My husband and I have been having a fight for the past several weeks. I would like to sign up and train for a fall marathon. He doesn't want me to run a marathon. He thinks it is too time consuming, but I tell him that it will just be an hour longer TOPS for my long runs on the weekend for three months. He won't budge. I don't know what to do to convince him that it is feasible and am mad at him for being such a bully about it. I hate feeling like I have to "get permission" to do anything. I am tempted to just sign up for a marathon anyway and do the training and just not tell him what I am doing until race day. I really don't think that I am asking for too much. I guess he is worried about how we will manage my running when I go back to work and that we might be doing renovations on the house in the fall, but I feel that it is unfair of him to curtail my activity/interests.
Side note: I know that I had said earlier that I would only run 10-milers and 1/2 marathons from now on because of my butt/hamstring issues...but I miss having something BIG for which to train. Putting in my 50-60 miles per week is easy....and I want something a bit harder. Maybe I should look into doing a triathalon? I doubt that he would be supportive of 2x a day workouts. Maybe once I go back to work I will realize that putting in 50-60 miles per week is tough enough.
Ug. Does anyone else have these issues with their hubby? This is what I get for marrying someone non-athletic.
Well - how it works for me baby or not is that is my ME time and I need that to be happy. You should totally do it. You want to and you will make it work. Maybe he feels like when you are training, he doesn't see much of you and he doesn't want that to happen with Nathan being around now? Hmm. how could you incorporate him into your training (both of them)? I think you should do it.
ReplyDeleteAnd I pump one side because at some feedings (usually he has been) only eating from one side. He sometimes just started - to eat from both. Esp in the night he only eats from one side so I had to balance it out and do each side at a different time - one was full and the other wasn't yet.
how many hours are you running a day now? if the marathon training won't increase your weekday runs, i guess i don't see his problem with it. if it were me (and i'm so not recommending this) i'd wait til he wanted to do something (go out with friends, whatever) and then tell him no. that might make him see? (in my case, it would just fuel the fight. yet i'd feel better...so stupid.) or try what i've never been able to do...run before everyone else is awake? if he and nathan are sleeping, how can he protest? but yeah, i hate compromising with my husband. not doing it has its own price though. good luck...
ReplyDeleteOh, that's tough. My husband has been pretty good about supporting my training- better now that he has seen what a b*tch I can be if I don't get my workouts in. BUT, having said that, I know he's secretly hoping that I don't qualify for Ironman this fall, because if I do that's gonna mean some long weekends away. He won't tell me no, but then I have been pretty supportive of him going out and playing soccer or surfing so I think he understands to some degree (although he's not obsessive like me).
ReplyDeleteI think if you entered the marathon secretly you'd have some weird negative feeling about doing it, knowing that your husband wasn't supporting it. Is it a marathon that's gonna fill up? If not, maybe you can just start training and then when its closer to the race you can see how things are. Maybe when it's just a month away he'll be more willing to compromise- given that by that point there will only be like 2 more long runs?
I hope you don't mind, I read your post to my husband just to ask him his thoughts from a man's perspective... His first thought was that he was wondering why your husband felt the need to draw the line somewhere? Like, maybe it's not about the marathon itself, but about your husband feeling like he sees a problem somewhere with the training... is there an aspect of your family life that he feels is being neglected at all? Does he have a reason to draw the line somewhere? Those are Scott's thoughts... for what they're worth. Hope you work it out.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Papa Simmons. The first thing I thought was something else is going on with hubby. I would talk to him more about it and see what he is worried about if you trained for the marathon. Maybe you can then address those fears and work from there.
ReplyDeleteI personally wouldn't be sneaky about it. One, that would probably stress you out to hide that. And two it undermines the trust between you. If you can, try to work it out and come to a mutual decision. Sure, your hub can't tell you what to do, but what you do does affect him and affects Nathan so he does have a say.
I always try to include mrp in my decisions that affect us as a couple and now as a family. I am probably going to train for a fall marathon but I won't be training like a did a couple of years ago. I just can't.
You also might feel differently about training when you go back to work. It will probably be a lot harder to justify that time away from Nathan when you've already been away from him 40+ hours a week. It's hard. During the week I get my runs in on my lunch break so it doesn't affect my peanut time. I'm sure I'd squeeze something in if I couldn't do that, but it would be a lot less I imagine.
But yeah, I bet it's not necessarily the idea of you running a marathon that's bugging hubby. It sounds like there's some underlying issues and if you get to the heart of those I bet you guys come to a good decision together that makes you both happy!
Good luck!
(Sorry I've meant to comment many times in the past but I can't comment on blogs at work--I know, lame!)
My husband and I go through this with ironman training. That's why I get up so stinking early. It's easier to get the training in when he's sleeping and it doesn't impact him at all so he doesn't have anything to complain about. I also let him go nuts with his hobby (obsessively following college football - he traveled to a game the day I was due). What's your husband's hobby? For my husband it was more that he thought my training was a bigger priority to me than he was. Now that I try to do it when he doesn't notice it's become much less of an issue. Of course, this means I rarely sleep, but I digress.
ReplyDelete