Ruth Stricker in Lupus News

Changing with the Changes: A Full, Purposeful Life with Lupus

Ruth Stricker, 75, lives one of those lives we’d all like to have. She’s gorgeous, intelligent, and deeply passionate about causes she supports. She and husband Bruce Dayton, of the Dayton’s department store family, have set arts-loving hearts aglow with their donations of Asian art to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. In 1985, she founded The Marsh, a Center for Balance and Fitness in Minnetonka, which was the culmination of years of study in wholistic medicine, fitness, and Eastern philosophy. And, as if that weren’t enough, she’s also a mother and grandmother, and sits on the boards of three international organizations.

Ruth Stricker doesn’t have time for lupus. But she’s lived with it for the past 35 years. “When asked how he could be so prolific, George Bernard Shaw once said, ‘At some point, I learned to happen to my days, rather than let them happen to me,’” quotes Stricker, summing up her attitude toward lupus. She doesn’t take it lying down. “I consider myself a well person in a diseased body. I could have let myself become a victim. ‘Oh, that poor Ruth. She has lupus.We better
help her.’ But I’m not a victim. I’m so much more of a person than I would’ve been if I hadn’t gone through my experiences.”

Fitness on the Cutting Edge
Stricker grew up inWindom, Minnesota, the child of a Presbyterian minister and his wife. Even as a child, she was active and enjoyed sports. So it wasn’t a stretch for her to major in physical education at Macalester College. Yet like her father, her brother and nine uncles, she also showed a keen interest in religious studies. The twin interests—fitness and religion—pursued Stricker after graduation, when she and her first husband moved to Massachusetts. It was here she encountered and then
immersed herself in the works of fitness pioneer Bonnie Prudden, who’d helped launch the President’s Council on Youth Fitness in the 1950s. Stricker also became
aware of the mind-body philosophy embodied in practices like yoga, meditation, and tai chi. She was beginning to realize that fitness was more than tight pecs and abs. It was about happy hearts and minds too.

When Stricker returned to Minnesota, she implemented these new concepts in a series of fitness classes taught around the Twin Cities Metro. These were years of hustle and bustle. She shuttled between exercise groups. She talked to organizations about the mind-body connection. She met with students, and then raced home to look after a house and two growing children.

She was invested in fitness, and actually making a difference in her community. But just as her career was hitting its stride, the world shifted under her.

The Lupus Diagnosis
The summer of 1975, Stricker was working at a summer camp for girls. She took 16 16-year-old girls on a backpacking trip to Colorado. It was the perfect summer outing, if a little exhausting. But no one ever said looking after 16 girls and charging the rapids on a rubber raft would be easy. However, none of that busyness accounted for the blotches covering her body or the flu-like symptoms that seemed to mysteriously come and go.

Back in Minnesota, Stricker made an appointment to see a dermatologist. The dermatologist was the one who delivered the life-altering words. “Uh-oh,” he said to
her. “I think you have lupus.” Lupus? Stricker didn’t know how to process the news. She exercised. She ate right. Heck, she had even devoted her career to healthy living. How could she have a chronic disease?

By January 1976, systemic lupus had kicked in and Stricker was staring down the ugly statistics. “The medical journals at the time were really morbid. They’d say things like no one lives more than five years with lupus. That kind of thing,” she says. Her doctors offered advice, but not the advice she wanted—or needed—to hear. “They told me I had a progressive disease and that I’d be looking at a pain clinic. Another doctor told me I should just go to bed for two to four months.”

But Stricker didn’t go to bed. She didn’t curl up in a ball and withdraw from the world, though the temptation was there. “Eventually I had this conversation with myself,” she says. “I said, well, I can’t depend on God to save me. The Lord helps those who help themselves, right? I can’t depend on the doctors to save me. So, I guess I have to take control of my life.”

By this time, Stricker’s first marriage had come to an end. The breakup was amicable, but now she was a single mother rearing two children, on top of handling a chronic disease. Yet what had her training in mind-body conditioning taught her if not to take control of her life, in good health and bad? Sickness was just another point on the health continuum.

“I went through all the anger and denial. But once I had my life squared away, and my death squared away, I was given permission to take risks. Because so what? I already had lupus. It was as if someone was up there saying, ‘You go, Ruth. Just fly,’” she says, and ten years after her diagnosis she opened The Marsh.

Thriving in the Company of Lupus
Stricker dreamed up The Marsh on the back of an envelope. She conceived a fitness center that would embody a wholistic approach to health, which included situating the 67,000-square-foot facility on the edge of a nature preserve. In the 1990s, Stricker had spearheaded research on the question of the mind-body connection to well-being.

“My premise was that if you are in your favorite sweatshirt, spending time with your favorite person, walking in your favorite woods, the benefits would be much greater
psychologically than if you were on a treadmill, in a sterile white room, gritting your teeth and saying, ‘This must be good for me.’ And that’s what we found,” says Stricker who has built that ethos into every room of her center.

The Marsh invites young and old, sick and well, rock-solid athletes and casual exercisers, members and non-members, to its Minnetonka address. The facility houses swimming pools, hot tubs, a Pilates studio, exercise rooms, and an indoor-outdoor walking track, alongside meeting rooms, a café and sit-down restaurant, art gallery, and gift store. A lot has changed since Stricker received her diagnosis in 1975. For one thing, there’s more research on lupus and more treatment options. And Stricker’s life has changed, too. She’s gotten older, yes, but also a lot wiser about living well with chronic illness.

“You have to learn the dimensions of lupus,” she advises. “This is hard, because at first you don’t know what is and what isn’t lupus. You could have lupus, cancer, the
flu. You don’t know. So, knowing the dimensions of lupus is important.”

Stricker is wearing more hats these days. She is active at her alma mater, recently dedicating a building on the Macalester campus. She has speaking engagements and interview requests. She has children, grandchildren, and her husband Bruce. And there’s still her lupus to consider. Stricker’s answer to a hectic schedule is blue sky—free time and wiggle room. “If I don’t make it into the office by eleven, it’s not because I’m sitting home watching soaps,” she jokes. “It’s because I couldn’t make it in earlier. Sometimes it can take an hour before I can hold a hairdryer.”

Stricker deals with pain by staying in the present moment, something she picked up from her study of Eastern religions. “The mind is either dragging in the past or worrying about the future. But the body is always in the present moment. If you can bring your mind where your body is, that’s peace, that’s wellness.” Stricker practices meditation and tai chi to bring her mind and body into alignment.

Another important facet of wellness, according to Stricker, is socialization. Getting out of your head and heading into the world. In a word, mingling. Stricker calls it ‘energy exchange.’ “Exercise is good for socialization because when you exercise you open up. I saw this when I taught classes. People would stick around after my classes just to talk about life, the ups and downs.”

She also stresses a positive attitude. No, she can’t cure her lupus. No, she can’t function 100 percent every day. But that doesn’t matter. No one can function at 100 percent every day. “The thing is to make peace with constants, so you can change with the change, like a cork floating on the water. That’s called resilience, the ability to spring back,” Stricker says, as she has said so often to students and friends dealing with their own unalterable conditions of life. “My big theme is you can’t wait for a cure. So you better make the best of what you have; and even more, do the best you can to live a full, purposeful life.”