Trading the Fast Track for Fulfillment

From his patio, Lee Gruenfeld gazes west beyond graceful palms to Mt. San Jacinto, rising sharply above the desert. It seems to absorb dawn’s rich pastels, he says, varying in red and blue hues from one morning to the next.

Such pleasing nuance makes each day a little different and adds to the sense of fullness he sees in life. “My happiest moment is right now. It doesn’t get any better than this.”

At least, that is, until tomorrow.

Somewhere near the base of the mountain, his wife, Cherie Gruenfeld, is in the midst of a 100-mile bicycle ride, bucking hot desert winds, forcing herself to focus on pace and rhythm, potholes and traffic.

It is a wonderful feeling, she says, to finally find one’s place in life. It inspires a sense of destiny and gives meaning to each day, each mile, each breath. The feeling comes upon her whenever she is biking or running or swimming, and when it does, she simply knows she is doing what she was meant to.

For both Cherie and Lee, life took on greater meaning the moment they fled their corporate careers. Both were executives, climbing career ladders that seemed to have no end. But there came a point on the climb when their salaries and happiness began moving in opposite directions.

In their own ways, they knew something had to change. Perhaps, for Cherie, it was from having a brother killed in Vietnam, or, in Lee’s case, from being the son of Holocaust survivors. Whatever the source, they understood two things about life: its fleeting nature and miraculous possibilities.

In his new life, Lee, 50, is an author, and Cherie, 55, is the top-ranked amateur Ironman triathlete in the world. They split their time between Cathedral City, near Palm Springs, and their primary residence in Lake Arrowhead.

Lee quit his job as a technology consultant in 1991, and Cherie followed suit a year later. They sold their house on the beach, the Benz, the Jag. They knew they were giving up a dream life, but they also knew it was somebody else’s dream.

In seeking new careers, new lives, they are not alone, says Linsey Levine of CareerCounsel, based in New York. Levine travels nationally to coach clients who, for whatever reason, are switching course. Perhaps it’s office politics or a missed promotion, or maybe it’s problems with the new boss that trigger the change. Or maybe it’s a matter of simply wanting more from life.

“We go through different periods of our lives, and midlife is the period when many people begin to take stock,” says Levine. “There’s a period of introspection when people search for their own voice.”

For some, says Levine, it is more than a matter of finding a new job or a new career. “It’s a process of finding who you are, of reinventing your life.”

Finances play an important role in making such changes, notes Susan W. Miller of California Career Services in Los Angeles.

“It has to do with values and priorities and goals,” she says. “It has to do with age and what stage of life you are in. Do you have children to support? You have to ask yourself if you can afford to make the changes you want to make, and certainly with financial security, you have more options.”

Baby boomers tend to have more education and financial security than previous generations, Miller says. That, coupled with today’s booming job market, makes it easier to change careers.

Which is not to say, however, that if you are working as a janitor and your dream is to become a lab technician, that you can’t make the change.

“You may have to work nights as a janitor and learn landscaping during the day or something like that,” says Miller. “But it can be done as long as you’re willing to do the homework and persist, not look at obstacles as barriers.”

Miller, who answers career-related questions on the Los Angeles Times Web site, says that one of the great motivators for people looking to change their lives is unhappiness.

In that regard, Lee Gruenfeld was highly motivated. A partner at Deloitte & Touche, a Big Six professional services firm, he had been sucked in by a corporate scorecard that measures success in terms of money and power. He played and he won; but the thrill of the chase was not lasting. He was made a partner in 1987 and each year thereafter grew increasingly disillusioned. From the suits he wore to the 80-hour workweeks to the hundreds of thousands of miles he traveled each year, to the stifling, opaque nature of corporate protocol, he hated it all.

“It’s hard to describe in standard capitalistic corporate life the overwhelming cultural imperative that says there is nothing more important in life than making more money than you did last year and being one step higher up on the promotion ladder,” he says. “There are millions of people working who cannot imagine that there is something as important as getting ahead in the business. I know. I was there.”

Opposites Who Attracted

They are opposites in many ways. Cherie works out six days a week and has to force herself to take Mondays off. Lee likes his cigars, one for every nine holes of golf. While Cherie can be disciplined without being obsessive, Lee is the other way around. It took him only 10 weeks from the time he decided he wanted to become a pilot until he was licensed. He once wrote a book in five weeks.

They also come from different backgrounds. Cherie grew up in a small town, Port Angeles, Wash. Her father was a chemical engineer, her mother a homemaker and secretary. Lee was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., and grew up on Long Island. His immigrant father was a television technician who owned his own shop. His mother works as an office manager.

Cherie’s passion was sports, but there were few organized programs for girls when she was growing up. She was high school valedictorian, and went on to earn a master’s degree in education and become a teacher. After nine years in education, she wanted something different, so she returned to school and earned an associate’s degree in computer science.

She started out programming but didn’t like being tethered to a desk and moved into sales. Eventually, she worked her way up to vice president of sales and marketing for AICorp. in Southern California.

Lee’s passions as a child were music and science. At 6, he received a scholarship to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, but he chose physics when it came time for college. He graduated with a double major in philosophy and psychology at State University of New York at Stony Brook. He was awarded a fellowship to pursue a doctorate in psychology at the University of Texas.

The summer before he was to begin, he worked in New York delivering computer printouts for a small company. It was his introduction to computers, which drew his fascination. He never made it to the University of Texas, instead working in the computer business for eight years.

She came to L.A. in 1976 to work for Tymsharecq Inc. and met Lee in 1977 when he visited L.A. from that firm’s East Coast office. In 1979, Lee became a management consultant dealing primarily with advanced technology. He and Cherie were married in 1982, and their relationship quickly became a refuge. No matter how miserable he was at work, he says, everything was OK once he got home.

The problem was that he didn’t get home until late, and often when he did, Cherie was out of town on business. In January 1991, they met in a VIP lounge at LAX. Lee was getting ready to board a plane for Minnesota, while Cherie was returning home from Boston. In nearly the same breath, they said hello and goodbye, both of them thinking: “This has got to stop.”

Then one day while the two of them were waiting for another couple at cafe in Venice, they were looking out at the ocean, and Lee unveiled the plot of the book he wanted to write. It had been taking shape in his mind, and as he spoke, he saw her face light up. It was all the encouragement he needed to resign from his position and get his life back.

Cherie, on the other hand, kept working. She had been looking to make a change by age 50 but had no idea in what direction she might go. Maybe she would return to school, she thought, begin anew in a different field.

“I didn’t want to be doing what I was doing any longer,” she says. “It wasn’t for any particular reason except that I felt that at that point in my life, it would be time to move on. . . . I wasn’t as unhappy in my work as Lee, but it wasn’t very fun or exciting.”

She had always been a good athlete. As a youngster, she played on a national badminton team. She was a graceful skier and a skillful tennis player. Once at a company business conference, she entered an employee tennis tournament and won the men’s division. For her efforts, she was given a special honor by her colleagues--a pair of brass balls.

In 1986, she watched the L.A. Marathon on television and became intrigued. She bought a pair of running shoes and a book on the subject. Six months later, after tuning up with a couple of shorter runs, she ran her first marathon and qualified for Boston.

She loved the feel of running, its challenges, and the way that it clearly and simply reflected the relationship between effort and reward. She liked the fact that she alone was responsible for success or failure. In running, she felt a sense of control over her life that didn’t exist in the mad dash of corporate survival.

In 1990, she competed in the Goodwill Games despite suffering from a stress fracture in her hip that wasn’t diagnosed until after the competition. The injury forced her to take a break from running, so she rode a bicycle and swam, and that is how she began thinking about triathlons, which combine swimming, bicycling and running.

The changes the Gruenfelds made in their lives were supported by great, unproven talents. Lee’s first book, “Irreparable Harm,” was a thriller published in 1993 and set a Warner Books record with a $1.2-million advance for three books. When the deal was signed, Cherie was halfway out her office door, her sights set on her running shoes.

“It took me about 20 nanoseconds to decide to quit my job and try the Ironman,” she says. “I knew nothing about it at the time. I didn’t even know you had to qualify for it, so I was really jumping into something I knew nothing about.”

And that was part of the fun.

Her Goal Is to Win

First you swim 2.4 miles, then bicycle 112 miles, and then you run a marathon, 26.2 miles. The grueling nature of the Ironman triathlon also is its appeal, and while finishing in itself is accomplishment enough for some, Cherie competes to win.

Her times continue to improve, and she suspects she will compete as long as that is the case and as long as she has a chance of winning. “I couldn’t see putting myself in a competitive situation,” she says, “if I couldn’t be competitive within my age group.”

Last year for the first time, the sanctioning body for Ironman competition utilized a formula that factored in age and gender to come up with an overall amateur Ironman champion. Earlier in the year, Cherie had eclipsed the Ironman record for her age group by almost an hour, finishing in 11 hours and 58 minutes.

She holds the international and national Ironman records for women 55 to 59, the European record for women 50 to 54, and is the only woman 55 or older to complete an Ironman competition in less than 12 hours. Last year, she competed in seven triathlons, won her division in all of them and set three course records.

“She shows that there are no limits,” says Bob Babbitt, co-publisher and editor of Competitor Publications. “Some younger people burn out on athletics at an early age, and I think people who start later often enjoy it more.”

Cherie uses her age to her advantage for the insight it affords her. She tries to be smart about her training, and for each race she develops a specific, detailed strategy.

“Not God,” she says, “is going to make me change that plan.”

Still, there are times when she wonders what might have been had she started training sooner. This summer in Sydney, for the first time, there will be Olympic triathlon competition.

“But what I am today has to do with my whole life, and I don’t regret the years that I had before I got into this. There’s something very nice about doing it the way I did. The only regret I will take to the grave with me is that I would have given anything to be an Olympian.”

She also serves as a worthy ambassador for the sport, Babbitt says. She helps coach younger competitors and invites people to give the sport a try. One person she brought into the sport is Deborah Hafford, 41, of Pacific Palisades.

A friend and former co-worker of Cherie’s, Hafford had never run a mile in her life before Cherie got her to start working out at age 37. Cherie encouraged Hafford to run a 5K, then a 10K. Eventually, Hafford ran a marathon, and now she competes in triathlons.

“I think a lot of the things that made her successful in sales now make her successful as an athlete,” Hafford says. “You need to be aggressive and focused, a team player, and I think all the things that made her successful in sales translated to the triathlon.”

As much as Cherie has come to love the sport, Lee loves golf. It is a sport he took up after quitting his job, and it is the subject of his last two novels. Last month, he fired an 82 in Florida. It was akin to walking on water. He can still feel the precious sweetness, the distinct, unfettered click of the ball as he put a four-iron on the green from 200 yards out.

The thing about golf, he says, is that with diligence and time, one can do incredible things on the course, make unbelievable shots. The difficulty is lining up those incredible shots, one after the other, over an entire course.

“On any given day, you might just go out and put together all those shots you hit before into the most incredible round anybody’s ever shot. I think that is on every golfer’s mind when he steps up to the first tee.”

And, so, he keeps trying and hoping, the thrill of the chase renewed in his life. His latest book, “The Foursome,” (Doubleday) is due for release April 18. It is written under the pseudonym of Troon McAllister. He is working on another novel about “Internet market madness” to be published next March.

“Writing, for me, is not difficult,” he says. “I look at a novel as being 500 blank pages and no rules, and no rules is big on my priority list. . . . I’m convinced that if you like what you’re doing for a living, you can’t be happier. If you enjoy what you have to do to make money, those are the happiest people I know. Those who are stuck in a job that they don’t like, no matter what they do, they’re just never going to find peace.”

He says he can’t imagine work more enjoyable than writing, but who knows what the future holds? Who knows what new dreams and beauty that dawn might bring? That is the lesson of San Jacinto.

Duane Noriyuki can be reached at duane.noriyuki@latimes.com.