Field note · May 29, 2023 · 2023 · May, week 4 · 2 min read · by Michelle
Two paces, one house
Hibiscus 2023 was my day, so Jay's job that morning was a 2:12 that belonged to me.
I'll say it: most couples-training advice is a lie with a smile on it. You won't hold the same watts and you won't want the same long-run pace, and one of you will be ready to chat at mile eight while the other one is having a private argument with a hamstring. Some weeks I'm the one and some weeks I'm the other, and I'm not always sure which until mile eight. We've been doing this since 2014 and seriously since 2022, and this is what it looks like in our house.
The short sessions during the week are separate, at different times, on different routes, and sometimes in different sports, so Jay might swim at dawn while I ride later, or the other way around. Trying to sync two weekday schedules around two jobs and two bodies is how both workouts get skipped, and apart, they both happen. I'm a routine person, and my routine works better when it isn't waiting on his.
The long stuff is shared, the long run, the long ride, and the brick, and that's where the training relationship lives, and it's where whose day is it matters most. In our house the person whose race it is sets the pace and the other one sits on it, even if it feels easy, and especially if it feels easy. Hibiscus 2023 was my day, so Jay's job that morning was a 2:12 that belonged to me and had nothing to do with a Strava segment, and he did the job.
Dinner doesn't turn into a second race either. If the evening becomes a negotiation about macros or who ate what, the week's already gone, so we eat, we talk about something that isn't the plan, and we go to bed early enough for the alarm. Is that boring? It is, and I like it that way (predictable and routine-based, that's me).
The hardest version of this is when one of us is tapering and the other one's building, and in that week the taper wins the calendar, because the race is closer, and the person building does their long work alone. We say it out loud on Sunday night, as the unspoken version has failed us every single time we've tried it. We'll keep writing this one down as the seasons change, and the rule underneath it stays the same, which is that whoever's day it is sets the pace.