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Marathon Swimming and Relationships
Jbetley
UKMember
Marathon swimming obviously needs a lot of time spending on it, often (at least in my case) at unsociable hours. How do people find that affects your relationship if you are in one? Do people have partners who are into the same thing? If not, do you feel supported in what you are doing, which might be perceived as being inherently a little selfish?
Personally, I am in the process of separating from my wife, as we are no longer making each other happy. It is not acrimonious (at the moment at least), and she is actually still incredibly supportive of my EC aspirations next year.
What other experiences do other people have?
Personally, I am in the process of separating from my wife, as we are no longer making each other happy. It is not acrimonious (at the moment at least), and she is actually still incredibly supportive of my EC aspirations next year.
What other experiences do other people have?
Comments
Sorry to hear about the separation hope it all works out in the end.
When we started to get serious, I think she'd sometimes get a little frustrated by how early I go to bed, but she doesn't stay up very late, so it was okay. I make sure to say "I love you" when I leave for the pool and she's still asleep, and as long as I do that, she doesn't seem worried (although if I forget, something doesn't register in her subconcious, and she says she'll get worried).
She paddled for me in the training swims and my first 25k. She saw me close to my worst, but she was very encouraging and helped me get through a swim that, if left to my own devices, I'm not sure I would have. She did get a little frustrated that I wouldn't tell her with more advanced warnings about long training swims, though.
She isn't paddling for me this weekend, but she is paddling for me at Kingdom Swim in Vermont this July.
I wouldn't call myself an expert, but I think you can make it work. It takes some sacrifice and compromise on both sides, but it's nothing that can't be overcome.
I suppose what it comes down to is having a partner that accepting *and* encouraging. Someone who gets that sometimes the obsession outranks them...my $0.02
I'm the Wiccan Christian that was profiled in USMS's Swimmer Magazine in 2017. Soon, I'll be moving to Zurich, Switzerland. Also, I pray to St. Adjutor, the patron saint of open water swimmers.
I'm sorry to hear about your separation @jbentley. I hope you can find some peace in your swimming. In a good relationship, I don't think you have to choose between your passion for swimming and your spouse or significant other.
Molly Nance, Lincoln, Nebraska
As for me I just keep reminding my wife how old I am and how little time I have left to do these kinds of things. She has no idea what I have planned next, and I'm going to keep it that way until the dust settles after this years swims. By then I'll be even older and, presumably, have even less time do do these kinds of things. ;-)
A Workout Ate My Marriage: Exercise Can Set Off Conflict About Family, Free Time; Errands vs. English Channel (Wall Street Journal)
We've been married a long time and we're a (retired) military family, so she's used to inconsistency and the vicissitudes of our life, as well as the fickleness and capriciousness of my "hobbies."
And, in a moment of weakness, she admitted that she loves telling people her husband is a marathon swimmer. So I can always throw that back in her face.
We're all just carbon, water, starlight, oxygen and dreams
Very interesting read. I have seen some of the effects of that, but I do try to keep my swimming time to times when she doesn't have much going on (like 3am when I'm swimming and she's sleeping, or saturday morning, when she's probably sleeping). I do sacrifice some of the sleep that I'd prefer to stay up and either spend time with her, or to help her out with something. I've skipped a few morning swims to stay out with her and her friends. It helps me out in the long term, I think (I hope)
...anything worth doing is worth overdoing.
That's unfortunate if JW was portrayed unfairly, but clearly the narrative rings true to many endurance athletes and their families.
Again, to echo some other posts, little does she know that my aspirations may not end with the EC (should I be lucky enough to get across). There's a lot of exciting swims out there!
i would say misleading...
...anything worth doing is worth overdoing.
1. No workouts after 5:00 PM. That's family time
2. Let her sleep in on Sunday morning as long as she wants and make sure my 2 and 4 year olds don't wake her up.
Good relationship: Wow, I'm feeling overwhelmed with work/care for elderly parents/childcare/yardwork, etc. This may not be the year for me to attempt an Ironman or a channel crossing. Unless my partner has some creative ideas for how we can simplify our lives to help make room for a new project.
Bad relationship A: If I do xyz this year, my partner will divorce me.
Bad relationship B: I'm a work/triathlon/swimming/video game/etc. widow(er)
Plus, I hate the part about how the spouse becomes so much better looking by training 20 hours per week. Twenty hours per week of training does not make you look better than 5. It may make you look much, much worse.
www.WaterGirl.co
AZ Open Water Swimming on Facebook
I like the article (but don't LOVE it, because that would be too strong) mostly for the comments. There is nothing quite like the sanctimonious outrage of a Wall Street Journal reader, except maybe the outrage of a New York Times reader.
We're all just carbon, water, starlight, oxygen and dreams
Like with many social phenomena, it's important to distinguish between correlation and causation. While it may be true that some marriages & relationships fall apart in the context of endurance training, it's not necessarily true that the endurance training causes the break-up.
It could be that the relationship is falling apart anyway, and one partner uses endurance training as an "escape" - which only hastens the inevitable.
It could also be that the endurance training and resulting time apart reveals flaws in the relationship that had gone unnoticed before.
It could be a number of things other than the Ironman/EC training directly causing break-ups. So yes, the article title "A Workout Ate My Marriage" is simplistic and in some cases misleading. A journalist oversimplifying things to tell a juicier story?! I know -- shocking.
But I would guess the less juicier version of the story - the correlational story - is probably true, and it's interesting and worthy of discussion. Is the "Ironman widow" a myth? No, I don't think so... just a more complicated truth than is typically portrayed.
Being an scientist (or at least someone with a science degree) I won't connect the sport to the end of the relationship; as @evmo points out: it shouldn't be done. To say the sport changed me or something like that might be true, but I think it is far more important to acknowledge that we were in college when we met and, swimming or not, different people five years later. Swimming may eat relationships, but it may not, or it may to the Robin Hood thing and steal from some while giving to others.
To her credit, take a look at this picture from MIMS last year http://nycswim.org/Resource/ShowPhoto.aspx?Picture_ID=18997, then remember: the girl in the red kayak and sun hat next to me the whole way around the island had just moved out a month earlier. Supportive.
Best of luck. And if you ever need an escape from it all, may I recommend you go for a swim?
I don't wear a wetsuit; it gives the ocean a sporting chance.
If 29 years of marriage goes down the drain, I won't marry again - there is just no reason to subject another woman to dealing with the kind of all-consuming lifestyle that long distance swimming engenders.
-LBJ
“Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.” - Oscar Wilde
I'm not very popular around here; but I've heard that I'm huge in Edinburgh!
Thankfully, Clare has embraced this one; not because she wants to swim 20 hours straight or anything like that, but I think she really enjoys being in and around the water. The OW community is a warm and welcoming bunch, and we both have many close friends who are in it deeply.... that helps too.
...anything worth doing is worth overdoing.
Between kids, study and work I've managed about 117 miles so far this year. Total. It's almost the end of May. This is normal achievable yardage for me.
I think sometimes partners will be jealous of any passion one has that doesn't fit into their image of how their "loved one" is meant to behave. In that case, things are doomed anyway, probably. I'd previously spent more time and money on tennis and lunches and that was apparently ok.
We're all just carbon, water, starlight, oxygen and dreams
When I was 23, I discovered what it is to swim; in my fifties I have been swept off my feet by marathon swimming.
My son Kyle has always been my main escort, manning a ten-and-a-half foot surfboard we call the Blue Beast.
Three years ago my wife Lisa and I, and our other son, Adam, watched as his life was nearly taken from him, in a slow-moving horror show.
With filmmaker Michelle Aguilar, Kyle and I tried to capture this experience in a short, water-centric video....
....A father and son explore the encountering of Self. Life presents herself to them, and through this they learn, in a small way, what it means to be human....
Here is our story:
To learn more about Kyle's illness, Guillain-Barré Syndrome, please visit here.
The filmmaker:
Michelle has an M.A. in Social Documentation from the University of California, Santa Cruz and has produced numerous non-fiction multimedia projects in cultures and communities across the world. She is currently a Staff Producer at Meridian Hill Pictures in Washington D.C. You can learn more about Michelle and her work here.
Thanks for sharing this with us, Dave. A beautiful and moving narration, over evocative imagery and film clips. I think you've touched on something deep that draws us to this activity. And that your elective journeys are tied so closely to your son's decidedly non-elective medical journey, reveals further meaning.
Loved seeing some fleeting glimpses of your amazing Estero Bay swim, too!