Why do middle aged married men often give up on staying fit?

Another great point in the two posts above... Three times a week, one of my kids has a 90-minute soccer practice. Their field is near a park with a short paved trail, but long enough for 3 loops to equal roughly 7 miles. Not a great place to run, but not awful.

I volunteer to drive 3 kids (my son and two teammates in the neighborhood) to and from practice whenever I can. When I do that, I run for about an hour to allow time to park, run, towel off, and get back to when I pick them up. It works well, but I need an EV b/c I burn so much gas getting out there and back so often (~25 miles away). It is worth it to me because I can work in a double if I ran that morning, or it can be my "last chance" run if I wasn't able to fit in a run before work.

Being creative is important. Another thing I used to do pre laptop is commute to/from work every day (my office had a gym/shower). When the kids were babies, I used to give mom a break by taking them on long runs in the BOB SUV strollers. At one point, I had a regular long run of 16 miles where I pushed an 8-year-old and 4-year-old in the Double BOB SUV. Holy cow...

In your 20s many people will develop functional workout routines for their post-organized-team life.

These often require flexible schedules, long blocks of time, and little outside obligations so you can strike when the motivation is high.

When you have kids that kind of routine gets WAY harder. Working out can feel like taking time from the kids. There are 50 other responsibilities.

+ your energy and metabolism are probably starting to change in your 30s.

These can compound and before you know it... you're very out of shape!

Wow this thread is making me think that maybe I shouldn't have kids unless I somehow make enough money to have my wife be a stay at home mom. Either that or maybe just don't have the kids do many sports and don't be a super involved parent. Just sounds like such a depressing and awful lifestyle to have literally zero personal time and spend decades slaving away in misery. Maybe this thread is bringing out more unhappy people, I wonder how much time the ones complaining spend watching TV.

I did exactly these kind of things when my son was growing up. In fact, he wanted to join in a kids running club at age 5 and being the hands-on dad, I would help by running with the kids for a little parental supervision.

But the funny thing is now that he is a young man, he still runs - ultras and marathons, etc - and once in a while he finds some time to go for a little jog with me, much older now, and he is clearly holding way back and I am struggling to even finish in a relative shuffle.

I guess the point is, these things can be a part of our times together. And as such they can have as much meaning as we might hope they would.

I actually do better at running on weekends when my kids have club sports. Usually we have to arrive at some random field 45-90 minutes before gametime. At that point, I go for a run. The only bad thing is sitting in sweaty clothes afterwards. I usually bring some fresh clothes and change into them at halftime or so. Then shower when we get home.

Because life happens and it is MUCH harder to find the time. I was running marathons and ultras into my early 30s and did it for a few years when my kids were younger than 5. I was getting up at 3AM on the weekends to get my long runs in so I could be there when they got up. That works when you are in your early 30s.

Then you wake up one day and realize you can’t recover as quickly any more on such little sleep. In your 40s you REALLY can’t recover and your metabolism slows. You either stop eating to compensate for the reduced activity or you start to put on weight.

My personal experience is that competitive people are all in or all out. I have always found balance very difficult. I am either training for something or not at all. I loved the process when I was younger but now find that I can replace that with work. I still outwork people but it has resulted in more material security than fast race times.

I admire people that can find balance. I am still trying to find it as I near 50 and suspect I never really will.

In another thread someone posted a reply to this topic by mistake. Here it is:

Having kids is better than anything. Much as I love running and training, being a mom is way better.

Don’t sweat it.

OP writes comments in a way that leads me to believe she is female. OP, are you female?

Welcome to America. This is the culture we have bred. Fortunately, people are starting to wake up to the misery that it is.

Kids are fantastic and should be prioritized above anything else. Work less, have less, enjoy your kids and don’t obsess over the size of your house or the car you drive. Get off your phone and develop relationships. These are the keys to a happy life.

I guess I don't see the problem unless you want to make it one.

Find ways to work in activity with your child or children. I used to mountain bike a real lot when my son took an interest to it, and had some wonderful trips to resorts to do it together. We've run together too, and like others said, there's ways to fit in a workout around their sports games/practices if you are creative.

I've come to find that doing this is not only good for us - it's time well spent together, and it sends a message. It rubs off.

Now I can look forward to my offspring as a young adult who finds a little time to share his impressive running with his old fart dad.

The easy and convenient aspect of a poor diet wth little or no exercise has been mentioned by many in this thread. Family and job responsibilities are often difficult and inconvenient. The average person will gravitate toward any advantage that appears to be less laborious, especially when faced with an angry spouse, screaming kids and a demanding boss. They disregard the long term damage of regularly eating low quality food and abandoning strenuous activity.

Okay, I feel the most important points are being lost in the responses. With regard to kids, the takeaway is that your kids become more important to you, not that they’re a nuisance.
When you have kids – regardless of whether they play sports – time with them becomes your main priority. So, you are not going to want to skip time with them to get in a longer run or a double or a supplementary lift at the gym. You can still do that sometimes, but other times you cannot. And that is okay!

This isn’t an excuse to get big and fat, but you begin to realize that it’s not the biggest deal in the world if your 5k time isn’t maximized. You’d rather your see your kid score a goal or PR or crush the violin solo. Those things take priority.

Also, we are talking about other humans here. So, if you don’t let your kids pursue their own athletic dreams, you’re putting yourself ahead of them. That isn’t the right thing to do, and I think we’d all agree on that. Imagine if your dad told you that you couldn’t play soccer or run track because he didn’t want to drive you to practice. He wanted to go to the gym instead. You’d rightfully think he was a selfish narcissist. But the good news is that when you have kids – at least for most people – this takes care of itself. You naturally care WAY more about them than yourself. Some people just give up their own fitness, but as you see here, others get creative and figure out ways to keep their fitness up while making sure their kids have the same – or better – opportunities they had growing up.

Everything I wrote above is about kids (and really almost exclusively focused on kids’ sports/activities) … now factor in the 5,000 other responsibilities you will have on top of kids – and even if you decide NOT to have kids – and you can begin to see why some people just give up. But that is just life. It isn't pessimistic, it is just life. You don't have to give up. It is working in the fitness around the million other blessings you will receive. Again, you don't have to give up. In fact, these other things are better if you DON’T GIVE UP!!!

There are prescriptions for this. See Serena Williams.

There's no simple reason. However, these might be some:

* running is less fun as you slow down. You naturally slowdown as you age. You might be able to stave it off until 40, but it hits everyone at some point. No exceptions.

* you tend to keep eating the same as when you ran 60-90 minutes a day. Weight creeps up on you over time. Making running fast harder.

* jobs and family make you miss days. More days you miss the longer it takes to get back as you age, you get slower, it's not fun, weight keeps creeping up, you get slower, you run less, weight keeps creeping up until you reach a kind of equilibrium your number above your ideal running weight (often 20-30 lbs or more). It becomes a viscous cycle.

Also note that not all slightly over weight men are not fit. They may not be fit for distance running, but they can be fit for many activities - playing with your kids, going on long hikes in nature, working in you garden (if you are lucky enough to have one), shooting hoops with you friends, swimming at the beach, biking, rowing, resistance training.

Why do so many zoomers and millennials worry about what other people are doing?

A number of people have pointed out obvious answers.

The last part is weird to me. Do you want a wife or a mommy? Part of being attractive to your spouse is not adding to their emotional/cognitive load. A large number of women care less about you maintaining your 29” waist than if you disappear with the kids on some days so she can have some down time. Look at all the fatties who are in happyish marriages with beautiful women.

Wait till the kid brings the bugs back home from daycare / school.

Many men used to have this mindset and burn themselves out. Then, when they think about how much "better" things used to be when they had that discipline, they then start to remember the chronic anxiety and fatigue that came along with it. The weight of that discipline scarred them, and now in their comfortable lifestyle, they find the idea of returning to that discipline to be the most onerous, stressful task imaginable. Maintaining 10% body fat, for example, sucks. You have to think about it constantly. It's not too bad if that's your full-time job (for me, working out was basically all there was to do in the summers during high school), but once you start working 40-60 hours per week, you're so stressed and fatigued from that other grind that the idea of coming home every night to eat a bland dinner and go to bed early with barely any "TV time" makes you want to jump out of your window. That monastic, disciplined, Spartan lifestyle just isn't sustainable for a lot of people. We're stupid creatures that need dopamine whether it's comfort food, doom-scrolling, sex, or alcohol/drugs for those who partake. Our only natural sources of dopamine are food and sex. In my experience, I can maintain that Spartan lifestyle for a few years at most, but I ultimately crash hard. And brother, I'm f*cking 21 years old. I ran 70 miles per week in high school then grinded 60-80 hours per week in college. Right now, I'm in a degenerate phase of doom-scrolling and procrastinating, but I'll probably get back on the horse like you are. I'm happy you've still got that grindset going in your 30s. I'm right there with you--I want to look good for my future wife for as many years as I possibly can. But it's so f*cking hard. Have you felt the burnout before? Have you sunk deep and lost all motivation before? Most people have. Maybe you're an absolute demon who's bulletproof, whether because that's who you are or you're addicted to caffeine or on ADHD meds. Most people aren't bulletproof. Humans are weak creatures. The superego will always be hindered by the id; it's a mosquito that never goes away. My and many others' ego, trying to deal with these two idiots, is so, so tired.

On the contrary, having a kid made me realize how much my pursuit of being arbitrarily fast was pointless.

Now I get to pass that pursuit on to the next generation.