Her Journey to IRONMAN: The Joy of the Observer: 3 Months

I, Bob, have been able to watch Bethany train over the past year for her IRONMAN adventure. 

Have you ever found yourself smiling watching someone else achieve greatness?

One of my favorite videos online is of John Boyega, a young 22-year-old black kid from London, who became the star of the new Star Wars franchise. This was his first acting role and he now stars in one of the most iconic film franchises in history. 

Watch as he picks up the light saber and you see the dreams of every 8-year-old boy come to life:

Watching others achieve greatness can bring tremendous joy. You can’t help but smile for John Boyega and his friend as they see their dreams come true.

Along those same lines, last year SpaceX landing a million pound rocket the size of the statue of liberty, that had been traveling 3,000 MPH, on a barge in the middle of the Atlantic. They did something that no-one had ever done and something everyone said was impossible. Watch as 1,000 rocket scientist lose their minds while people worth a billion dollars high five interns:

Can you see their hours of labor? Their pain, suffering, and effort all boil to the surface when they achieve their goal? Did you notice the young guy who looked possessed as he lost himself in the cheering? I know that feeling.

For the past 12 months, I’ve been happy to be a supporting character in Bethany’s play. I’ve been happy to spend days with the girls as she puts in hours on the bike or in the water or out on the road. Watching Bethany achieve greatness has been one of the happiest events of my life.

I don’t believe life is binary where you have to compete with those closest to you in order to have joy. The presence of her joy doesn’t drive joy away from me, it provides joy to me. Like the reactions in those videos, joy is infectious and spreads to everyone in the room.

Unless you live alone, IRONMAN is a team sport.

There are only so many man hours in the day, and when you’re training, most of those man hours are spent exhausting yourself in pursuit of the IRONMAN goal. Being married to someone doing IRONMAN training is watching your partner have more energy and life than you’ve ever seen them have one minute and have them sleep for 20 hours the next. Bethany has never had more life, more joy, more energy, and more purpose than she does right now.  It's exciting and infectious. She spreads life everywhere.  I can't help but smile.

One of my favorite parts of the training is being with the girls while Bethany is out of the house. Bethany is gone when the girl's wake up.

When the training started, the girls would ask where mommy was, but after the first few weeks they knew she was out training. Our girls live in a world where their mom is so strong, so indestructible, and so determined that it is unusual if she is at home in the mornings. Her strength is making our girls strong.

I want to be a parent that isn’t as lazy as I want to be. I hope to raise girls who can solve the problems I couldn’t solve while loving people I couldn’t love. I want to have a marriage between two equals who choose to do life together every day. I want to have emotional bandwidth remaining at the end of the day. I want to have a wife who loves life. I want to have a wife who isn’t fragile and beaten down by life. I want a wife who can kick life in the teeth. Bethany training for Ironman gives us all those things.

Watch Bethany’s joy, and let it be infectious:

I love you babe.