something that would give them an
opportunity to rehabilitate themselves
through a physical activity that lent
itself to escalating goals. Ride around
the park. Ride around the city. Ride in
a marathon. Run a 5K. Run five miles.
Run 10. 13. 1. 26. 2. After a while,
the goals become about more than
just running or biking. Get a job. Get
settled down. Enjoy life.
One of the things that Traum loves
most about the Freedom Team is the
deep impact it has had on the soldiers
who join it. He has heard of Freedom
Team vets rearranging surgery dates
so they would not interfere with races.
One group of 12 soldiers who raced in
the Boston Marathon returned to Walter Reed only to find the hospital doctors, staff and other patients cheering
for them as they arrived.
For some, the results have been
groundbreaking. One soldier, a Maj.
David Roselle, lost his leg below the
knee in Iraq, Traum recalls. He joined
Achilles, ran a marathon and then
sought to re-enlist. When he was
initially rebuffed because of his leg,
Roselle pointed out that he had run a
marathon on it. He subsequently became the first soldier in U.S. history to
be re-assigned to combat duty while
wearing a prosthetic limb. “That’s
not only good for him,” Traum says,
“That’s good for everybody.”
Mark Marsters is the senior vice president in charge of disability operations for Cigna, a health insurer based in Bloomfield. Conn.
Marsters got to know Achilles through
a personal rehabilitation story of his
own. Several years ago, through a
series of health assessments Cigna
provided for its own employees, Mark
realized he was dangerously over-
weight and had prescription-worthy
high cholesterol. Mark compared
National Underwriter Life & Health • April 2012 38
himself to Cigna’s CEO David Cordani,
himself an accomplished triathlete,
and decided something had to change.
Cordani preached health and wellness, and practiced it, too. Marsters
decided to do the same. And, thinking as only an insurance professional
might, he realized that if he did not,
20 or 30 years in the future, he would
pay for it with far more expensive
medical costs.
He started running an hour a day
on an elliptical machine and quickly
graduated to 5Ks, 10Ks, 10 milers
and half-marathons. He shed 50
pounds and ran the San Francisco
half marathon in 1: 53. He has since
run in 20 marathons as well as numerous other races, which is how he
met Dick Traum.
Cigna has been a longtime sponsor of the Falmouth Road Race on
Cape Cod, and it was there that Mark
noticed the Achilles Team, which was
also running there. Mark and Dick instantly realized their two groups could
help each other. For all of Achilles’
success, it always had difficulty finding new athletes. People with disabilities usually did not seek out Achilles;
it was typically the other way around.
Meanwhile, at any given time, Cigna
has about 50,000 people on disability
claims of one kind or another.
Marsters often asks himself whether people are really disabled, or are
they simply less productive in a certain
category, whether it be a hobby, sports,
daily living or work. He has seen
legions of people who want to regain
their lost health and productivity, but
who don’t really know how, and who
certainly don’t want to spend the rest
of their life sitting on a couch. Marsters
realized that if Cigna could refer its
disability claimants to Achilles, many
of them might find the group support
they need to mainstream themselves
into more productive lives.
This January, Cigna launched a
pilot program out of its Dallas location
that would monitor claimants for trig-
gers that indicated people who were
mentally committed to rehabilitating
themselves as aggressively as they
could. This covered people with a wide
variety of challenges, ranging from
physical injuries, loss of mobility and
behavioral problems. Cigna already
was convinced that physical activity
reduced anxiety and stress among
disability patients, and Achilles was
convinced it did even more, pointing
to studies that showed how regular
exercise among patients with trau-
matic brain injuries actually improves
cognitive ability.
