For Wall Street’s Elite, Marathon Means Glorious Solitude

Bob Yawger, a commodities broker in Manhattan, gets up at 4:30 a.m. every day to get ready for his commute from Red Bank, N.J. After a 12-hour day and a one-hour commute home, he heads out to run some of the 60 miles he’s been running every week since May to get ready for the New York City marathon next week.The average person might think a 55-hour workweek or running in a marathon would each, on its own, qualify Mr. Yawger as certifiably insane. But like the 3,000 Wall Streeters running 26.2 miles through the five boroughs, he is doing both. To them, there’s nothing nuts about this combination: Running a marathon on top of crazy hours makes them better at their demanding jobs. And it keeps them sane. Sort of.“If I miss one day of running, I become testy, miserable,” said the hyperkinetic 42-year-old Mr. Yawger, who works at Man Financial.Making time for marathon training within her 70-hour work week is no easy task for Diane Kenna, one of New York’s fastest female runners and a director of debt capital markets at Merrill Lynch, running in her 45th marathon on Sunday. She ends up structuring deals in her head when she’s running for hours, and even drafts memos, transcribing them once she gets to her desk. Conversely, if an office meeting is boring, she’ll log her miles on a Post-it note.The caricature of the marathoner is that of a driven, obsessive, self-absorbed, disciplined, hyper-competitive person. And sometimes prone to being addicted to running.”People who throw themselves 100% into what they do have perfectionist tendencies and need to succeed at the highest levels, whether in business or exercise, and can develop addictions,” a Manhattan psychologist who teaches a sports addiction workshop at the William Alanson White Institute and is himself a runner, Anton Hart, said.Psychologists don’t agree on the threshold at which enthusiasm for running veers into addiction. But some runners don’t care if they are addicted.Take Tucker Andersen, a 64-year-old Wall Street veteran. He is the Cal Ripken of the New York Marathon, running in his record 31st straight New York Marathon. Some addictions are positive, he says, to his wife’s consternation. Anyway, says the former hedge fund manager with Cumberland Associates, “anybody this obsessive and with a streak this long won’t stop.”The last day he didn’t run was in 1992.If marathon training enables some of those Type A personality traits common in Wall Streeters to thrive, they claim it’s essential to their mental health.Mr. Yawger’s daily run is his only chance at what he calls “Bob time.” “It’s my relaxing time,” he says, though mere mortals might wonder what is so relaxing about running 60 miles a week.At the end of a work day, Ms. Kenna likes to change in her World Financial Center office and run the seven miles to her Upper West Side home. “It’s like I am literally running away from work,” she says with a laugh.As for the supposed loneliness of the long distance runner, these Wall Streeters welcome it. Though there are dozens of running clubs in the New York area, these execs seem to prefer running alone. “I hate running with other people,” says Mr. Yawger. Company prevents him from entering a meditative zone during his long runs, he says.Then there’s New York’s doyenne of running, Mary Wittenberg. The 44-year-old marathon race director heads a staff of 80 at the 40,000-member New York Road Runners club. She has overseen New York’s efforts to field more runners, attract more elite runners, and work with corporate sponsors to give record monetary awards to the winners.The total purse is $700,000, including $130,000 for each of the men’s and women’s champions. It’ll be the largest guaranteed prize purse of any marathon ever.“Running helps me set goals and sacrifice instant reward for my long-term goal,” said Ms. Wittenberg, who won the 1987 Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C, in a time of 2:44. “That translates into my management style.”Seth Cohen, a 41-year-old Upper West Sider and a manager at the Silver Point Capital hedge fund in Greenwich, Conn., is a BlackBerry addict. “Running time is the free time for your mind, free from the BlackBerry, cell phone, and other external demands,” says the first-time marathoner, expressing his bewilderment at the sight of runners in Central Park speaking on their cell phones.The appeal of this solitary aspect of marathoning comes as little surprise to Mr. Hart, who has treated marathon and triathlon addicts, and says it can have “personal therapeutic value.”He says there is little culture of introspection on Wall Street, and he has found it hard to get his marathoner patients curious about themselves. Despite all that time alone, he says it can paradoxically be “a way of escaping facing yourself” because while it is time alone, many spend it thinking about their pace, their physical pain, and their jobs.And in a profession where the ego can take a beating from unfavorable market movements, running can be a source of great solace. “In bad times, I need an objective measure of myself that is not related to the stock market,” says Mr. Andersen, who says running saved him during the turmoil of the 1987 crash.Not inclined to psycho-babble, many Wall Streeters say the bottom line is that running makes them better at their jobs.Ms. Kenna says it gives her more energy and unleashes her creativity. She also says patience and discipline have made her an elite runner: She finished third among 723 women between 41 and 44 at the New York City Half-Marathon in August. “Deals can take three to six months, so the marathon has that same feeling of long-term planning and strategy and payoff,” she says. And as much as she tries not to factor athleticism into recruitment, she can’t help but feel kinship with an applicant who is exercise-oriented, too.As for the woefully undertrained Mr. Cohen, he says his ability to “keep grinding it out” through the pain will pull him through on Sunday.For all the benefits they say running brings to their careers and lives, Wall Streeters don’t deny it enables their obsessive streak and need to manage everything, even training, by objectives. And contrary to stereotype, these Wall Streeters aren’t competitive with other runners. It’s all about them.“I know my times for every run I’ve ever done,” says Mr. Yawger. “I micromanage every aspect of my training and plan everything to the hilt.”“I am competitive only with myself,” says Ms. Kenna.While each runner has a different goal on Sunday — Ms. Kenna is pacing a blind runner and wants her to finish in 3:45; Mr. Yawger wants to beat 3:30; Mr. Andersen wants to come in under five hours; Mr. Cohen just wants to finish — none makes any apologies about his or her obsessiveness.Says Mr. Yawger, who has his boss’s permission to get his hair cut into a Mohawk and dyed white for the occasion, “It’s got me this far.”One of the most common afflictions for these runners is a case of the post-marathon blues, when there is no more goal to chase.

For Wall Street’s Elite, Marathon Means Glorious Solitude

For Wall Street’s Elite, Marathon Means Glorious Solitude

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