Last month, my
wife ran the ING New York City Marathon. I’m incredibly
proud of her. She did it all by her lonesome. She put in the months of
training; no running group, no private guru, just her and the road. And that
takes something. Especially when you’ve got a kid.
This is actually
the third year in a row that one of us has trained for a marathon. After our
son was born, I decided that it would be a good idea for me to get in shape, so
as not to leave him fatherless at a young age because his dad was fonder of Ben
& Jerry’s than of exercise.
So I took all of
the half-hearted running I’d done over the previous decade and cranked it up a
notch. I started running races. I dropped a good 40 pounds and I set my sights
on running the full 26.2 miles.
If you’ve got a
kid, distance training is a bit trickier. If you’ve got a spouse who has no
problem staying home while you’re spending hours and hours running down the
sidewalk, you’re set. My wife runs, so leaving the kid with her was not an
option. If we lived near our families, we could drop the kid off at Nana’s
while the two of us put in our weekly mileage. But our families live nowhere
near us.
Which
leaves…babysitters? Right. Four months of the kind of hours we’d have
needed a sitter for would’ve bankrupted us.
So we schlepped
the kid along.
Actually, one of
our earliest purchases when my wife was pregnant was a jogging stroller. It takes
some getting used to. A part of running, as I’d learned how to do it, is to
swing your arms. Pushing a jogger down the road, you can’t exactly swing your
arms. They don’t turn on a dime, either. Additionally, when the kid is small,
you have to use a car seat with the thing, which makes it even heavier and
harder to maneuver. I won’t even go into what a hassle a jogging stroller is on
a crowded subway train. Woof.
But, in spite of
these issues, we learned to use and love the jogger. Our kid has spent roughly
12,879 hours in the jogger thus far. (That’s a rough estimate.)
When the kid is
small, it’s pretty easy. They sleep 97% of the time anyway, so it’s no great
deal for them to sleep in a jogger. As they age, though, it becomes a bit
trickier. You have to provide them with entertainment; bring along a toy (or
ten). The kid needs you to take care of a dropped sippy cup or a runny nose, so
you’re stopping periodically. Also, there’s a big difference between running a
quick three miles and asking a kid to sit in a jogger for an eighteen-mile
training run.
So now, in
addition to the logistics of training with a kid, you’ve got the guilt of
training with a kid. Sure, it’s nice to know you’re setting a good example of
an active, healthy life for the wee one to live up to. But you weigh that
against forcing the kid to sit in a jogger for two or three hours. Or, if one
spouse is making the sacrifice to stay home so the spouse in training can get
in the necessary miles, the runner is left with the guilt of spending all this
time away from the kid.
What I’m saying
is, I’ve got some guilt around these issues.
I do have
something to hold onto, though; something to keep those feelings at bay. When
I’m looking down at the kid, wrapped up in a blanket in the jogger at 8:30 on a
Wednesday night, out late because I have to get in an eight-mile run after
work, I think of the lovely image of my son and I, twenty years from now,
running a race together.
That helps.
Joe Wack currently teaches science to elementary school
children in the Bronx. He writes for New York Family‘s Parenting In Progress blog. He
lives in Harlem with his wife and 3-year-old son.
