Who knew staying fit would be so difficult as a dad? Apparently everyone, based on the predictions many people made about my dad-bod. As I wrote earlier, I was determined to prove them wrong and to never use my daughter as an excuse for not achieving anything. It was hard work, but I managed to squeeze time to train into most days. Many times I didn’t ant to do it and no doubt it added to my overall sense of fatigue, but I knew it wouldn’t be forever. As my little girl became a less-little girl, she would sleep more and presumably so would I. The hard work seemed to work too. When my daughter was five months old I ran a new PB of at the Sydney Marathon. Even with the added time pressures of parenting and a few other curve balls life threw my way, I found I was largely able to achieve the quantity and intensity of running I wanted to. Training was going well. No matter how tired I was, I usually only needed to marshal my full self-discipline to push myself through a training session for an hour a day. I reckon anyone can be disciplined for one hour out of 24.
I also had the intention of losing a little bit of weight to make life a little later in the latter stages of races. I found this a lot harder. Because unlike the short bursts of hard work I needed to keep training no matter how busty the rest of life get, improving my diet required 24-hour discipline. With my normal routine a thing of the past, I was often forced to miss normal meal times and getting really hungry later leading to some fairly unregulated eating patterns. I would also find myself awake and often in the kitchen at all sorts of unusual times so there was the constant temptation to eat something extra, especially when I was tired and felt like I needed a little extra energy. Compounding these issues this was the fact I was often more rushed and had less time to prepare food, leading to more snacking on the go with less healthy alternatives. Maybe I’m a bit slow on the uptake, as it has taken until my daughter reached six months of age before I identified this area that was holding me back, but now that I have I think I can plan to eat better and maybe have a little more success in this regard.
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Dad thoughtsI haven’t had much chance to write much over the last couple of weeks. This has largely been to do with the birth of my daughter, which has had a profound impact on my life. As a corollary of this, a fair amount of my thoughts and observations may shift to the new topic of parenthood. I’m not planning on stealing from Sonia Kruger’s playbook and use the phrase, “as a parent,’ to make claims with no factual basis, but parenthood is a complex and fascinating area so I will be making a few comments about my experience of it. Archives
October 2020
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