Transcription of Meg LePage for the show Active Life #183
Dr. L Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio show number one eighty-three airing for the first time on Sunday March 15, 2015. Today’s theme is Active Life. How do we balance professional and private responsibilities with the enjoyment of physical pursuits? For each person, the answer is different, but most of us find a great deal of satisfaction in taking the time to run, bike, walk, or otherwise get our bodies moving on a regular basis. Today, we speak with attorney Meg LePage and Ted Darling founding partner at Ethos Marketing about their athletic pursuits and why these have become an important part of their lives. Thank you for joining us.
One of my great loves is running and it’s always wonderful to spend time with people who share the love that I do. Meg LePage is a partner at Pierce Atwood in Portland. She has worked on a wide range of workplace disputes and her clients have included healthcare and educational institutions, financial service companies, insurance companies, manufacturers, social service agencies, summer youth camps and hospitality and recreation facilities. Meg is the mother of four grown children. She lives with her husband Mike in Cumberland. We have Megan today to talk about her work but also about her life outside of work as a dedicated runner. I’m really glad to have you here today.
Meg: Good morning. It’s good to be here.
Dr. L Belisle: Meg it’s funny to see you out running where I live because I live in Yarmouth, the islands out there. You live in Cumberland. That’s a long distance. You’re doing a lot of running these days.
Meg: I’m doing a fair amount. I’m actually training for the Boston Marathon on April 20th, so I’ve had to ramp up my mileage, but I do run Saturday mornings with a group.
Dr. L Belisle: This is probably where I’m seeing you.
Meg: That’s probably where you’re seeing me. We often go out to Cousins Island or Little John and we cover anywhere from maybe five or six miles to twelve or thirteen in the morning.
Dr. L Belisle: Tell me about your running schedule. I know that many runners will do, they’ll put together a plan if they’re going to run say Boston, if they’re going to run the Boston Marathon. What does that plan look like for you?
Meg: Well it’s supposed to be five days a week. I try to take Mondays and Fridays but I’ve had to adjust things with snow and subzero temperatures [sometimes 00:03:58]. I won’t go below zero. I try to run at least one long run and one medium length run and then the rest of them are four, five, six miles.
Dr. L Belisle: A long run for you can be up to?
Meg: Well the longest run in the training will be twenty, but right now I’m running about fourteen, fifteen is the longest run.
Dr. L Belisle: Running for you is something that has come about relatively recently or at least with the intensity that you’re approaching it now.
Meg: Yeah, it didn’t start until I was about fifty-three. I’m fifty-six now so it’s been three years. All four of my kids ran through high school and college, but I stood on the sidelines watching them. It never occurred to me to run other than maybe a mile or two here and there. I had a neighbor who was an avid runner. She kept encouraging me to go out. She ran at 5:00 in the morning which wasn’t appealing. One day I came back from visiting my daughter in South Africa and my time was all messed up. She asked me why don’t you come out and run with me tomorrow morning? I did. I had just finished chemotherapy about six months before that and was trying to get my strength back and so I said on a lark, “Sure I’ll run with you.”
She was training for the Boston Marathon. From that day, I kept going out with her at 5:00 in the morning four or five days a week and I got hooked by accident but I realized there was this whole social world out there of people that like to run together, like to go to races together and so forth. That was a world I had no idea existed.
Dr. L Belisle: You and I have known each other for a while and your life looked very different maybe we’ll say ten, fifteen years ago. I mean your kids are all grown now. Three of them are in [Denver 00:06:00]. They’ve all graduated from college, but you at one time you were really in the thick of things.
Meg: Yeah for quite a few years. It was working full time and having four kids, juggling their schedules was a challenge and I found it very difficult during that period of time to incorporate exercise. It almost felt self indulgent to do that, to take time off to do that, so it was tricky. I played some tennis and at times played squash but not on a regular basis. Now it’s much easier. I can get up in the morning and leave if I can force myself out the door. I can work out at night if I want to so I don’t have those same kind of limits. I also don’t have limits on work too. I can work until 10:00 at night, sometimes I do.
Dr. L Belisle: Why did it feel self indulgent?
Meg: I don’t know. I always felt like I should be doing something else when I was exercising, I should be working or I should be doing something with the kids or getting some chore done. I just felt a low priority for a while.
Dr. L Belisle: Tell me about how you came to be an attorney?
Meg: That was accidental. I was in college. I was an English major. I had thought of going to medical school and decided I liked the arts and humanities more than the sciences and so decided that wasn’t a route I wanted to take. I spent a summer in D.C. working on Capitol Hill and thought that was really interesting, was with a bunch of people that were taking the LSATs. Decided to do that that summer and then I just followed that path. When I got out of law school, I never thought I’d be doing private practice for more than a couple of years, but it’s been about thirty-two years. I’m still doing the same thing I did when I got out of law school to which in retrospect is really surprising to me.
Dr. L Belisle: What did you think that you would be doing when you got out of law school? What did you think your focus was going to be?
Meg: Well I thought I would start out in a firm and then do something different whether it was in house or in business. I wasn’t really sure, but I just figured I’d start out in a firm and I’d probably branch out and do something different but so far doing the same thing and I’m still enjoying it.
Dr. L Belisle: Well I’m fascinated by the wide range of things that you do. It’s having known many attorneys there tends to be quite a narrow focus and you’re dealing with healthcare, education, financial companies, social services, recreation, I mean you’re almost the equivalent of a legal family doctor. It’s an interesting thing because it doesn’t seem to be the way that many attorneys go these days.
Meg: Yeah, well I’m not focused in terms of industry too much. I do a lot of different things but I’m focused on the human resources primarily and so it’s a narrow area of law even though it’s everybody has people in their organizations. Then the school, the education area I’m doing employment work but also work involving students and again it’s people oriented. It is focused in terms of the legal discipline, but it’s a variety and I like that. I like to be talking to a hospital one day about issues involving nurses and then the next day you’re talking about manufacturing welders or some other kind of completely different occupation.
Dr. L Belisle: You and Mike, because Mike has been on the show before and I think people in the community, if anybody doesn’t know Mike LePage already then I’m sure you’ll run across him at some point. You both have a very strong sense of connection to people and in very different ways. It’s interesting to me that you both are in occupations that allow you to connect, not only personally but professionally, but yours is a more quiet way.
Meg: Mine is. Yeah, I’m definitely more quite when you compare me to Mike. Yeah, certainly I have to have relationships with people in order to have business come my way. Those relationships, I’ve had some that have been going on for twenty, twenty-five years and those are really important to me. You get to know somebody pretty well if you talk to them once a week, twice a week for decades at a time. I like that. I like to be able to answer the phone and help somebody, give somebody the answer or tell them there’s no good answer here but what you’re thinking of doing is probably the most appropriate. I like having those conversations.
Dr. L Belisle: How have things changed over the thirty-two years that you’ve been doing this? How have things changed I mean from a work standpoint personally but also professionally?
Meg: They’ve changed pretty dramatically in some ways. Certainly the technology has changed things dramatically. I still remember when we had secretaries who typed briefs and if you wanted to add a sentence in the middle of the brief it had to be typed over the whole thing pretty much, very laborious that way. I was in the early ’80s one of a test case to see if lawyers could use computers. They had four of us and they gave us a computer. I had been using a typewriter just because I compose better on the typewriter. That immediately changed things dramatically for me. I knew nobody was taking away that computer, but all of our research now is electronic. We rarely pick up a book anymore. We can do things so much faster.
I think one of the downfalls is that you’re expected to do so much so much faster that you don’t always have time to think through something. You’re expected to give instantaneous answers and sometimes you really need to sit back and think through something before you can really feel confident that it’s the right answer.
Dr. L Belisle: I’m sure you work with lawyers who are newer to the field. Are you sensing that there’s any difference in the way that they approach the law or approach life in general than maybe you once did, before the age of computers when we were still doing things typewritten?
Meg: Yeah, there are certainly positive and negatives there. I do like the fact that the young people today expect to have a personal life and practice law. I remember a time when I really for probably years didn’t plan things on the weekends for the most part because I knew I’d most likely have to work at some point. I think that turned over. People have their personal time and they try to work the work in. I think that newer attorneys coming in are so comfortable with technology that it’s a real advantage.
Sometimes they can be overly dependent on it and expect to just be able to plug in a couple of words and find the answer when it’s a little more complex. They have to think, go to the tertiary sources and really get the background before they try to find the magic answer by doing a word search. I think that’s a change. I didn’t have the luxury of doing the word searches when I started, so I had to get the background first and then refine it a little bit.
Dr. L Belisle: That’s a really good point. I know that a lot of patients who come in to see me they have access to Google so they’ll go online and they’ll Google their diagnosis and they’ll come and it generates some higher level of discussion which I really appreciate but it actually also opens up this whole notion of ambiguity and that you’re still only really making your best guess at any given situation, I mean based on obviously facts and knowledge and intuition and good judgment, but Google does not give you the answer.
Meg: It may look like the answer but it’s not necessarily the right answer, overly simplified sometimes.
Dr. L Belisle: I have two brothers who are attorneys. I come from a large family. We have doctors and lawyers and such and two brothers who are pretty recently in the legal field. They’re very existed to be doing it but I think it’s a different, it seems like a different profession than it once was. Somehow you’ve maintained your passion for it. You’ve stayed in it all this time. What is it about being a lawyer that has kept you interested in doing it?
Meg: Well I think it’s the area of law that I really like and every day I’m brought into some new human drama and that can be sometimes mind boggling what people do at work and problems employers have to deal with but it’s also interesting and it keeps me on my toes. I always get a, every day I get a question where I don’t know the answer and that’s challenging. I have to think it through and learn something new. That’s kept me interested. Certainly there are days where I’m just slogging through documents and it’s no fun and I get frustrated, but most of the time there’s something new happening and some new challenge keeps me interested.
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Dr. L Belisle: Meg you and Mike have been married for how long?
Meg: Thirty-two years in May.
Dr. L Belisle: You have been a lawyer roughly?
Meg: About the same time. I got married and two weeks later we flew out to Seattle where I was starting my first job and I took the bar exam and then started a new job so there were a lot of new changes all at once.
Dr. L Belisle: Mike I know has a background in the financial field and he’s currently he owns his real estate business. How has that worked for the two of you to be experiencing this professional life and evolving as professionals even as you’ve evolved personally over the years?
Meg: Well I think we both enjoy hearing about things that we’re each working on. We’re both very busy and in some ways that’s good because no one is resentful of the other, like, “Why aren’t you home?” His job has been sometimes more flexible than mine, but at the same time he’s almost on every weekend so there’s that and I used to be on every weekend. I’m not so much anymore. I think the fact that we’re both very interested in what we do for work is a good thing. There’s not one of us that’s frustrated and not enjoying it.
Dr. L Belisle: Somehow you’ve found time to raise four children in there being a set of twins.
Meg: Yes, my youngest two are twins.
Dr. L Belisle: What has that been like for you? Both of you working full time, raising four kids who are all now successfully graduated and out in the world and contribution to the greater good. What was that like?
Meg: When I look back on it I realize it was more of a challenge than I thought going through it. There were times when it was difficult, but we always had good childcare. We had the ability to have somebody come into the house and with four that’s a necessity. Even when they got older, I had somebody come in at 3:00 in the afternoon and she would be in charge of getting them from place A to place B, cooking dinner, doing laundry and that kind of thing. That was just a huge help, but it was wonderful in so many ways, but it was very little time at the end of the day to do anything but the basics.
I did have a rule eventually with the kids that they couldn’t do more than two sports per child per season. You would think that would be enough, but I actually had the twins were each doing three sports at the same time. There was a conflict with each of them almost every day, so that was too much. They are very well-adjusted and self-reliant kids and I think it’s in part because they didn’t have somebody doing things for them every minute. They had to figure things out for themselves. On the other hand, Mike and I were at their athletic events and their music events almost all the time. We didn’t miss a whole lot. We both had jobs although we worked a lot we could also flex and go out and go to a game and go back to the office if we had to. I think the kids felt that we were very much present in their lives even though we were very busy.
Dr. L Belisle: They were all successful as far as being athletes. If I remember correctly, it was when your children were in the local high school at Greely, it was all LePage this and LePage that and I was reading the local sports news I mean they did a great job both in high school and in college.
Meg: Yes, they all participated in three sports a season in high school. I mean three sports a year. They all competed in college. One of my daughters found a new sport in college. She did crew which she hadn’t done before. My oldest played field hockey for Bowdoin which has the best program in the country. That was a lot of fun. She also ran track. My son ran twelve seasons of track at Bates and his twin sister ran for Bowdoin.
The nice thing about having twins at schools that are close together is there would be meets where they were both competing at the same time. That was really fun. We got to travel. We went to a lot of their college games and their college meets. My son competed at nationals a couple of times in Iowa and Indiana and Illinois and we made those trips. My daughter went to the final four a couple of times and we made those trips as well. Those are special memories being there with family.
Dr. L Belisle: Mike also went to Bowdoin and he’s been a lifelong swimmer.
Meg: Yes.
Dr. L Belisle: This running piece for you has become really important recently. How does that feel to be the one in the game as opposed to be the one that’s watching?
Meg: Yeah, it’s very different and I think the kids were surprised that I actually entered a race and ran the first time, but it’s a lot of fun. I never really experienced that to the same degree. Mike is now running. He started this past summer and he ran the Back Bay Challenge where you run every week on Wednesdays and he’s signed up for a half marathon in May so we’ll see how that goes. We’re both going to run it together.
Dr. L Belisle: I’m impressed with the two of you and your longevity because not only have you made it through high pressure professions, four kids together, thirty-two years of marriage, but both of you had cancer and you had it within two or three years of each other about seven or eight years ago.
Meg: Yeah, yeah, that was yeah Mike was first and that was a shock to both of us. It was a difficult time, but he went through the chemotherapy with flying colors and in fact right before his last treatment he got his doctor to agree to postpone the last chemo so he could swim Peaks to Portland, so he had the treatment on Monday instead of Friday. We thought we were in the clear and then all of the sudden my diagnosis. I had ovarian cancer and uterine cancer and was the first person in my family to have cancer. That wasn’t something I had ever thought about very seriously. My diagnosis was scary in terms of the survival rates but fortunately they caught it early enough and my oncologist is one of the people that encouraged me to run.
I don’t know if he did on purpose, but I went to a checkup about maybe almost a year after my last treatment and I told him that I had had a stomach flu. I told him about it because I thought it might be related and I mentioned that I wasn’t able to run a half marathon that day because it was the night before. He looked at me and he said, “What are you doing running a half marathon?” I thought he was going to be critical [by 00:25:39] telling me I wasn’t ready and I shouldn’t be doing this and I was about to explain why I was doing it. He said, “You should be doing a full marathon.” I said, “Well I’m not ready for that.” He picked up my chart and he looked at my age and he said, “You’re fifty-four years old when are you going to be ready.” I thought that’s a good point.
The next visit I went. He came in and I said, “I’ve signed up for the Maine Marathon,” and he was very excited and said, “What’s your time goal?” I hadn’t thought about yet and I said, “I don’t know. I don’t have one.” He said, “You’ve got to have one. What is it?” Off the top of my head I said, “Five hours.” He said, “Oh yeah you’ll do that. Good.” The next visit he walks in and I said, “Four forty-seven.” He said, “What?” I said, “Four forty-seven, that was my time in the marathon.” That’s been a good connection to have. He’s also a runner. He encouraged me.
Dr. L Belisle: Well talking to you is so interesting to me because having recently gone through cancer myself and also being young and also having no risk factors that I knew about, no family history, such a shock to the system. I think it used to be that cancer was thought of as a disease of old people or a disease of people who were going to die. It is a very serious thing and people do die and people do get it when they’re older, but then there are a lot of us who are out there who are younger and are going to live hopefully years after having had cancer, so being active is so important from a health standpoint.
Meg: Oh, I think so. In fact I had some other kind of virus which was never diagnosed before they diagnosed me with cancer where I had pain in all of my joints and muscles for a couple of years. I just assumed that when I started running that the pain might get worse and I might not be able to do it. About a month after I started running, I got up one morning at 4:30, walked to the bathroom and all of the sudden I stopped short and I realized it didn’t hurt to get out of bed. It was first time in a couple of years that I had realized that and I haven’t had that pain since. Part of me is a little afraid to stop. I did ask my doctor could there be cause and effect or was that just coincidence. He said, “Oh, absolutely could be related.”
Dr. L Belisle: There’s also just the pure joy of it. I mean it’s good for your body, but it’s also good for your soul. It’s good for your soul to get out there and be outside and be running with friends. Tell me just describe to me how you incorporate the running just on a regular day.
Meg: Typically I’m doing it in the morning before I go to work. This time of year it’s hard because it’s dark, but I have a number of groups of people that I run with. There’s a group of women in Cumberland that we call ourselves [Run and Done 00:28:55]. There can be as many as forty women showing up at the high school parking lot at 5:30 in the morning to run, so I run with that group. I have a few other smaller groups of friends that I run with. Typically, I’m running somewhere between 5:30 and 7:30 in the morning, then I go to work.
I have run in the evening before but I do prefer the morning. Occasionally I’ll run from the office. We have showers in our office so that makes it possible to do that and run down to East End Beach and then around Back Bay sometimes and that’s nice but it’s hard once I get in the office it’s really hard to get out and exercise. If I get it done in the morning, then I know I’ve gotten it done and it’s out of the way.
Dr. L Belisle: We know that you’re going to run Boston.
Meg: Yes.
Dr. L Belisle: That’s coming up in April. What other running events and goals do you have for 2015?
Meg: Well Sunday I ran the Mid Winter Classic, just a ten miler in Cape Elizabeth. It seemed a little crazy as we were driving over and it was three degrees. There was snow banks and why am I doing this, but I knew that I needed to get a long run in anyway so we did it and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. I have a twenty mile run in late March that’s a tune up for Boston. I’m going to be doing it’s a two day relay race with a group of people in September and that starts up in the White Mountains and goes up to Hampton Beach so you run two hundred miles in about a day and a half.
Now I don’t run two hundred miles but I run a leg of the two hundred miles or three or four legs during the course of the two days and those are fun. I’ll probably, I may run Beach to Beacon and a few other races. I’ll just play it by ear. Last summer I ran with my daughters, the San Francisco Marathon and that was really a fun experience. Two of my daughters ran the full marathon with me and the twins ran the half marathon. Mike ran the 5K the same day. My daughters and I decided we’d all run together for twenty miles and then whoever felt like they could take off would take off. At about sixteen miles, I thought I’m going to definitely take off at mile twenty, but something happened between mile eighteen and mile twenty. The wheels fell off and my daughters went ahead, but it was really a lot of fun. It was a beautiful area, scenery to run a marathon.
Dr. L Belisle: Meg I am so thrilled that you came in and talked to me. You’re speaking my language here. Everything that’s coming out your mouth I feel like could come out of my mouth too, so obviously I’m going to enjoy speaking to somebody who feels as good about running, but also I really appreciate your talking to me about raising your kids, about being a person who’s working along with another working spouse and going through cancer. I think there are a lot of things that you and I have talked about that other people can really relate to. I appreciate your taking the time to come in here and talk.
Meg: It’s been fun and I hope I see you again on the road. I think I saw you a couple of months ago running through Yarmouth.
Dr. L Belisle: That’s right. You’re running in my neighborhood so you and I are definitely going to be running across each other at some point. We’ve been speaking with Meg LePage who is a partner at Pierce Atwood in Portland. Meg is the mother of four. She lives with her husband, Mike, in Cumberland and she is a dedicated runner. She’s going to run Boston. You’re going to be successful and I can fell the joy and happiness that you bring to your life, so I appreciate you sharing that with all of us.
Meg: Thank you.
Dr. L Belisle: As a physician and small business owner I rely on Marci Booth from Booth Maine to help me with my own business and to help me live my own life fully. Here are a few thoughts from Marci.