Henderson resident shows that hard work does pay off
Sixty-eight-year-old baby boomer George Rudnisky says he’s just a regular guy. And in some ways the retired federal employee is.
He ate too much and got a gut and high blood pressure and more. He ran up thousands of dollars in credit card debt.
Millions of Americans have done that.
But in other ways Rudnisky seems, well, irregular.
After joining a pen pal organization, he wrote letters to the woman who would become his wife for five years before seeing her. She didn’t speak English but could write and read it when they first met.
They’ve been happily married for 41 years — he sent her to a community college to help her learn the language — and have three successful grown children.
That doesn’t seem to fit in the regular-guy equation.
Nor do many regular guys shed 83 pounds in less than a year — he dropped from 308 to 225 — through a self-prescribed walking regimen, an accomplishment that Dr. Jenny Ha says makes him “a role model” for retirees who think it’s too late to get in shape.
And regular guys don’t often pay off $100,000 in credit card debt in seven years by working 40 hours a week for the government and then more than 30 hours at another job — especially when the part-time sales job is an hour away.
Bankruptcy has been the way out for millions of regular guys.
The self-anointed regular guy and I sat in the living room of his Henderson home and talked about his not-so-regular life. The more I talked with him — his 36 years of federal service included 21 years in advance planning for the Defense Department — the more I realized how impossible it is to reasonably generalize about the 60 million baby boomers still alive today.
I guess we can say with some certainty that those baby boomers who back Donald Trump and those who back Hillary Clinton each consider every day a milestone when their name isn’t on a gravestone.
Rudnisky’s life — a Vietnam veteran, he served with the Army Security Agency in Southeast Asia — proves yet again that a written snapshot of a boomer can be full of surprises.
Stacks of log books and calendars sat in front of him as he showed me evidence of his walking regimen. He flipped through pages of numbers — they look like an accountant’s old ledger — which reveal that from April 25, 2012, to Oct. 16 of this year he walked, largely on a home treadmill, 5,290.4 miles in 1,194.5 hours while burning 1,088,776 calories.
“Writing things down made it more personal and gave me motivation and something to show and brag about.”
Calendars full of notes supplemented the log books — together they show he missed days walking from April 2012 to the following March, but they also show that since March 30, 2013, he’s never missed a day.
“If I can do it, anybody can do it,” he said.
Ha, his former primary care doctor in Henderson, hopes so. Because of his weight loss, she said he got off medications that included one for blood pressure. If more boomers followed his lead, heart disease and Type 2 diabetes wouldn’t be such problems.
“My motivation was that I was tired of taking medicine, of clothes not fitting, and hard to get out of a car,” Rudnisky said. “All people need is some self-discipline.”
As millions of obese boomers know, self-control around food is easier said than done.
It was Rudnisky’s ability to turn on his self-discipline after losing it for awhile that not only got him healthy, but also got him out of debt, said his wife, Fatima, a native of Brazil.
Many letters he wrote her, she said, talked about the value of hard work.
“When he puts his mind to something — like a commitment to marriage — he just does it,” she said. “No matter what.”
So goes the life of a regular guy. Paul Harasim’s column runs Sunday, Tuesday and Friday in the Nevada section and Monday in the Health section. Contact him at pharasim@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5273. Follow @paulharasim on Twitter