Officials Sweats Out Their Stress at Gym

There’s a $40-million budget shortfall this year that could well jump to $60 million next year. There is a desperate need for a new Orange County jail, but no one can agree on where to build it or how to pay for it.

Complaints increase daily about the lack of money to house and feed the homeless, some of whom live in the bushes right outside the County Hall of Administration building. Crime is on the increase and the criminal justice system needs more judges and more courtrooms. The problems often appear insurmountable.

So how do some county officials keep their heads when others have lost theirs?

County Administrative Officer Ernie Schneider skips lunch and heads for the YMCA--a small, colorless gym with basketball and handball courts across the street from the county government complex in downtown Santa Ana.

He and others, from high-ranking county administrators to judges and prosecutors, pass up the three-martini lunches in favor of sweating it out pumping iron, running, playing basketball or toiling on bodybuilding machines.

They say the daily exercise is their antidote to the stress and frustrations of managing thousands of people, spending billions in taxpayers funds, prosecuting criminals and ordering them to Death Row.

“It takes the edge off. There is so much stress associated with this job,” Schneider, the county’s top administrator, explained after a daily workout last week. “There are so many arrows and bullets flying in my direction that when I work out it’s like things slow down and I can dodge the bullets easier.

“That’s because I’m not hyped, you know, I’m not skitzed, I’m not jumping up and down all over the place, freaking out. It’s not that I’m tired, I actually have more energy, but there’s a calmness, a mellowness.”

Officials like Schneider, 43, County Planning Director Thomas Mathews, Superior Court Judge Robert R. Fitzgerald, and county prosecutor Kelly W. MacEachern, have been making the daily treks to the gym for years. They are among hundreds of county employees who exercise their lunch hours away each day by running in Santa Ana or working out at nearby gyms and health clubs.

They set their schedules so they can spend an hour or more each day lifting weights, running, playing basketball or handball, swimming, pumping a stationary bike, pulling make-believe oars, or working on a variety of aerobic exercises.

They very seldom deviate from what they call their “addictions” and “euphoric experiences.” All of them confessed that they become “cranky, irritable, and not much fun to be around” if they are denied their daily exercise.

After a workout, they return to their desks and eat chicken or peanut butter sandwiches, a salad or fruit they brought to the office in a brown paper bag. They have a camaraderie with others who go to the gym regularly and feel that the daily routines keep them young, mentally alert and thin.

MacEachern, 36, prosecutes child molesters, an extremely stressful job because “you know that little children are being abused sexually and physically.”

“I don’t think I could survive without working out,” said MacEachern, a mother of four children ranging in ages from 1 to 10. “I’m working full time and have four kids, three of them in soccer, three of them go to tutors and one is in gymnastics . . . as you can imagine, our evenings are really full.”

She runs 3 miles four times a week before she comes to work. Then four days a week she visits the gym at the Santa Ana-Tustin YMCA at 205 Civic Center Drive. Fridays are reserved for “social contact,” when she has lunch with other lawyers in her office.

What if she had to stop working out?

“I would have ulcers and would be screaming at everybody all the time,” she said. “I think the tension would build up so badly I probably would have either physical problems or emotional problems.”

Even since he came to work for the county in 1974, Mathews, 47, head of the county Planning Department in the Environmental Management Agency, has been working out at the YMCA gym.

“Exercising is as much a part of my life as eating and sleeping,” Mathews said. “I look better in my clothes and feel better and more professional. I take care of myself physically because that is part of the package of maintaining myself as a professional.”

Mathews’ department evaluates and makes recommendations for development projects in unincorporated areas of the county. Many times, the department feels pressure for the public as well as from powerful developers.

“Working out allows my mind to loosen up enough to accept other alternatives or view problems from other angles,” Mathews said. “Generally speaking, people who work out regularly are very positive people. Positive people want to be around positive people.”

“Ego is a big part of it. . . . Ego is a very fundamental characteristic of the human animal. I recognize that and I don’t have a problem with that,” he said.

Superior Court Judge Robert R. Fitzgerald years ago traded in his lunchtime martinis for a basketball and weights.

When Fitzgerald, 55, was in private practice in the early 1970s, he attended a lot of lunches.

“It was customary for business reasons to have lunch with folks and tip a few martinis. So I was a regular noontime imbiber,” said Fitzgerald, often considered one of the toughest judges in Orange County and who has sent six convicted murders to Death Row in San Quentin. “In 1974, I quit drinking for good on April Fools’ Day. A year later, I was involved in heavy athletics and ever since then it has been noontime workouts rather than noontime drink-outs.”

He can often be seen on the YMCA basketball floor at noon playing pickup games against men half his age. After he exhausts himself he goes downstairs to the weight room for another 10-minute workout.

“It’s almost a euphoric experience,” he said. “This would be a very stressful job for most people. . . . I know one thing when I go and work out at noontime: I am really mellow in the afternoon session of court. Sometimes in the early part of the day I am pretty much a grouch.”

Schneider, who, as county administrator makes $129,000 a year, and heads a budget of $3.3 billion and a county work force of more than 16,000, said many of the pressing problems at his level are not solvable. For example, he said, the state cut $13 million to the county for services and there is nothing the county can do to make up the money.

Problems like this send him to the gym. “It takes the edge off--I can’t really think of a better way to put it.

“As funny as it may sound, it gives me even more strength to get through the day,” said the wedged-shaped Schneider, who has a vigorous exercise and handball schedule Monday through Friday. On weekends he surfs and takes long walks along the beach with his wife, Sally, and 9-year-old son, Nicolas.

“When I don’t work out I get very irritable. I get tense and I don’t have very much patience. I feel more stressed out and more pushed to the wall,” Schneider said.

Many of those who work out religiously become preachers of sorts spreading the word of exercise as a way to better physical and mental health.

Schneider, who has run a marathon and numerous triathlons, hands out free one-week passes to the YMCA.

“I have more respect for someone who cares enough for how they look and how they feel than someone who doesn’t,” Schneider said. “I know how much work it takes and how much effort you have to put into it.

“People who say to me, ‘I don’t have the time,’ I don’t buy that. I don’t have time either, but I make time. It is a priority--it is what you want to do with your time and your life. I’m not looking for longevity, I am looking for quality.”