As a smoker for 30 years, John Scheibel was looking for a way to get that monkey off his back. The
54-year-old CEO of Scheibel Halaska Inc. knew, as author Kurt Vonnegut once put it, that he was slowly “committing suicide by cigarette,” but he still struggled with a pack-a-day habit.
“When you are younger, you have this mental image that you are an athlete, then life happens,” said Scheibel, a Saukville resident who leads his marketing/communications firm in downtown Milwaukee.
Scheibel said he started smoking in college, and it turned into a 30-year bad habit.
“It truly is an addiction,” Scheibel said. “There’s a lot of people who smoke who do it even though they don’t enjoy it anymore.”
Searching for a mechanism to help him quit smoking, he found one when he signed up for the Chicago Marathon after watching his son compete in the race in 2006. Using preparation to run a 26.2-mile marathon as a device to stay on the quitting bandwagon, Scheibel started working out right after the calendar turned to 2007. As a self-described couch potato who had not exercised regularly for years, Scheibel deliberately set himself up with a significant challenge.
Throughout 2007, his goal was to take a 35-pound overweight body, “a heart attack waiting to happen,” as he puts it, and transform himself into someone who could complete a marathon. For the first five months, his training regimen involved running five miles three times a week.
“The first couple of months, he had to walk. He couldn’t run,” recalled his wife, Mary, founder of Scheibel Halaska. “He just kept at it and kept at it.”
Scheibel had already quit smoking and was still in the early stages of beginning his exercise program when became aware of the Small Business Times Fittest Executive challenge last year. At that point, he had told virtually no one about his plans to run in the Chicago marathon, and he called the Fittest Execs challenge one of the last pieces of reinforcement that he needed to actually commit to running the marathon.
“I didn’t have any thought that I would be the Fittest Exec,” he said. “But it gave me a forum to sit down and go through the assessment — it does give you base markers to make future assessments of your progress. In signing up and filling out the application, almost concurrently, that’s when I got online and got signed up for the Chicago Marathon. So, it was a piece of an overall framework that is going to have saved my life, quite frankly.”
Mary Scheibel recalls being shocked when her husband told her nonchalantly that he was planning to run in the marathon. To her, the biggest gain in all of this is that John no longer smokes.
“To know that he is not smoking anymore, that is the biggest difference,” she said. “Before, he was always trying to quit, and he was crabby. I think he feels much better about himself, and he is much healthier overall.”
“I went from literally being a couch potato on Dec. 31, 2006, to being in physical shape to complete four runs totaling 40 miles by the end of the following year,” he said.
Now that he has quit, he finds more continuity to his work day, as opposed to the broken, stop-start sequence he followed when he went outside to smoke.
“I feel much more productive and focused,” he said. “Smokers have a monkey on their back – it’s a self-esteem issue. It was a gnawing thing in my subconscious, ‘How can you be so well-educated and aware of the world around you, and you can’t get rid of this nuisance?’ So, I think my self-esteem is much higher now. I don’t have that monkey on my back anymore.”
As for the Chicago Marathon, he never finished it. But, not because he couldn’t. On that particular Sunday last October in Chicago, organizers stopped the race before noon, as the temperature was upwards of 95 degrees and they had run out of water. At that juncture, Scheibel had run 16 miles and wanted to continue.
He took the rest of the year off from running due to heavier business travel, as well as the recuperation his body required. Since the new year, he works out at the YMCA three or more times a week, focusing on weight training and muscle toning. He plans on running in the Chicago marathon again next year.
“The conclusion for me was to use all of that commitment and investment of time and energy to completely change my lifestyle by remaining smoke-free, getting regular exercise and eating more healthfully, ” Scheibel said. “Physically, I feel great, even though I am nowhere near in the shape to go out and bang out 10 miles. Some of the old aches and pains no longer exist. I think my mental energy is significantly higher, I don’t feel as lethargic, and I can tolerate longer hours better than I used to.”
Scheibel commends the sponsors of the Fittest Execs challenge, saying that the program is designed to motivate the leaders of companies to lead their employees in more than just business.
“That’s where I think the power is,” Scheibel said. “I hope the program continues to build momentum. People who take their physical situation seriously can speak to workers in a different way – that they care about physical health and well-being. I really commend Small Business Times for doing it, as well as all of the other people who are partnering in this.”
