Viewpoint FROM THE CHIEF MEDICAL EDITOR

New Captain Coming Aboard

Paul S. Koch, M.D.

"You'll be sorry," I told my young friend, when he wanted to borrow one of my racing dinghies for a regatta. "There's something wrong with it. It doesn't accelerate as quickly as it should, and it's not quite as fast as some of the others."

Regular readers know that I spend my free time racing sailboats out of Newport, and boy, are we loaded with good sailors in this town. Slip into any bar and you might find that your waitress did the Whitbread and the fellow who draws your draught won an Olympic medal.

So, I felt a little sorry that my friend, an intercollegiate All-American sailor, couldn't find a faster boat to borrow. I had campaigned it for a few years and only occasionally cracked the Top 3. Unfortunately, mine was the last one available. If he couldn't use it, he could not race.

Two weeks later he returned, having just won the North American Championship.

Hmmm, I sailed this boat, struggled, and blamed the boat. He sailed the same boat and won the NAs. Was it the boat, or was it the sailor? Oh my gosh! It's not the boat. It's me!

This really happened about 10 years ago and was the incident that convinced me I wasn't a kid anymore. I was 45 years old, a little heavier, a little slower and a lot less in shape. I could no longer race high-performance dinghies against the college kids and expect to beat them. I was the old guy who could hang with them for a while, but ultimately they would put me away.

It was time to shift to boats that put a bigger premium on experience and tactics and less on athleticism. I still race the dinghies once in a while for fun, but that's the world of the 20-year-olds with the six-packs, not the 50-year-olds who drank the six-packs.

Passing the Torch

This tale is my modest way of admitting that it's time to move on. I have had the distinct honor of being chief medical editor of this magazine for 5 years. That's enough. Any longer and the readership might chase me up the mountain carrying torches and pitchforks screaming, "Out! Out!"

The very delightful Larry Patterson, M.D., takes over as chief medical editor next month and I'm moving to a new column on the back page on alternate months. See you there.