Convincing your Partner

Stanners from the Bridge wrote (see)

some kind of "light bulb" argument that can allow me to pay a few hundred quid to spend the best part of 17 hours in pain? If so please share....

I can understand your wife's point of view. I can understand your frustration. 

Any chance you can adjust your training. You could do less? ... it's just you *want* to do more and do well? 

Can you agree a plan with her so that she can see the full extent of time on her own with the kids?   Can you reciprocate?    Can you give her an equal amount of time for her to do her own thing?    They after all both your responsibility. 

Depends how many hours you spend at work as well.  If you are putting in an 8 hr day 5 days a week (fairly light side of normal?) it leaves little family time. They grow up so quickly and when young, are full on hard work.  

I brought up mine on my own. It's hard work. That's probably how your wife feels about it. What does she get out of this marriage?

I think that every situation is different depending on fitness levels, personalities etc...

For me in my first IM, it was as much my head being in it as the hours consumed with training. I was too emotionally involved in the outcome and that made me selfish. But you have to be selfish to a certain degree with long distance endurance.

I guess it's up to you how you manage the situation. I trained for the Double by not really training as I knew that hours away from my young family would put stress on our marriage the very year after I'd spent a lot of time out training for a single IM.

It's all perfectly possible but what I think I'm trying to say, is find the right thing for you and your relationship and your family. 

RicF wrote (see)

I got all this time consuming stuff out of the way before I was married with kids or in any relationship. So fishing for days on end, going to golf multiple hours a week, and birding from one end of the country to the other affected no one. One the other hand other guys decide to 'take up' these activities once they get hooked up. No wonder so many get problems, they always want to be somewhere else doing something else.

That's what I was sort of saying on another thread, some people have to question why they would rather spend 6 hours on their bike than a day with their family.

On the flip side, I know how addictive exercise can be. 

As others have said it all depends on individual circumstances... how old your kids are, does your OH work or not, do you have a long commute to your job... all sorts of factors...

The couples where I see this sort of thing go well are those where:

• when they met he/she was already doing endurance stuff like marathon training or such and it didn't come as a huge shock
• they take a couple or even whole family approach where you can maybe do some runs or rides with you OH, the whole family comes to races to support, everyone is interested and thinks it's fun
• people who are exceptionally self-motivated and organised and manage to get a long run in before their OH even wakes up...
• people who manage to fit training into the daily grind, for example if you work 20 miles away from home and the roads are ok, cycle commute to work a few times a week and count it as training

On the flipside... from experience here on the forum,

• conflict usually arises when the race committment (whether financial or time wise) wasn't negotiated properly beforehand and everyone else is just expected to put up with the temporary hardship and this breeds resentment
• the OH isn't genuinely interested in the whole thing and a year is a long time to be getting on someone's nerves giving them the ins and outs of your Garmin splits when they don't really give two hoots
• the OH has nothing similar that they themselves are at all interested in, no own hobby
• the OH is the sort of person who is quite lost socially without the person doing the race and ends up feeling lonely and excluded
• the OH is the sort of person who gets jealous easily and gets twitchy about mixed gender training groups etc

Hope you work it all out.

Being in the wifey camp of training much less than my OH - if you said that the following 6 months would be for her to choose how you both spend your spare time - that would work for me! Depends on what you want to do after the IM - is this a one-off or are you already planning something else afterwards?

We often negotiate on the fact that my OH goes away quite a lot so I get a large say in what happens when he is home.  It can all hinge on wanting a happy husband and not wanting one who resents me for stopping him doing what he would choose given free will. 

Of course this comes with all the good sense talked above as a baseline.  6 months can seem like a very long time sometimes and you need to be prepared to help out if your OH finds it too tough to cope with everything else on her own.

Good profile name, Stanners. First thing I should say is welcome to the forum! I didn't know you were coming on here, mate. Due to meet for a pint in town tomorrow after work, so perhaps we can chat it over a brew in the Chop House?

Some tripe being offered up.....

I got all this time consuming stuff out of the way before I was married with kids or in any relationship. So fishing for days on end, going to golf multiple hours a week, and birding from one end of the country to the other affected no one. One the other hand other guys decide to 'take up' these activities once they get hooked up. No wonder so many get problems, they always want to be somewhere else doing something else.

I don't get this "get married - end life" attitude. The sort of attitude I see evidenced by my obese, drunk, bitter old mates down the rugby club on a Saturday evening, moaning about all the incredible things they'd do if it wasn't for "the missus". More like lazy, idle blokes who've lost their get-up and go. There's plenty of scope in all our lives to do a tough job, enjoy a fulfilling marriage, cherish your kids and complete a little race. You make sacrifices elsewhere.... pubs, telly, newspapers, lie-ins etc.

COMPLETING an iron distance race and being a good family bloke is wholly compatible, Stanners. I was lucky that mine wanted me to go and push myself - keep looking to improve and grow as a person at the age of 39. We had two kids, aged 2 and 4 (a bit like yours). We both have fairly grown up jobs (like most Iron Distance triathletes.... wonder why that is?)

Two suggestion;

1. I went from nought to a 12:44 at Outlaw last year on an average of 8.5 hours a week for 40 weeks. That's not much different from your Oly training, mate. Only difference is a longer bike ride. And that ride only really needs to get long on one day a week during, say, 12 weeks of the summer, when you are blessed by enough daylight to crack out early and be back by lunchtime. YOU DON'T NEED MUCH MORE THAN YOU'RE CURRENTLY DOING. So work out a plan based on that and share it with your wife. Beware that the key word lifted from above is "COMPLETE". Don't expect to be anywhere near the pointy end on that volume of training

2. Take your wife to a big event. Whizz over to Bolton during July and let her take in the atmosphere. My wife was starting to get a little bit fed up by the end of my programme last year (getting up to 15 hours a week for a few weeks), but when she spent the day at Outlaw, she was totally buzzed by the whole thing. The spirit of achievement can be pretty intoxicating! So this year, especially with the kids a year older, we're both going long (different events). The garden looks like shit and I've had to hire cleaners, but we'll get there!

Good luck, mate. It's worth it!

S.T.I.L. you speak much sense, but perhaps not everyone has a double-income and the finances to 'outsource' the cleaning and other shitty jobs to some other minion! 

Of course if you're in the priviledged position to have it all then it's much easier to deal with the rest.  But some couples, who are on one modest income, the sacrifices will affect everyone.  For some people it might mean no other holiday that year etc and it's only fair that that is negotiated.

"I don't get this "get married - end life" attitude."

Where you've always done other stuff then it's just part of normal life.  

I think RicF's point was that where someone STARTS wanting to do things that take them away from the family, it can cause problems.

When you suddenly start wanting to spend hours and hours out of the house then it could feel like being lumbered with all the drudgery while the OH is out enjoying themselves.

Wilkie wrote (see)

I think RicF's point was that where someone STARTS wanting to do things that take them away from the family, it can cause problems.

When you suddenly start wanting to spend hours and hours out of the house then it could feel like being lumbered with all the drudgery while the OH is out enjoying themselves.

It all comes down to balance surely, and in that I think it's possible, of course it's possible, many of us have done it. But it just needs working out.

marriage isn't the end of being an individual but especially when kids come along, there are other things to consider.

And I want to consider them, I do actually love being with my husband and kids

The original post here sounds very familiar.  My wife was convinced that IM would consume all hours for an entire summer, even if I was capable of doing it.  The lightbulb moment was meeting a bloke at a wedding who'd done Roth the year before and made it sound amazing even to a non-believer like herself, and the next morning she told me to go & book it. 

She was swayed by the idea that it would be a weekend away for both of us, it was in July so we'd have the rest of the summer free from IM activities, and that it would be a one-off.  That last bit turned out not to be quite true, but then again neither did the training take over life completely.  We'd arrange for a weekend away with friends, I'd leave on the crack of dawn on my bike, ride 120 miles to Cheltenham and she'd arrive with the kids: weekend training done, the rest of it was family time.  I had to be flexible in fitting weekend training around other things, and if that meant not being able to do a long run until late Sunday afternoon rather than my preferred morning slot, then so be it.

I'll admit I'm fortunate to be able to train in my lunch hour, and during the week training doesn't affect family like much at all.   And she's since said that we get to see more of each other than some of her friends at work, who's husbands are off playing golf twice a weekend.

I'm training for my first IM at the moment, and many of the points above ring true.

I had a long chat with my husband, who, once he got over the "you are kidding, you nutter" phase, has been nothing but supportive, as have my kids

However, as everybody else seems to be saying, you have to know your partner and know your goals. Mine is just to finish, so I'm happy bumbling along with about 10hours a week training.

Lots of 5am starts, and luckily for me lunchtime sessions.

My biggest issue is fitting in my long bike ride, I also have two young girls who do all sorts of activities at the weekend (horseriding, skiiing, football), as well as wanting family time with mum and dad.

Our solution has been for my husband to commit to doing a century ride, so we take days off work together to do long rides occasionlly - which has actually turned out to be really cool .

Or we do our own version of "tag team", where I take girls to activities Saturday morning while he rides, then we swap at about 1pm, and he does activities and I ride Saturday afternoons. Then Sunday is family time

Seems to be working,  but ask me again after Outlaw