Rea Kolbl

A while ago my husband and I were working out in a gym, and I was in a particularly bad mood; I was hungry, tired and stressed from work, but still wanted to work out, failing at it, and taking it all out on Bun, who by then was well trained in the hangry athlete management and just patiently nodded at my glares and R-rated language. Not getting upset at me actually just made it worse, and while I felt bad I also couldn’t find a way to stop it. Then someone recognized me.

“Are you Rea?? You are amazing!!” Then, turning over to my husband, “isn’t she amazing?”

I half expected Bun to just walk away at that point, but he smiled and said, “I guess she is.”

No matter how hard the race is, Bun is always there for me at the finish line. Photo credit: Bob Mulholland

But the truth is, I wasn’t amazing at that moment, and there are many like this in our daily lives. Being tired can make you moody, and being bad at planning sometimes also means I’ll be hungry, overall a bad situation for me and those around. It’s easy to smile at races, be happy during events where I’m rested, full of adrenaline, with nutrition planned (usually by Bun) to avoid hunger. It’s also easy to be amazing after a race, especially a good one. And even after bad ones, there’s always things to learn and to celebrate, hang out with friends I haven’t seen in a long while, and eat all the bananas and peanuts available at the venue.

But this is maybe 10% of our daily lives (fine, this year maybe 20%), but there are so many more days of hard training, involuntary sitting down (taper tantrums tend to be even worse than tired tirades), and Bun puts up with me through all of those. Even kisses me goodnight at the end of the day, no matter how many times I told him that the lack of bananas is obviously his fault, and no I refuse to eat that energy bar because the second ingredient is sugar.

I think staying up all night is even harder for our crew – at least we’re occupied with “one foot in front of the other”, while they patiently wait ready for us to come into the pit. Photo credit: Victor Martines

So what’s my point? I don’t know how to fix this. I know when I’m annoying, but in that moment, I can’t stop it. So I guess this is a shout-out to all of the spouses out there, all of the partners, family, and friends who see the worst of us, yet still love us, despite. Who come with us to races, stay up all night with us, or stay at home to take care of the household… and who rarely get greeted with “You are amazing!” by strangers in the gym.