Confessions Of The Marathon Widows

Sometimes I like to imagine what a cat burglar might surmise if he crept into our basement and got a load of the complex black, catapult-like apparatus that now hulks in one corner of the space. Oooh, he might think, are these folks up to some elaborate kink? Bahahaha, silly cat burglar! That’s “our” inversion chair, intended to alleviate pressure on the spine by suspending its (solo) user heels-up, like Batman in repose. Just one example of the gear that infiltrated our space over the past year, as my husband — let’s call him Sam — prepared for, and completed, his first marathon.

And look, folks, he did it! Our whole family is proud. America is proud. If there is a more socially endorsed, unimpeachably virtuous project than spending months traversing hundreds of miles — and cross-training, and stretching, and all of it — to ready oneself for a single, unbroken slog of 26.2 miles, I can’t think what it would be. What could be more arduous, more admirable, more pure than marathon training? And who among us could find it in ourselves to resent a person who undertakes this endeavor? That person’s partner, that’s who.

Here is what I have not told my husband: Throughout the long months he spent planning and fueling and strengthening himself mentally and physically, I was simmering at a slow boil. Even as I attempted to play the role of benevolent, if slightly checked-out, “supportive wife,” deep down, I was a marathon shrew: small, irritable, ungenerous. Resentful in a way that I couldn’t quite put a finger on.

With marathon running increasingly becoming the bucket-list activity of choice among not just Gen Xers like Sam, but also Gen Z strivers, I’m hardly the only one stewing on the sidelines. Turns out, behind many a (coupled) marathon runner is that person’s “marathon widow,” pushing the toddler swing in the park alone, yet again, on Saturday morning while speculating about what their partner is really running from. Anna*, 45, an editor in Charlottesville, Virginia, refers to her husband’s running habit as his “family avoidance plan.” One friend of a friend saw her marriage nosedive after her husband got hooked on running. Now they’re separated.

Asked how her husband’s hardcore athleticism impacted her marriage, Jean*, a teacher based in Central Virginia, does not hold back. “We almost got deeeevorced,” she says. His gateway drug was a simple, 10-mile jaunt, completed in brisk eight-minute miles, that opened his eyes to his own untapped talent, and his hunger for more.

Soon he was competing in his first triathlon (“Do you know how much gear you have to buy to do a triathlon?” Jean says); hiring a specialized triathlon trainer; joining a triathlon running club; and, eventually, signing on to multiple Ironman competitions. That’s a 112-mile bike ride, a 2.4-mile swim, and a marathon-length run. All this, on top of the demanding, long-distance job that left him cranky and jet-lagged. When the couple reviewed their monthly Visa bill, “every single thing would be, like, ‘bike, tires, shoes, race entry fee,’” she recalls. Which was nothing compared to the toll it took on his parenting. When the kids’ soccer Saturdays inevitably rolled around, “he was like, ‘I’m so sorry. Can’t help. I have a six-hour training,’” she sighs. “I wanted to kill him.”

The half dozen marathon resenters I spoke with for this story complain of spouses who leave them holding the bag (and the baby) while they go out to train; who are subsequently too exhausted to make it to drinks with friends; who then, maddeningly, moan about all the fun they’re missing out on. These runners blow serious cash on cloudlike Hokas, ocean-plasma “gels,” and trigger point massages. Some start eating different meals from the rest of the family in their quest for “optimization.” Many salivate over Strava, the now-ubiquitous community-building exercise app, like they’re tweens hooked on TikTok.

Blaire, 40, a high-school teacher in Columbus, Ohio, describes herself as “primary parent, primary shopper, primary scheduler” in her family of four. Which I guess makes her husband… primary hot-footer? “Whenever he can get out to run, that’s when he’s going to go,” she says, whether that’s dinnertime or first thing Saturday morning. “When I complain to my friends about it,” she says with a laugh, “I always say, well, I guess he could have a gambling addiction, or spend all his time in sports bars, or something?”

Whether you have kids or not, “you are choosing to leave your partner for long stretches of time,” says Anna. “You should ask yourself why you’re making that choice. Because I guarantee your partner is asking that question.”

The most universal marathon widow pet peeve? The all-in obsessiveness that overtakes the human being they once knew. Maybe their runner bores them silly with stats and spreadsheets and strategies that only people addicted to running actually care about. Maybe it’s just the grind of living with someone whose entire life is ruled by the training schedule tacked to the fridge. You don’t have to be hitched for this fixation to drive you insane. Diana, a 42-year-old project manager in Pelham, Massachusetts, recalls the time she made the mistake of planning a girls’ trip with a recent Ironman convert. Not only did her friend rise at the crack of dawn to run and work out — a serious buzzkill — but, worse, she never shut up about it. Eventually, Diana put a stop to that, with a bluntness that would not go over well in most marital arrangements: “I don’t want to hear about your training anymore.”

“Do we have to acknowledge that every time you go out for a 2-mile run you’re training for a marathon?” says Courtney, 47, a nurse practitioner in Burlington, Vermont, whose husband was among the world-record-breaking 55,646 runners to complete the New York City Marathon this past November. “Think of how many people do a marathon every year. [He acts like] it’s this special thing,” she says, scoffing. “It’s not special. It’s not superhuman. The fact that they’re endlessly droning on, it’s like, ‘OK, you and 50 million other people.’”

Here’s the thing. Yes, my husband subjected me to detailed discussions of how many ounces each of his multiple brand-new pairs of top-of-the-line running shoes weighed, and thus how many pounds 26.2 miles worth of steps in each would pair would add up to — without seeming to notice that, while he was talking, I had rolled out of my chair and fallen into a life-threatening coma. And, yes, he did order that stupid inversion chair, which taunts me with its over-the-topness. But if I’m being honest, Sam did not commit many of the other aforementioned runners’ sins. He is an extremely conscientious guy. Who washed his own running clothes. Who made it to soccer practice, school drop-off, and Trader Joe’s, just like he always does. Who continued to eat mostly regular-people food. And who never made me a marathon widow — because he barely got a chance to train at all.

“But when I tried to pinpoint the origin of my beef, it wasn’t really about something I wanted from him. ... It’s about what I haven’t been able to find for myself.”

Ready for our special marathon story? In early summer, just when he was due to begin training in earnest, Sam was felled by a surge of searing pain. Not while pounding out that 17th mile, but while stepping into his pants. Did I mention we’re middle-aged? It was a bulging disc. For months, he nursed it around the clock with doctor’s appointments, PT, ice packs, heating pads, and a wedge pillow the size of a small snowplow that got its own checked bag on our summer vacation. Yet he never shelved his marathon dream. Sam was determined to complete it, even if that meant taking an excruciating nine-hour walk through New York City.

On the surface, I tried to applaud his determination. Inside, I steamed and stewed. I couldn’t understand how, after an injury that had overshadowed months of our lives, he was still so stuck on this thing; it struck me as absurd, maybe even irresponsible. He was experiencing real physical vulnerability for the first time; that brought up all kinds of emotional mishegoss — not least of which was a deepening dissatisfaction with me, his supposed helpmate, whose response to the crisis was admittedly a little… stilted. It seemed that no matter what I said or did, I couldn’t be supportive in the right way — an issue of tone, not action, that reflected my festering ambivalence about this whole project. (Not that I was about to admit it!) By the time Sam entered the final countdown this fall, his disc was still somewhat fragile, but not as fragile as the balance between us. I’d have given anything to be a regular old marathon widow, at home with the kids while he happily loped along some far-off path, preferably far from me.

In 2018, Assaf Lev and Sima Zach, a pair of Israeli researchers and academics, published a paper titled “Running between the raindrops: Running marathons and the potential to put marriage in jeopardy.” Interestingly, Lev and Zach posit that this toll on relationships has relatively little to do with surface-level annoyances — the bank-breaking new gear, the unfair child management — and more to do with one partner’s rapidly shifting identity. Oftentimes, newly hooked runners are molting into a new version of themselves, one who looks a little different, talks a little different (runner speak; it’s a thing), and has new interests, new priorities. And a new milieu: In an era of running apps and clubs and group texts, a sport that was once inherently a lone-wolf activity has developed a pack mentality. New runners are quickly absorbed into a community of people who do want to hear about, say, the relative weights of various running shoes.

Shadeen Francis, a marriage and family therapist and certified sex therapist (herself a former runner and soccer player), compares the transformation that comes over some newly-obsessed runners to that of partners who get sober, or who develop fantasies outside of their usual sex lives.

All three are physiological transformations that, to the partner undergoing them, feel “deeply rewarding,” Francis says. The new discovery feels “growthful,” in some way, and like it “explains something about me or connects me to something that I'm missing, such that without it, I don't feel like myself, or I don't enjoy the experience without it.”

All three transformations can make the partner who is not undergoing them feel not just caught off guard, betrayed — who is this person I’m living with, anyway? — but also neglected, deprioritized, left out… left behind. As Francis puts it, “the most valuable resource we have is our attention.” Small, seemingly innocuous (and, hey, healthy!) lifestyle changes — like Blair’s husband, who now skips the glass of wine on Friday night and heads to bed early, leaving her “tiptoeing into the bedroom” because he’s already fast asleep — can add up to a widening chasm.

Francis challenged me to discern my own unmet needs: What was it that Sam’s marathon running was taking away from me? Intellectually at least, I truly was happy for my husband to find his bliss on the marathon course.

So, what, as she put it, was complicating my ability to take joy in his pleasure? If I could figure out what I was missing, I could then ask for it, preferably in “almost offensively specific” terms. She laughs, making up an example: “I would like us to spend 47 and a half minutes, together as a family, every other Tuesday after our son’s soccer practice.”

But when I tried to pinpoint the origin of my beef, it wasn’t really about something I wanted from him. Nearly two months after his marathon was complete, the closest I’ve come to an explanation for my negativity is my own ambient jealousy. It’s not about what he took from me, or from us, it’s about what I haven’t been able to find for myself: Sam had his new thing, something he loved to do, to plan for, to think about, that had nothing to do with the Groundhog Day of our domestic life with two kids. Running was purely for him and, on days when he wasn’t sidelined in pain, it made him feel great.

I, meanwhile, was the same old me. A little bored, a little discontent. A little ambivalent — perhaps my most defining quality — while he was all f*cking in. That single-minded discipline, so laudable in theory, can feel alienating to those of us who can’t muster it. Barbara, 44, a lawyer and mother of two young kids in Akron, Ohio, marvels at her husband’s dedication to the running club he co-founded. “If he sets his mind to, ‘I gotta go run today,’ then he just does it, whether it’s raining, snowing, whether he’s sick, whether he feels like it or not. He’ll go no matter what,” Barbara says. Meanwhile, “I’m, like, looking for any excuse [to get out of my own workout].”

Oh, how I have tried to think of some hobby, any hobby, that I could devote myself to, so that Sam would not, as the scholars put it in their paper, eat a “bigger portion of the marriage cake” — and so that I would not shrew out at him. But there is literally nothing I do for fun, for me, that could possibly require the kind of time and involvement that marathon running does. Sociologists have terminology for this disparity, of course: In couples like mine, one partner is built for “casual leisure” (short-term, relaxing diversions) while the other is built for “serious leisure” (demanding, high-investment hobbies aimed at self-fulfillment and self-improvement). I know that if I did adopt a “serious leisure” pursuit of my own, Sam would be right on board, an amazing support squad — that’s his value system, after all. But it’s just not how I’m built. I don’t want to endure something for fun.

In November, when race day finally arrived, our kids scrawled his name on multiple cardboard signs, which we carted to three different spots along the race course, from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Each time we glimpsed him chugging along, we cheered with genuine pride. With the bare minimum of training, Sam somehow ran almost the entire course — talk about two people being wired differently — and after all that angst, his dastardly disc made it through with nary a twinge. The next day, when I asked in a studied neutral tone whether he thought this was the beginning of a marathon career, his response was immediate and definitive: “No way. That was hard. I don’t need to do that again.” At the finish line, at last, we were in agreement.

*Name has been changed to protect anonymity.