wishing to test my endurance as age chipped away at speed. At some point it occurred to me to try to swim the equivalent of a running marathon. Given the fact that one mile of swimming is equivalent to four miles of running, I’d need to swim 6.5 miles in a single session. This I did, interestingly, in about the same time I would later record in running marathons. That swim started me thinking that running would be a new and worthwhile challenge. Not long afterward I began to supplement my swimming workouts with short runs. I soon began to enjoy the fresh challenge of running and shifted the workouts increasingly toward it. Approaching age 60, I began to feel like, despite all the challenges I had taken on in sport, completing a 26.2 mile run would be a sort of crowning achievement to cap off my athletic “career.” In the spring of 2004, having been running less than a year, I entered a 5K race and finished third in age with a respectable time. That caught the attention of coach, Jim Bowles, who invited me to join Albany’s Team Utopia. Jim insisted I’d be ready to run a marathon by the fall. I was skeptical, but followed the training regimen and entered the October, 2004 Mohawk-Hudson Marathon.
Many runners run marathon after marathon trying to achieve, in vain, a time that would qualify them for Boston’s iconic race, but Boston was the last thing on my mind. My goal was simply to run the full distance. I didn’t even know what the Boston qualifying time was. I figured after successfully completing the goal of just finishing, I’d give up running and settle back into comfortable fitness swimming for the rest of my years. Fate had other plans, for when I looked at the race result sheet, there was an asterisk next to my name. It denoted that my finishing time met the Boston qualifying standard.
I wasn’t even sure I wanted to enter that race, but if you have read my essay, “Running On Faith,” you know that I did and, that in the process of training for and participating in it, my own personal “Olympics,” I had a spiritual experience. In that essay I talked about my lifelong agnosticism, really atheism, and noted that, maybe due to endorphins, while running I felt more in touch with some kind of universal power. I quoted missionary and Olympian Eric Liddell, who said “God made me fast and it pleases him to see me run.” Liddell asked “where does the power come from, to see the race to its end?” “It comes,” he answered, “from within.”
The essay concluded on my words:
“From within. What is this thing within us? Some call it the soul. The best part of us, it reaches inward toward greatness and outward toward something greater still. It is a blessing to have had this chance to run Boston. It is a benediction to have the chance to run the race called Life. If God is watching, I hope He is pleased.”
That realization expanded my understanding of what had motivated me all those years to do my best. It had not been only overcompensation for my early sense of inferiority.
The probability of ever being born is infinitesimally small. It is like winning a zillion lotteries. Each of us is endowed with certain potentialities. As an act of gratitude for having won the rare prize of life, it is incumbent on each of us to make the most of our “God given” gifts in all ways, both to our own benefit and to that of the rest of the world. To my mind, to fail to do so is an affront to whatever forces bestowed that gift upon us. We should live, then, in the hope that if there were a God, our lives would have pleased Him, and if there were not, no matter, for we must all conduct ourselves in a way that would have pleased Him if He actually existed.
I continued to run competitively for the next 10 or so years with much local and regional success. As I approached my seventies and backed off to fitness running and swimming, I felt I had nothing more to prove. Again, I was mistaken. A new passion took over, one that gives meaning to my life still.
I will talk about that in the next and final chapter.
An Author's Inner Mind 