The un-retired: When do you call it quits

He was six months into an early retirement when the competitive juices kicked in.

"All of a sudden, you're going, 'Wait a minute. Wait a minute. What am I doing here?'" he said. "You're faced with a real tough question: What's your life?"

Unlike NFL quarterback Brett Favre, who created quite a stir in these parts with his recent reversal of field, Brian Muldoon has stayed retired since selling his business five years ago at 45. But he was hardly immune to the "I can still play!" pangs that inevitably hit those who leave behind a flourishing career at a relatively early age.

"You face a moment where you think, 'Do I come back?'" said Muldoon, now splitting his time between Minneapolis and northern California. "You have to look at it really hard and have the discipline to say, 'I stepped aside for a reason.' "

The problem for Muldoon and other "stars" who give up competitive jobs is that their identity becomes predominantly wrapped up in their work. What they do is who they are.

As Muldoon put it, "Your life grooved into that thing; you became that job, like a quarterback does."

It's an identity crisis, pure and simple. And more Minnesotans are experiencing it, with a raft of company sales and a trend among baby boomers to step away from the rat race.

State demographer Tom Gillaspy said there's no clear data on Minnesota's early retirements.

"We have had more companies encouraging people to retire early recently, but a lot of them simply take the retirement money and go do something else," he said. "We do know that most retired people, no matter the reason they retired, work at least part-time."

That includes people who don't need the money, such as Colette Gandelot, who retired three years ago at 36 from a job at Vujovich Design-Build Inc.

"There are people with real [financial] issues and challenges once they retire. I'm not one of them," she said. "If you are lucky enough to tap into a passion and your career happens to match your passion, that's great. The hard part [after retiring] is the passion keeps bubbling up."

As more women such as Gandelot succeed in their jobs, they're prone to the same quandary that traditionally has visited mostly men.

"Maybe it's a 'guy thing,' if the guy has had so much of his identity wrapped up in his profession and hasn't developed other areas of his life to their fuller capacity," said Ginny D'Angelo, a marriage and family therapist with Both/And Resources. "But I would guess that many women now could be experiencing the same kind of thing. A transition like this requires a whole reorganization of self and daily life."

The rush is gone

That's a familiar scenario for couples at traditional retirement age, but it's a bigger concern for younger "stars."

"The energy required to devote oneself to athletic, performance or other pursuits is enormous," said therapist Judy Tiesel of Family Therapy Resources in Edina, "and then when it pays off with recognition, that recognition becomes its own 'high.' The absence of the adrenaline rush of attention feels more like a depression than a normal state, and that can create internal panic."

Compounding that is a concern that early retirees will atrophy if they don't get back in the game.

"If you've been at the same job a long time, there's a burnout factor. Your initial reaction is [to] get away from this totally," said Muldoon, who sold the Minneapolis packaging and design firm Pedersen Gesk in 2003. "But then you realize, 'I don't want to do nothing.' You still have youth and all your skills, but you don't want to get back in a situation where it has control of you."

A noncompetitive balance

Some early retirees are not racked by such emotions. Former Twins star Kent Hrbek hung up his cleats after the 1994 season at 34 and says he never looked back.

"I thought I probably could still play, but when I retired, I was done. There were so many things I wanted to do outside baseball," said Hrbek, an avid outdoorsman whose "Kent Hrbek Outdoors" debuts at 10:35 p.m. Sunday on KMSP-TV. "I had a 2-year-old daughter and wanted to watch her grow up."

So Hrbek hunts, fishes and spends time with his family. Muldoon also devotes a big chunk of his time to his wife and two sons, but for him and Gandelot, the tug of doing something at which they had long excelled bubbled back up. Finding balance then became the key, they agreed.

Muldoon does consulting work and said, "It's working great, because you can do it on your own time, and turn down assignments. You have to have the discipline to say, 'I can do this much well, but not more.' "

Gandelot, now 39, faced a different dilemma but found a similar happy medium. After a year off, "your friends come out of the woodwork and say 'Could you redo my basement?'" So she started a company and limits the number of projects she takes on.

"Clearly, I can't stop doing what I do," she said. "But I retired because I wanted to spend more time with my partner, Mark, get my life in order. So I still work, more than I expected to.

"And Mark, bless him, every time I come in, he razzes me about 'How's that retirement thing working out?'"

Bill Ward • 612-673-7643