What Boston Will Cost Me
My wife hasn’t complained once. I need to say that upfront because everything that follows might make it sound like she has. She hasn’t. She’s rearranged her mornings, handled events alone, picked up the slack on weekends when I disappear for three hours, and done all of it without making me feel guilty. That’s precisely why I feel guilty.
Training for the Boston Marathon is the most selfish thing I’ve done in years. I chose it, I committed to it, and what seems like every morning I lace up and walk out the door I’m choosing it again over everything else. Over breakfast with my kids. Over an extra hour in bed with my wife. Over being present in the house during the chaos of getting everyone ready for the day. The alarm goes off and I leave. That’s the deal I’ve made with myself, and I keep telling myself it’s temporary.
I’ve written before about how my enjoyment always comes last, how being a father and husband means putting yourself at the bottom of the list. That’s just the way I am, and I’ve always been comfortable with it. Training for Boston has flipped that completely. For the first time in a long time, I’m putting myself first, and it feels wrong even though I know it shouldn’t. Marathon training sends an invoice to everyone in your house and none of them signed up for it. My daughter needs help with something and I’m foam rolling in the living room. The house needs sorting and I’m calculating whether I have enough recovery time before Tuesday’s tempo run.
The hours are the obvious cost. Numerous runs a week, some of them ninety minutes or longer. Those hours come from somewhere, and they come from my family. There’s no version of this where I train properly and nothing changes at home. The laundry still needs doing. The kids still need feeding. The dog still needs walking. All of that falls on my wife when I’m out grinding through kilometres in the dark, and I can dress it up any way I want, call it self-improvement or discipline or whatever, it’s still me choosing to be somewhere else.
Selfishness dressed up as growth
If you read my blog you will know I love doing hard things and I know the value of Misogi. The idea that testing your limits gives you clarity, the way a long run makes everything else feel manageable. I still believe that a life without challenge is a life half-lived. What you don’t see is the look on my wife’s face when I tell her Saturday’s long run is going to be over twenty miles. There is no anger, nor resentment, just a quiet recalibration of her entire weekend around my hobby.
That’s the word I keep circling. Hobby. Running a marathon is a hobby. A very time-consuming, physically demanding, emotionally draining hobby that I’ve convinced myself is somehow more important than it is. I’m not curing anything. I’m not solving a problem. I’m running in a circle and coming back to the same place I started, and the people I love are waiting at home for me to finish.
Most running content is about the runner. The early mornings, the mental toughness, the long slog through winter miles. I’ve written those posts. I’ve sat in the mud and talked about what it takes to keep going. The part that’s missing from all of that is the people who aren’t running. My wife isn’t getting a medal at the end of this. My kids aren’t crossing a finish line. They’re just getting a version of their dad who’s either running, recovering from running, or planning his next run. Always verbing, never just being there.
I’m not going to stop running any time soon, I’m just trying to be honest about what it costs and who’s paying for it, because the running community rarely talks about that part. The discipline, the grit, the early mornings: all real. The partner doing everything else while you’re out chasing a personal best: equally real, and they deserve more than a thank you in an Instagram caption.