I didn’t run that many marathons in the last couple of years of the decade. The annual trip to The Great Wall Marathon was obligatory, of course, but there were other priorities in life, although I did go on training runs.
Particularly radical changes in 2007 caused me to focus less on marathon running than in previous years. This upheaval meant that the focus had to be elsewhere. Looking back, I realise that this has been the right choice.
I had been going out with Karin since 2003 and roughly speaking one can say that it was a marathon run between our two homes. Since we were both alone with our kids, our love life for four years had been part-time with alternating visits to each other’s homes at weekends. But in the summer of 2007 she moved in with me at my house. From being a single father for several years, I had now become a family man with children of different marriages.
As far as employment was concerned I had worked since 1990 for our family company Wolle’s Nature System. Since the early 1920s, the firm had developed herbal medicine, manufactured in accordance with, among others, Chinese principles. I was the company director, and it was in the cards that the job was one I would have until I retired.
Working with alternative (supplementary) medicine has been connected with witch hunting through centuries. In the old days, they used to burn people at the stake. Things haven’t been that savage in my time, although I have experienced being hounded. Unfortunately, it is in some people’s nature to rip other people off for the sake of their own gain. That’s the way it is in the natural medicine business, where even other human beings’ health is not sacred in the hunt for dishonestly earned money. Fortunately, we have authorities and legislation on our side to combat these cheats and swindlers. The problem is, just to make absolutely sure, they also clamped down on honest companies that make products for the benefit and pleasure of people with a variety of complaints. This had a noticeable impact on our company.
For years, I had struggled to attract politicians’ attention and get changes made to legislation that would enable the industry’s “ranger” to go into the forest and remove the sick trees and care for the healthy ones instead of just felling all of them. I ended up banging my head against a wall many times.
The company received an enforcement notice from the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration on the same morning as I flew out to Greenland in 2005. I obviously could not do anything about it at that point in time. But I could worry about it on what should have been a pleasant journey as well as during my marathon. This was followed by a long struggle resulting in considerable lawyers expenses. It was all to no avail.
The hopeless situation affected me both physically and mentally. It made me ill, and I totally lost faith in the future of our venerable family firm. I, therefore, informed my family that, in the long term, I would be pulling out of the firm. I stepped down on 28th September 2007 after an extended phase-out period.
I wasn’t left entirely without an income, although it did involve a voluntary nosedive. I had been running a small accountancy firm since 1987, but as an extra job there were limits to how much income it could make. I had been doing NLP training for a few years, most recently as a conversation therapist, trainer and coach. I hoped to be able to create a living for myself working with human values. Karin had also been on several similar training courses. To begin with our goal was to make sure that I could earn a living. Whether the blame lay with the economic crisis that began at that time or with other conditions is difficult to say. But the fact is that the business didn’t really get underway.
I then had to focus on my accountancy business and gradually brought about growth with an increasing number of clients, so I eventually started making a satisfactory living.
Just to round off the story of Wolle’s Nature System, I can tell you that we sold the company to new people in 2009 but that they subsequently went bankrupt after 18 months. An era of 88 years came to an end.
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