If pre-dawn is not an option, then perhaps getting out the door during his nap time. Otherwise, hop on the trainer during his nap time. Lastly, you could also hit the trainer after he goes down at night. While I can get up at 4am to train, I could never adjust to a workout right before bed. Also, by the time the twins go down, I too am ready for some sleep.
Twins yikes =D. Yep, 5A is my normal trainer time that seems to work pretty well for us.
Recently got my wife a cheaper wheel on trainer so she has been coming down to train for our family rides. Little guy loves the Burley.
I think that other than stroller and trailer when they are young, you are really limited. And the pack n play to ride your trainer.
I got my stepdaughter when she was 6, so missed all the little kid stuff.
When they get older and into activities, make their time yours as well.
Mine was in soccer, marching band and 4H.
I had to drive her to many of these practices and activities. Unless you have to stay and watch their practice, their hour practice would be a 45 minute run or ride.
Marching band competitions were often 8-12 hours long. Her performance would be 12 minutes. Her section might be an hour and a half. Awards would be an hour, about 5 hours later. I’d go for a long ride in the middle.
In 4H she raised steer, hour plus feed/cleanup a few nights a week and 3-5 hour bath and training on Sunday. I’d go for a ride or run during those.
Honestly there are probably times when it makes sense to back off the bike a bit if it feels right to you. The kids are only young for so long and the freedom to ride will come and go at different stages of their lives. I have 4 and my oldest is now 18, youngest now 7 and I’ve never had as much freedom to ride as I do now. Activities with kids can now include riding or running, which is super cool. But they also are way more able to understand any riding I do as contributing to my mental health or general wellbeing. The younger childhood years were precious and I dialed back on a lot of my activities at the time and I don’t regret it. Everyone has a balance that works for them and it changes all the time, my advice would be not to add the meta stress of worrying about the ups and downs of hours spent riding!
For me, my outdoor ride on a Sunday with my best mate is my anchor for the week. …some good competition with bouts of chats re life’s challenges… followed by a coffee…bliss. Really the only time I get to myself all week. My wife does the same thing on the Saturday and it seem to work for our family.
This is the most challenging part of being a masters athlete. I have 3 kids, the older 2 (14 & 11) are hard in a way because I am running them from one activity to another after schools, and the little man (3) is hard because you have to do the bedtime stuff (shouldn’t say hard because all 3 kids are bloody good kids and I enjoy doing these things with them). So in the end something has to give, and with a wife that is very active as well it seems more than anything it’s the adult time together. Sometimes we barely see each other in a week as we are both going different directions or taking care of the kids while the other trains. It’s definately something that we need to get better at.
I wanted to resurrect this thread as there are probably a lot of new parents that could benefit from some of the tips and I could use a refresher/motivator. I just had my fourth child (all under 6 :)) last month so I’ve become accustomed to managing training while welcoming and nurturing new family members. Raising children is supremely challenging and rewarding and completely changes how you schedule your life and training. If not realistic in your expectations, you can face a rude awakening.
I’ve managed to actually make modest improvements in my overall fitness on the bike although the path hasn’t been linear. Below are some of my thoughts/learnings if you want to try and maintain decent fitness on the bike while prioritizing family and work.
This is basically my personal reflection that I finally had the time to write being on paternity leave now, so I apologize that it’s way too long. It also might come across as too serious for some, but my performance goals have been to be able to race competitively during the Spring/Summer and maintain relatively close to peak conditioning and maintain decent fitness in winter months. Unfortunately, I’ve only been able to race a few times but I’ve been able to maintain adequate fitness to still feel good doing a group ride here and there or go for a PR on a bucket list climb.
For context, here is a graph of my training hours over the last several years and timing of my children. My exercise time weekly fell from around ten hours to about six but my cycling stayed pretty consistent (4-5 times per week) with most consistent non-cycling exercise being maintenance and injury prevention core work and yoga. Over the time period, I’ve done as little as seven workouts in a month when on vacation and sick but then leaned into training when schedule became better.
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Examine what you spend your weekly time on (work, family, hobbies). What would you cut first if family demands increased by X hours per week? Be prepared if you want to maintain or even improve fitness while also meeting your new family needs.
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Prepare bike/workout station ahead of time. Other folks have mentioned this and I think its key - get an indoor system with big fans that is ready to go on moment’s notice. Pre-fill water bottles, have some snacks next to the trainer, fan setup. Having a fridge near your trainer is ideal. For me, any time I’m about to workout but have to go back inside or interact with my young kids, its disruptive to everyone so best to have a station where you have your kit, shoes, HR monitor, etc.
I’ve done 30-minute workouts wedged between obligations because they’re better than nothing and the mental boost from making it happen is sometimes as big as an ideal workout. Related - learn to love the indoor trainer. I’ve had many times where I had an hour and a half block and I chewed through the first 30 minutes fiddling with some mechanical or tire issue. It removes a ton of the uncontrollable variables that you probably don’t have the time for anymore.
- Communicate with spouse ahead of time. In the heat of the moment (Saturday morning) while the baby is crying nobody is going to feel good about you suggesting you might head out on a 2 hour ride. Talking about it earlier in the week while asking what they want to achieve that weekend before you suggest what you want to do is much more palatable.
This is key with your spouse in that (similar to your kids), nobody wants to be told what to do. For example, if I tell my wife, I really need to do this workout Saturday, can you watch the kid(s), etc, she is far likely to resent my training. If I ask, what do you want to prioritize/accomplish personally this weekend, and I can help support her, she is 10x more likely to turn around and ask me the same. Now it’s a team approach and completely shifts the dynamic from zero sum push pull to expand the pie, both feeling more control. We also set annual goals and discuss what each of us personally and as a family would like to accomplish in the year. This helps both of us understand how we may be prioritizing our non-family time and gets buy-in.
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Utilize Indoor Intervals. My training over the last several years moved from mostly unstructured to nearly all structured workouts. My outdoor rides used to be the majority of my cycling and now they can seem like a rare treat. But my “junk” miles are also minimal so an hour indoor workout now is probably as valuable if not more than a 2-hour ride from my pre-kids days. This shows up in my fitness improvements which is now 4.55w/kg with ftp at 364 from a FTP in the low/mid 300s before having kids. Some of the leading research suggests you can get most of the benefits from doing high intensity intervals for a very short period of time in a session that might only be 30 minutes long. While you may not increase performance by only doing this training you can maintain a lot of what you’ve built over the prior weeks/months during tougher stretches.
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Identity/Priorities. Change your identity to accept that you are now also a Mother/Father and not just a Husband/Wife/Partner, Athlete, Employee. I often visualize my future self looking back at how I spent my energy and time. I always envision myself with my family. You need to change the subconscious to align it with your new reality or you risk a lot of cognitive dissonance and discomfort when your athletic pursuits are falling short of your expectations/desires. Personally, this is what I struggle with the most. I’ve come to realize that I am quite selfish naturally so I have to remind myself what I want my ultimate legacy to be. It’s not being a competitive age group athlete, it’s being a husband and father.
Prior to my first child at the start of 2018 I did an Ironman in 2017, lots of riding, etc and built my weekends and many days around it. Now my weekends are usually my flex days where I’ll add something if it works with everyone’s schedules but I don’t have it scheduled or I risk being stressed and disappointed when I can’t do it. I can usually get in a 30 minute yoga session and perhaps an hour indoor ride but I rarely build my weekend around it (unless it’s my Birthday :)). I also realize that having it planned makes me more annoying to my wife as I’m asking questions indirectly about the likelihood of me completing my workout.
I get Strava envy most weekends when I see friends or others posting huge rides. Some have kids. I don’t know what their arrangement is but everyone has different priorities/setups/agreements and outside help. I’ll probably never complete a Rapha Festive 500 challenge or a Saturday morning group ride. I know I want to be super present at all points in my kids’ lives and I don’t want them to ever feel Dad would rather be riding his bike than spending time with us. What I do want them to think is, Dad prioritized us, but he also loved riding his bike and sacrificed other things to still work toward those goals. I also remind myself that I wouldn’t choose anything different, I love being a Father and having kids. I wouldn’t ever trade weekend rides.
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Creativity. One needs to be creative in incorporating training into the normal course of life. I realize this is unrealistic for most but when our first child was 8 months we moved out of the city and into a house that made for a possible commute ride to/from work. It wasn’t the most important consideration but it was an input into our decision for me to have a potential workout commute. Other thoughts would be are there meetings you have that you could take while on an indoor trainer? I’ve listened to several when I haven’t had to be active. I’ve done 9pm workouts and 4am workouts as well if scheduling is tough.
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Efficiency. Unfortunately, much of your current personal activities and hobbies will have to go if you want to maintain or even improve your cycling ability. There are so many pulls on your time and energy and you’ll likely only have an hour or so of personal time a day. I used to watch sports on TV quite often but now it’s rare. I feel slightly embarrassed when I have no idea how the local teams have performed, but it doesn’t work for my current schedule and my kids aren’t of the age to watch yet so it’s out.
I think with one child it’s not quite as dramatic because you and your spouse can share the load over the weekends but as you get to 2+ this gets more difficult. For my first two children my wife would get the coveted Saturday morning spot (7-10am) and I would get the Sunday spot. But when additional children came this became a smaller window and now completely gone. My workouts changed from outdoor 2-3 hour rides to indoor 1 hour rides.
- Adaptability. Kids get sick a lot, particularly when they have siblings and are going to daycare/school. At a few points I wondered if my kids were immunocompromised as they were getting sick at least monthly for 1-2 weeks. It seemed every time I had a decent block of training I’d get sick and go backwards. In the course I missed my one scheduled 2022 A race when my family got Covid due to my child’s daycare exposure and I’ve missed countless training sessions. Sick kids also sleep worse and need more attention, especially when young so everything suffers. Multiple night wake-ups don’t leave you feeling fresh for training.
This is where you double down as a parent and caregiver and trust that things get easier over time. I’ve also started workouts only to get 20 minutes in and a crying baby or other has forced me to end early. These are frustrating but become less common as the kids age so trust it won’t always be this way and getting on the bike is always worth it even if you only get a short warm-up. What you don’t want to do is give up completely and stop even trying, which leads to the next consideration.
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Resilience. There will be tons of reasons your fitness will decline and you’ll see many of your friends completely fall off when they have kids. Everyone has different priorities and much has to be eliminated once you decide to have children. I always prioritized strong fitness and cut out most other non-essential commitments, but I also wanted to continue to ride competitively and maintain a level I felt good about. Being an above average athlete/cyclist was part of my identity and I didn’t want to lose that so across all the sicknesses, long family trips without my bike, etc I found ways to do something. It could be running on the beach, stroller jogs, hotel recumbents or anything. You’ll need to learn to find joy in a steamy indoor trainer ride at 4pm when you used to do an 8am coffee ride with friends. But the times you do get out for those social rides they’ll mean a lot more. I often visualize riding with my kids when I’m 50 and being able to keep up which helps keep me stay motivated during certain tough periods.
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Opportunistic. One of the major learnings from parenthood is you can’t count on anything so when you have that day you feel reasonably good, you have to take advantage of it. I haven’t always had a specific training plan over the last five years but I’ve listened to my body and mental capacity when it comes to choosing my training stress. This means I often don’t know what I’ll do day-to-day but I have a general weekly goal of 1-2 hard interval sessions with a couple low/moderate intensity rides and maybe an easy ride if I have time. Not being wed to a day-to-day training plan reduces my anxiety when I’m awoken in the middle of the night by my kids or my kid wakes me up at 5am (this happened for about a year when my oldest was one). I just accept that today might not be the best day for my VO2Max intervals. I do try and follow a plan when I am gearing up for an event but again, I move things around to incorporate the family needs.
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Acceptance. We must accept that having children is (at least for me) the biggest life change we’ll experience. This requires accepting that the old must make way for the new. We can’t do the same things we did before having kids and we must incorporate this into our training. We must prioritize rest and recovery knowing that family stress increases overall stress, especially at a time when our bodies are aging. I’ve learned the hard way multiple times and I’m finally listening. For example, I resumed training fairly quickly after my kids were born worried I would lose fitness and in desperate need of the exercise induced endorphins. I paid for it when I developed Shingles twice - about a month and a half after my second and third’s birth. I wasn’t sleeping much and still trying to get high intense interval training until my body couldn’t take the toll. I should have scaled back my intensity and focused on endurance rides and accepted some short-term loss of fitness.
There are times when you need to accept that you can’t have it all and you need to focus on the long game. I’ve had some dark periods when everything seemed hard (terrible sleep, sickness, parenting challenges) where I thought maybe I’ll just drift into cycling mediocracy doing a few easy rides a week. At times like that, I remind myself that my most important cycling goals are being able to keep fit as I age so I can keep up with my kids in addition to the lessons they learn from seeing me set goals. Those goals are met through consistency rather than perfectly executed training plans. And eventually, things improved and I rediscovered the motivation and joy of pushing myself. I had to repeat “this too shall end” more times than I want to recall, but all of those ups and downs result in a rich and full life.
Hope some find this helpful, and I look forward to hearing others’ thoughts.
This takes the cake, even over me that had my first baby at 58
4 kids under 6!! You obviously wasn’t training enough. hahaha
Has anyone experience in training (Z2 ride) early in the AM and eating later (I’m intermittent fasting for the last 5 years - I start eating at approximately 12 pm). I’m putting this post in this thread because I’m trying to put some time before the start of the day, as the afternoon want to spend as much time with the kids as possible … Thanks!
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As for morning rides while everyone is asleep, go for it. It’s awesome! You get your workout done w/out distractions. That said, in the early days and months I was too tired from having to get up and feed the twins and/or change diapers. All rides (trainer), assuming I had energy were during my lunch break or immediately when I walked in the door after work. So, if you’re past that phase and the kids are sleeping on their own and thru the night, then get up early and get it done!
I’ve edited the post:
“I’m intermittent fasting for the last 5 years - I start eating at approximately 12 pm”.
I’m worried that if I start eating a bit later (5 hours) after the ride, I might cause more harm than good. 