In late February 1990, Fred Lebow, president of the New York Road Runners Club, was diagnosed with a rare brain cancer. The doctor told him he might live another three months, maybe six.
The Romanian immigrant who had founded the New York City Marathon wound up lasting 4.5 years. He finished strong, concluding his 62 years with what runners call a kick, also known as getting a second wind.
Luckily enough, I came to know Lebow a little. I interviewed him for a book for hours, several times in 1992. What he told me about how cancer changed his life has stayed with me for decades.
“At first, I denied to myself that I had cancer,” he told me. “I felt so nervous and upset the day I heard the diagnosis that I hardly even realized what the doctor had said. I kept thinking, ‘Probably someone has made a mistake, a serious mistake.’”
Lebow, lean and bearded, with pale blue eyes, propped his feet on his desk, surrounded by trophies and plaques, and looked upward in a trance of memory.
“I felt I was healthy,” he said. “I kept saying to the doctor, ‘I’m healthy. I’ve never even had a headache or dizziness, forget about a disease.’ I had no symptoms. So I denied it. I ignored the prognosis – just forgot about it.”
Now Lebow spoke softly, in a raspy voice. “But when you’re in the hospital, you have lots of time to think,” he told me. “It was the first time I had had this. I was able to think about myself in depth. Before I got sick, I never saw my family at all. I had thought: Family? Brothers and sisters? Who cared? I saw my brothers and sisters, individually, only once every year or two.”
But within a week of his diagnosis, his five siblings, three of whom came from Tel Aviv, Chicago, and Cleveland, visited him in his hospital room. “It was the first time in my life my family came together to the same place to spend time together,” he said. “I realized how much they cared about me. And I realized how much I cared, too. It brought us closer.”
Lebow soon underwent chemotherapy and radiation therapy, always without complaint. “I think the disease helped me to find myself,” he went on. “I used to be tougher on my staff, tried to be a one-man business, tried to control everything from A to Z, every little detail, because I thought I would do a better job, because I thought I cared more than anybody else, because I thought I knew the business better. I was always in the office, always here. Now I’ve learned to delegate.”
The threat of a final reckoning forced Lebow to recast his life and streamline his priorities. “I realized that besides my job, I have my family and friends and my girlfriend. All this helps keep me alive. I wake up in the morning and thank God that I’m still here.”
'You reach what you think is your limit and keep going'
EVER THE hustler – he had, after all, smuggled diamonds as a teenager to escape Nazis in Eastern Europe in 1945 and turned himself into a specialist in knockoffs in New York City’s teeming garment district, in the process amassing a fortune – he cut a deal with death. As he went into remission, Lebow took advantage of opportunities to reach out to other cancer patients.
“Right after I left the hospital, people with cancer called me and wrote me letters,” he said. “I had hundreds of calls and letters from relatives and friends of patients who needed a layman to explain what it meant.
“A father called me and said, ‘My daughter is sick with cancer. Can you talk to her?’ You cannot hang up on these people. I said to them, ‘Doctors can do only so much. You have to help yourself. Do some exercise to keep yourself physically fit and feel better mentally.’ It’s also always very important to be engaged in something. The only really happy people are busy people.
“We have to force our limits in order to become stronger,” Lebow explained. “You reach what you think is your limit, but then you get a second wind and keep going.”
Lebow kept going all right – long enough to compete for the first time in his own New York City Marathon in 1992. He completed the race, the 69th of his career, in five-plus hours.
The scene at the finish line reverberated with thunderous echoes of ancient history. In 490 BCE, the Athenian runner Pheidippides was dispatched from the city of Marathon to Athens to convey the news that the Persian army had suffered a terrible defeat. Once he delivered the message, he promptly dropped dead.
Lebow proved different. In running his final marathon, he found life, if only for a little while longer. And he delivered a message uniquely his own.
The writer, a consultant and essayist, is the author of Edge Against Cancer: The Athlete’s Advantage against Cancer and How to Gain It, and a memoir, Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age.