Austin360 blogs > Out & About > Archives > 2011 > October > 07 > Entry
Comptroller Susan Combs on Marathon Kids, fitness, philanthropy & socializing
“Energy in. Energy out.”
Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts Susan Combs applies this simple formula, not only to her daily fitness regimen, but also to her long, public campaign against childhood obesity.
The formula also infiltrates her nimble thoughts about philanthropy, socializing and even the Circuit of the Americas, the planned Formula 1 racetrack which she champions.
“I am concerned that the population continues to be ill,” says Combs, neatly folded into a chair at her pristine office in the Lyndon Baines Johnson State Office Building.
At first, her efforts followed traditional fitness tracks. In 2003, she worked with Paul Carroza, RunTex director and member of the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition to produce the Marathon to Marathon, which runs from Alpine to the town of Marathon, which her ancestors helped found 130 years ago.
Then Carrozza introduced Combs to Kay Morris’ Marathon Kids, which provides a breakthrough framework for students to exercise and eat healthy.
“I thought it was wonderful that this was a community effort that just spread and spread and spread,” she says. In the program, children run the equivalent of a marathon over the course of days, weeks or months — often around the track or the schoolyard. The Austin program has gone national, reaching many tens of thousands of youngsters. “It’s got to be fun for kids, not painful,” Combs says.
Long-limbed, imposing and laser-focused, Combs climbed from assistant district attorney in Dallas to state representative from suburban Austin to the statewide offices of agriculture commissioner and comptroller in part by making complex governmental concepts simple, transparent.
Her keen intellect — she was educated at St. Mary’s Hall in San Antonio before graduating from Vassar College — tends to intimidate. While she’s no finger-thrusting bully, like the namesake for her office building, Combs gives new meaning to the old saying: “she makes coffee nervous.”
“I like her candor, her willingness to say things as they are,” says Marathon Kids founder Morris. “(She) knocked it out of the park with her articulation of a real nutritional challenge in our schools. A national conversation caught fire. She gave us the ‘words to say it’ about the state of vending and cafeteria offerings in the schools.”
Morris refers to Combs work as Ag Commissioner, publishing studies on the origins and costs of obesity to the private sector and finding ways to incentivize PE in public middle schools with high rates of poverty.
She’s a great believer in partnering with businesses to solve problems without direct government intervention. She praises the Texas Restaurant Association, for instance, for hiring a lab to provide third-party numbers on the content of the dishes their members serve.
“They really are working hard to get calorie counts for every single recipe,” Combs says. “I thought that was pretty terrific. If I am going to engage in free choice about my food, let me at least know how many calories it costs.”
Combs, who runs a cow-calf operation on her Brewster County ranch, was forced to quit running herself when diagnosed with spondylolisthesis.
“That means my vertebrae are not connected,” she says. “They float. Which is not good. You get nerve damage if you run. So I have a treadmill. A wonderful treadmill. And I’ve got these fabulous earphones. I note the ‘energy in’ part, too. I watch my food.”
One of her concerns is being fit enough to walk back to her ranch house if her vehicle breaks down, which it has, twice, when barbed wire wrapped around her axle.
This is the competitive woman who, years ago, walked a 5K charity in stocking, heels and skirt — and won. She played basketball for St. Mary’s Hall. At Vassar, she took fencing lessons for six weeks.
“I was thinking how wonderful I was because the instructor said: ‘Why Susan, you could be a champion.’ ‘You noticed how good I’ve become?’ ‘No, no, no no. It’s your reach.’ I had no talent. Just arm length,” she recounts with a hearty laugh and a her always-ready cast of accented voices.
Nonprofit groups like Marathon Kids also appeal to Combs because they are close to the ground.
“It’s bottom up rather than top down,” she says. “Government is top down: Thou shalt do this. Philanthropy is bottom up. You get everybody there who says we, as a community of interested persons, whether you are in San Antonio, Dallas or Austin, we think this is wonderful, we’ll give you this money.”
The noncoercive aspect of charitable work also fits into Combs’ world view. “It’s very personal: We earned this money,” she says.
“You didn’t extract it from me by coercion or the IRS code. What you get when people invest themselves and of their assets, they really have a strong connection to it.”
The launcher of the Where the Money Goes online tool for tracking state spending thinks that, despite some bad apples in the charity world, nonprofits tend to be more efficient and transparent than governments when delivering social services.
“If you are a taxpayer, you really don’t know where the money is going,” she says. “When we get the kind of donations that we are seeing come in (to nonprofits), those are from people who are saying: It’s important, maybe to my business longterm, because I care about Texans, or it’s something that I think is important for our citizens. Also because they are right there, if you are the charitable entity, they are watching you. That’s good.”
Combs personally donates to churches, schools and kids’ causes. She’s also an outspoken supporter of Marfa Public Radio — her husband, computer scientist Joe Duran, has served on its board.
“They were able to warn people about the wildfires (in West Texas),” she says. “That was a very scary deal.”
For a politician, socializing at charity events is often practical. Yet Combs also sees the wider importance of social giving, when patrons of a cause gather in common understanding rather than just writing checks in private.
“People come together and feed off each other,” she observes. “There’s a nice symbiotic thing: ‘Oh, you like this, too? That’s fanstastic!’”
Though she texts from her smart phone now as often as she calls anybody, Combs mourns the loss of face-to-face socializing.
“I do think some of the technology gives people an artificial sense of closeness,” she says. “But the old deal of sitting out on the porch and chewing the fat is gone. TV and air-conditioning are two of the worst things to happen to old-fashioned socializing.”
Despite the pummeling the Circuit of Americas has received for its promised $250 million in tax breaks, Combs is a unrepentant cheerleader for the attraction.
“I think there’s going to be the biggest influx of delightful strangers you’ve ever seen,” she says. “Delightful strangers who bring cash. I think it’s going to give a whole luster to Austin and what we do. It should take us slightly out of ourselves. It’s good not to be insular.”
She’s also excited about the way that F1 might energize engineering and science programs at the University of Texas, Texas A&M University, Texas State University and Austin Community College. Ever aware of the fitness angles, she predicts a lot of biking, running and walking at the Circuit of the Americas, too. Marathon Kids has already looked into the racetrack as a possible event site.
One last word on the fitness charity: “If we care about children — and we say we do — this is a very concrete, real efficient mechanism.”
CLARIFICATIONS: Comptroller Combs clarified some of her statements on obesity, running and wildfires from her July interview.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: Charity, Law, Sports
Comments
When commenting, we ask that you keep things civil and abide by our Visitor Agreement. To report comment abuse, click here.