Somewhere in the first mile, the negotiation would start.
Five will be good. Six is still a solid workout. Dude, you’ve already done a lot this week.
That was me on every run this summer, pre-loading the exit before the run had a chance to show me anything. Then I’d finish seven. Or nine. Every time.
Tired was real. Tired just wasn’t done.
The summer was heavy. Between a mother-in-law’s broken arm, surgery, dementia and the move to assisted living, a son who was home from college and then left again this Fall, a daughter starting her senior year in college and a book to launch, my marriage took a hit and needed reclaiming.
Truth be told, some weeks the weight felt like it had its own gravity. The kind of tired that lives in the chest, not just the legs. The kind that makes five miles sound reasonable.
I’ll say this now, because I know where you’re headed. You’re going to tell me a marriage isn’t a half marathon, or that your season was harder than mine. Maybe so. Keep reading anyway.
Clinically, that voice at mile one is anticipatory anxiety. In plain English, it’s the part of you that talks you out of the hard thing before the hard thing has shown up.
So ask what it’s actually telling you. Problem is, it isn’t reporting on the road. It’s reporting on how the next ten minutes feel, and asking you to make a permanent decision off a temporary feeling.
Marriage has the same voice. It sounds like: I’ve been present enough. I’ve held steady enough. This is a reasonable place to stop.
Tired is not a reliable narrator.
You can read your spouse’s exhaustion with perfect accuracy and still miss your own excuse. Accurate map of them, blind to yourself. And that’s the position most of us settle into after a hard season: the one who’s already given enough. We stay there because it looks like wisdom.
The marriage isn’t done because the season was hard. The kids launching and the caretaking settling doesn’t finish the work, it changes it. Harmony gives way to disharmony, disharmony asks for repair, and then it starts over. Nothing is broken when the cycle restarts. That is the work.
The good news is the capacity grows. The body adapts. The marriage adapts. But only if you don’t stop at the number that feels like enough.
Done isn’t a finish line. It’s a direction.
Movement is different than outcome. I don’t get to control completely whether my half marathon race this Saturday goes sub-two. I do get to control whether I keep my pace when the mid-race complaint files itself around mile eight, and it will.
The race is one morning. The marriage is every morning after it.
Five miles is fine. It’s also a way of never finding out what nine felt like.
Which mile are you negotiating at right now?
