Advertisement

Marriage Will Survive, Even if Ironman Comes Calling

Share

Mickie Shapiro, a marriage, family and child therapist, gave me a call after reading my column about my husband’s transformation from exercise dilettante to bicycling maniac.

Mickie, who also teaches sports psychology at UC Irvine, has been there. Oh, the stories she could tell, about herself, her friends and her clients.

Spouse A gets fed up with the usual work-eat-TV-sleep routine and starts exercising, vigorously. Spouse B, who thought things were fine just as they were, can’t relate.

Advertisement

Spouse B begins to resent all the time that Spouse A spends exercising, away from home and with God-only-knows whom.

Then Spouse A starts saying things like: “If you’d start exercising yourself, you’d feel better and look better, too. I know I feel great.”

This is a couple in trouble.

“So you think my marriage is on the rocks?” I ask Mickie.

“Oh, no,” she says. “I thought you sounded very supportive.”

I liked this woman immediately. Boy, did she have me down. Supportive, loving . . . I could go on.

So I went to see Mickie at her home in Costa Mesa. I figured, what the heck, even an obviously well-adjusted person such as myself could use a couple of pointers now and then.

Then when Mickie came to the door, something else popped into my mind. When we had talked on the phone, she’d mentioned something about having just competed in “Ironman.” The truth was I had no idea what she had been talking about.

I was ready to guess that Ironman was a new Saturday morning cartoon show before Mickie explained that it was a triathlon, essentially the athletic equivalent of taking the SAT, GRE and the bar exam back-to-back, for fun.

All of this began to sink in when Mickie, 53, mother of four, greeted me at her front door. Jane Fonda should look this good. I wondered if Mickie’s lack of superfluous padding made it difficult for her to sit for long distances.

Let me tell you, exactly, what Ironman is so that you can better picture what I’m talking about.

Advertisement

There are five of these triathlons in the world, in Japan, Canada, New Zealand, Germany and in Kona, Hawaii, the most rigorous of the bunch. That’s where Mickie went, one of 1,250 lucky winners of previous competitions.

It took her 14 hours and 45 minutes to swim 2.4 miles in the ocean, (they do that first so they don’t drown), then pedal 112 miles on a bike and then run a marathon.

“But it flows,” she tells me. “It just goes. It’s like the SAT. You get yourself prepared and you just do it.”

OK, by this time I must have had a look on my face or something. Mickie looks back.

“When I first saw it, I thought it was ridiculous, crazy,” she says. “I thought who would ever do that?”

Exactly, Mickie.

So this is my opening. I ask about the state of her marriage.

Mickie, a woman who was raised for marriage and motherhood, says she is happily divorced.

She has analyzed the reasons for this, of course, and concluded that her love of athletics, dawning almost by accident at the age of 40, is directly responsible.

Running made her feel alive, invigorated. She gained confidence and made new friends. She entered competitions and came out a winner.

But it wasn’t like her husband opposed all this, she says. Fact is he was too supportive.

“It felt real intrusive to me,” Mickie says. “It was like he was making my accomplishments his own.”

Advertisement

Then she says her husband tried a little different approach. He started running, around the neighborhood, on his own.

“But he was jogging,” Mickie says. “He wasn’t racing.”

So at this point in our conversation, I’m beginning to think about what Mickie had told me earlier. “Supportive,” she had called me, and I, naively, had thought that was probably a good thing.

“Then you wouldn’t counsel someone like me to hop on a bike next to her husband?” I ask.

“Oh, no,” she says in a reassuringly emphatic tone. “He needs his own thing.”

I knew that, of course. I was just testing. Now I’m beginning to feel good about our talk.

“The whole idea is that you have two equal partners,” Mickie goes on. “Each partner should have their own interests, but at the same time they should be able to communicate with each other, share with each other. . . . The whole thing I preach is balance.” Balance. Right. That sounds eminently reasonable. But then visions of Ironman pop into my head again. I give Mickie another look.

“It’s not possible to be a triathlete and have balance,” she says, smiling.

Right. I knew that. I may be supportive, but I’m not crazy.

Dianne Klein’s column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.

Advertisement