So it is no secret that I am pretty enthusiastic about sport and fitness (hence the entire section of my website related to it) so I wasn’t surprised at the number of people who found the idea of me getting a ‘dad bod’ humorous or ironic when they found out I was expecting a daughter. For those like me who miss half of the pop culture references that seem to flood the internet from people who have trouble using full sentences, a dad bod refers to the common change in shape that men get when they have a child. We’re meant to get a gut. My first reaction was to stubbornly insist I could maintain the same level of fitness and that my dad bod would be just the same as my physique pre-parenthood (I can imagine lots of parents reading this and chuckling to themselves). Then I decided that not having been a parent yet, I really didn’t know how hard things were going to be so I would hold off on making any promises. Except one. I would not blame my daughter for anything. Maybe I will put on some weight or lose some fitness this year, but that would not be a consequence of having a child. I was sure I could still find time to maintain my fitness if I wanted to.
With my daughter ten weeks old and after I recently had a disappointing race at the Gold Coast Marathon, I have been reflecting on that promise. I still stand by it. I may have lost a bit of fitness since becoming a father, but that was not inevitable. If I wanted to do more training in the last three months, I could have found the time (I didn’t because I also like sleep and having some kind of a social life), so being a parent didn’t cause me to lose fitness. My daughter who has little say in the choices I make anyway, certainly did not cause me to lose fitness. If I never run as fast as I did before I was a parent, that isn’t because I became a parent, it’s because of choices I have made since after becoming a parent. I mentioned my struggles in the Gold Coast Marathon earlier. In actual fact I was really suffering and wanted to give up pretty bad. I don’t like to give up at anything, but I was dehydrated, exhausted and in a fair bit of pain, with another hour of running ahead of me and no prospect of a result I would be happy with. My strongest motivator to keep going was the knowledge that when my daughter is older I will no doubt speak to her about being resilient and not giving up. Could I do that without feeling like a hypocrite if I gave up this time? Now I’ll never know what factors played the biggest part in my poor result. It could have been a bad race plan, the humidity, my nutrition or perhaps I didn’t get enough training in leading up to the race. But what I do know for sure is that having a daughter (and hence a dad bod) made it easier for me to finish the race, not harder.
1 Comment
Airwrekka M8
7/4/2018 01:05:56 am
Dad bods are rad bods!
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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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