cabdoctor wrote:
tttiltheend wrote:
My family came first, my job second. Not to mention house renovations that I did myself, doing my own landscaping, etc. etc.tttiltheend wrote:
it's the exception rather than the rule that one can move to a job with less hours and not give up some professional advancement potential, job satisfaction, and compensation.I think you hit the nail on the head with both of these comments. To make this work you do have to sacrifice..a lot. It maybe it's yourjob, it may mean hiring someone to do your yard or home renovations, or maybe choosing to live some place with very little upkeep. I think the point that most of us are making is that to be successful, and I hate to use that phrase because I think any happy athlete is successful and so i consider you a successful athlete, but to be a winning athlete it takes a lot of premeditated sacrifice. And that's true at any level no matter how many or few hours you put in.
Add to this tangent, my 2 cents is its nearly impossible to excute on professional advancement in any moderately demanding field and get close to your potential in tri at the same time....forget about layering families on top. So really it's a matter of picking which is higher priority. Me personally, I never picked professional advancement (better job or killing myself at the current one) to advance in status at the expense of being able to do sport. For me, that tradeoff has never been worth it. It would not make me happy.
My family has been on my side if/when I wanted to do more work or more sport (or during the times when I did both simultaneously.....family got financially ahead and they knew that I wasn't dropping tri, but I was not around much for home)....So in a way I took care of family by getting financially ahead at least that is my bogus justification to myself. But the pace doing all that is fairly suicidal. Basically you're either working or training. It's not for most people. You kind of have to be wired that way to get off on doing both at full throttle. But I only did that stuff when my son was finishing off high school or starting university. No way I would do that when my family needed more of my time, so I de prioritized work advancement (but I still felt I got a ton done and we were financially OK), did the family stuff and did sport.