Tag: marriage

Love and Marriage and Long Distance Running
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Originally posted by Gingko on April 3, 2013 (five years ago today).

Long distance relationships are hard, but how about long distance running and relationships? When you’ve got to go out for a 3-hour training run on Sunday and miss quality time at home, how do your loved ones feel? For those of you with a partner at home, does your training provide your mate with much-needed alone time, or does it put distance between you? I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting married in three weeks, but lately I’ve been finding myself feeling guilty for having running be such a priority in my day-to-day schedule when I never really worried about it before. Do you ever feel guilty or selfish going out on your daily runs? Is serious training compatible with married life?

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Readers Roundtable: Do Runners Make Good or Bad Partners?
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Cinnamon's picture on the dartboardWelp, I did it again. I broke up with the dude I was dating after just a few months. Why? When I explained that I didn’t want to go out late Saturday because of marathon training, he balked. “Can’t you just run later?”

Yeah, sure, I’ll just do that 14 miles by myself at the end of my day on the dark, icy streets I run all week instead of doing it in the morning with my sister and other friends on beautiful, wooded trails and enjoying the rest of my day without a two hour long run looming ahead. It’s okay, babe, sitting in a bar followed by a drunk sleepover in your dorm-room-furnished apartment with one pillow between us is worth it!

Or not.

But this begs the question, is it him or me? Are we runners being unreasonable by asking a partner to adjust his expectations of a good weekend to accommodate marathon training? Is it asking too much to say, “Sorry, you won’t be seeing me speed day, tempo day, long run day or the night before long run day. Oh, and when you do see me I’m going to eat more than you, need more sleep, probably not always smell great and mostly wear spandex.”

And it’s not just that I’m set in my single runner ways, I see this with my coupled friends. And whoa, when they have kids the demands are even bigger. Do we runners ask too much of our partners without giving enough in return? Are we giving up better relationships by prioritizing our training? Are our cries of health and mental well-being just lame excuses?

Do runners make bad partners, or good ones? How come?

Readers Roundtable: Who Supports You?
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We runners need support to be our absolute best, whether it comes from family, friends, teammates or coaches. It takes a village to raise a runner! While there are countless supportive loved ones cheering us on and enabling us to pursue our big goals, not everyone we love gets this whole running thing. Even some people who once were all-in with our running sometimes change as our relationships and lives change. That’s why we want to hear both great tales of support and tales of how other loved one’s lack of support has affected you.

We want to hear from you:

Stories about others’ support and lack of support for your running.

✬And as always, join us on Twitter every Monday at 8:00 p.m. Eastern for #SaltyChat to discuss the day’s Readers Roundtable topic and more!✬

To My Running Buddy’s Partner: It’s Only About the Running or I Would Never Hit That
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Most competitive women runners train with men at least some times. If you took running out of the equation, there would be no argument from me that spending hours sweating half-naked with heterosexual members of the opposite sex is at best odd, or at worst, inappropriate.

Hey honey, I’m getting up at 4:30 tomorrow morning to hang out and talk with Bill, Fred, and Tom for three hours.

That would be weird, but for some reason when it comes to running we think of it as completely normal.

But what about all of our running buddies’ significant others, especially those who don’t run? How do they feel about their partners spending so much time with other women and then texting them at all hours of the day and night? Do they have anything to worry about from their men’s female running friends?

To the wives and girlfriends of my male running buddies, I say this: it really is only about the running (and even if it wasn’t, no offense, but I wouldn’t hit that, anyway). Read more >>

The Spouse as Running Coach: How to Make it Work
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pasted_image_at_2016_03_30_06_17_pm_720We’ve all been warned don’t mix business with family or friendships! Dual relationships can lead to some messy situations, but sometimes mixing roles is unavoidable or happens anyway. Maybe your landlord happens to be your father, your sister is your boss, your teammate is your massage therapist, or maybe you’re dating your landscaper and are training partners with your hairdresser. 

Balancing these different roles is something I know well, because, for over ten years now, and for the foreseeable future, my husband has also been my running coach.  

Our dual relationship began because I honestly felt my husband was the best fit to be my coach. We both trained under some of the same coaches, had similar philosophies about training, and we shared similar strengths: both benefiting from high mileage and long aerobic intervals. He had seen many of my successes in running so he knew what worked. Additionally, he had a big hand in my qualifying for my first Olympic Marathon Trials in June of 2003, so I knew he could help me accomplish my running goals.

Having my husband as my coach has not always been smooth sailing, but we have learned how to balance the coach/athlete relationship with the husband/wife one over the years. Here are few of the things I’ve found to be helpful to make our dual relationship work.

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Who To Watch at the Olympic Trials: Katie Schiemann
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imageIn 7th grade, nerves almost stopped her from reaching her first starting line, but with the encouragement of her mom and coach, young Katie Howery had a great first race and, as the saying goes, the rest is history. An accountant by day, an elite runner by the crack of dawn, Katie, now Katie Scheimann, will toe the line at her first Olympic Trials this Saturday.

A collegiate runner for the University of Minnesota, Katie began to dabble in half marathons after her eligibility ended. Like most runners, she found the need for a new goal. She ran a 2:52 and won her debut, the 2009 Fox Cities Marathon. With this strong showing, Katie knew with a little more marathoning experience, an Olympic Trials Qualifier was within her grasp.

“After my first marathon my then-boyfriend clued me in that I could even qualify for the marathon trials and what the standard was. It certainly became my mission after that point!” Katie said. It took a few tries, she even thought it wasn’t meant to be at one point, but eventually Katie did just that; she qualified for the 2016 Marathon Trials on the last day of the two-and-a-half-year qualifying window and did it with her husband Christopher by her side. Read more >>

Jessica Odorcic Runs to Overcome
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Jessica Odorcic, Tommy and their son Max. Image courtesy of Jessica Odorcic.
Jessica Odorcic, Tommy and their son Max in 2014. Image courtesy of Jessica Odorcic.

On September 21, 2013, two days before she was supposed to run one of the biggest races of her life and where she would attempt to qualify for the Olympic Marathon Trials, Jessica sat beside her husband at the Seidman Cancer Center in Cleveland, Ohio, trying to digest devastating, heart-wrenching news that would ultimately steal away her Tommy.

In August of 2012 Jessica’s best friend and husband had been diagnosed with melanoma on his scalp. Surgeons immediately removed it and everything seemed fine. Six months later, Tommy’s doctors discovered the cancer had metastasized throughout his lymph nodes, his organs … everywhere. Jessica’s Tommy, a loving husband, father, and her most supportive running companion passed away on June 28, 2014.

Back to that dreary day in September of 2013; Jessica told Tommy it would be selfish to race just two days after receiving the devastating news. Tommy would have none of that. He insisted that she run the race because it’s what she loved to do. So, she listened. Read more >>

Teaching a Non-Runner Hubby to Race!
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Before the OSU 4-miler!
Yes you too can turn your non-running husband into a racing machine!

My husband doesn’t like running, and that’s an understatement. He’s that guy who played sports in high school, and to him, running was punishment for not completing a tackle or kicking the soccer ball off-sides. We runners turn this around to mean we’re hardcore: “Our sport is your sport’s punishment.”

Yes, my husband believes that completely:  on a recent 20-degree morning, with ice-covered sidewalks, he thought there was something wrong with my head. Why would anyone in their right mind voluntarily go run in this cold?

Well it just so happens that, given the right frame of mind, a ball-playing non-runner husband might voluntarily go run in the cold. Read more >>

Love and Marriage…and Long Distance Running.
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On Easter Sunday, I was scheduled to get in a 10 miler. Instead, I did 5 so I could sleep in with my soon-to-be hubby and go to the 11:00 a.m. mass. I don't regret it.
As I count down the final days to my wedding (eek!), I can’t help but wonder whether I can have this guy and my running too.

Long distance relationships are hard, but how about long distance running and relationships? When you’ve got to go out for a 3-hour training run on Sunday and miss quality time at home, how do your loved ones feel? For those of you with a partner at home,  does your training provide your mate with much-needed alone time, or does it put distance between you?  I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting married in three weeks, but lately I’ve been finding myself feeling guilty for having running be such a priority in my day-to-day schedule when I never really worried about it before. Do you ever feel guilty or selfish going out on your daily runs? Is serious training compatible with married life?

Read more >>

Running Infertile: Two Steps Forward, 100 Steps Back
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Raccoons on my mind with just four weeks to “go time.”

I sit here in front of a warm fire with a hot cup of coffee, trying as hard as I can not to think about today’s double-header workout.  I can manage the cold, trying as it is, but the icy streets and snow-drift-covered track have presented some unique challenges this past training week.  I purposely wrote my recovery week into the Christmas/New Year holiday, which had the decency to coincide with the initial snowstorms. But here hits the first 100-mile week of my final peak phase before the Rocky Raccoon 100, and there’s literally nowhere to run.

That’s an apt analogy for the other thing I’ve been avoiding in my life.  Nowhere to run but a treadmill, staring straight ahead and just wishing it would end. Read more >>

Four Shoes, One Love: How Training Changes Runners’ Relationships
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I am no expert in relationships, but I am a competition-oriented runner in a relationship with another runner, and as the years go by and my husband and I go in and out of training cycles, I’ve noticed a few patterns.

The way I see it, the relationship dynamic between pair of runners depends greatly on where each runner is in her/his training.  It’s sort of like the states of matter: as the molecules of an object react to different temperatures, the object passes through the various states of matter (solid, liquid, gas, etc.).  Similarly, as the training of two runners increases and decreases in intensity, so will their relationship fluctuate through different states. Read more >>