[Closed] Sunny days and family life - conflicted

There's always tomorrow, your lad won't always want to hang with his dad so make the most of it

I'm single. Occasionally family stuff does get in the way buy 98% of the time if I want to dissappear for the day to go riding, I do. I'll be doing some weekends in Wales this year, I'll probably decide less than a week beforehand when I'm going. Spend £5k on a new bike? The only person I need to justify it to, is me 😁

I am in a similar boat.

Only really do a day on the bike once a quarter or rode early am and back for 10/noon.

I ended up going part time so I can ride in the week and keep the weekends free for family stuff. Fortunate to be able to do that.

Enjoy your kids while you can, it'll all be over far too quickly and you'll miss them big time! Then they start wanting to come back because you've put a lot into them when they were young.
Best days of my life are now spent with my lads when they come to see us😎

I've not really been on an all dayer since this time last year. My wife works full time so likes us to spend weekends together with out 2 + 5 year old when I'm not on shift so a couple of hours is the most I really manage to fit in. Some times wish I could have a bit more time to myself but love my gang so don't really worry.

When my daughter goes to nursery a bit more next year I'll get more time back so it's not forever.

How old are you Good Sir, to be still surprised that life is Fine Art of Compromising?

Born yesterday by any chance, heh?

Cheers!
I.

I’m quite lucky,my missus encourages me to ride and I don’t take the pish. I do feel guilty sometimes(5hours+)but if there’s a two hour window of opportunity,I’m out the door.
Bit of work today,bike fettling and then a quick 3.5 hours of cx bliss. I usually fit it in between never ending parties and play dates.
Tomorrow I pay for it ,park run then football in the morning . On the plus side junior J wants to go for a ride to Trent park tmora. Yeeha.

whilst my wife is away for the day

do wish I could hit pause on them once in a while.

What's good for the gander is good for the goose.

I hear you OP but that doesn't sound a bad family day at all to be fair. I took my 9 yeqr old lad out riding today, did 12km and only towed him up the steepest bits with the ebike. The pace was not quick but he absolutely loved it and so did I!

Plus I have a 3 hour pass tomorrow morning so it's swings and roundabouts. Or maybe that's swings and swings? Or roundabouts and roundabouts? Confused myself now.

As long as you still get to ride sometimes don't worry. I ride MTB only a few times a year but fill in with other riding when I can than more convenient local and shorter in time usage.

Every single thing in life is a compromise. Sometimes it sucks.

Cheers all. Don't get me wrong it's not that I don't appreciate family life or enjoy it. It's not that I don't know how to compromise or that we don't.

I think it's more that occasionally I feel like I want to be ta11pau1 and not even have to think about it, which is when the guilt sets in.

Idle musings.

It will pass as they get older, but you can't replace the memories you have given him.

But as others have said, you now have a day out for yourself in the karma bank.

I used to get quite uptight about how much people I know on Strava got to ride but at the end of the day they are mostly twenty years younger than me with no kids. This weekend is a case in point. A lot of my cycling friends are competing in a 400 km race as I write this. It started at 12 today and is due to finish 12 tomorrow or earlier. I would have loved to have taken part but I have too much to do around the house this weekend. ☹️ Still registered for a 24hr race around the Nürburgring in July with 5000 other cyclists mind! 😈

This is why I sold my bike. It was just sat in the shed doing nothing. Between working full time and family it just wasn’t getting used. Really chuffed when a younger person bought it and told me how much they’d be using it.

Don't think you're any different from any bloke, or girl trying to balance family and an interest. I have the opposite problem in a way. Have no problems getting out whenever I like...within reason as long as I don't take the P, but would love to get the family out too but just can't get them interested in biking. Got them all half decent bikes hoping having decent kit would make it easier for them, but they all just whinge and moan when I do force them to get out on the bikes...the wife's the worst. The kids will get bored of whinging after a while and end up cracking on and having a good time, but the wife is utterly determined she's going to hate it and just moans all the time, gets angry, snaps at everyone and vows never to do it again. Wouldn't mind if I'd dragged them on some tough ride, but I'm talking a flat disused railway trail with a stop at a decent cafe or pub for lunch. So you can't win I'm afraid. Enjoy the time you spend with your lad, one day he might join you on those epic sunny day rides, but at least you're instilling him with a sense of adventure. The trails and roads will always be there when you next get the opportunity.

In-laws, its all about the in-laws!

4 kids- 6,8 & 3yr old twins

its getting harder to fit in big days on the bike

after bed time I go for a 2+hr night ride once a week, but I do miss daytime riding!
the odd cheeky sunday morning couple of hours but im usually too tired

so what I do is arrange for a few weekends away a year, racing or mates stuff or uplifts and have the in-laws come & stay, they get fun times with grandkids & freedom for me!

Im quite lucky in that they all love riding so today we did a few hours on the annual scarecrow festival trail, but its not a proper ride, & the twins love their balance bikes, but I still have to lug the trailer around for a longer ride & while the local cycleways in MK are amazing but yeah I wanted to be out on a big ride in the mountains today!

Always tried to encourage the kids onto their bikes from an early age and yes I was often torn between riding with mates or taking the time with the kids. 90% of the time I did the latter. My lad is now 9 and he bloody loves being out on the bike, he's hardly any slower than me (or I've got slower - more likely) and we did a 48 mile ride starting on the South Downs a few weeks ago and today had a fantastic couple of hours in the Surrey Hills. Invest the time now and it won't be long before you're sharing those epic rides together - just be prepared for the fact that by then they'll be quicker than you 😉

My lad is getting quicker all the time, downhill I won't touch him this time next year. We're off to Jedi together in 6 weeks time. It is incredible riding with my lad, just brilliant. I still have the days out, but with him out too.
Don't rule your kids out, they may surprise you

Much further down the line and my epic rides now are with grown up my son and daughter. They live in opposite directions, one in Bristol and one in Liverpool with me in the middle in Ludlow. I regularly meet my lad at Llandegla, my daughter at FoD and they always bring their bikes when they come to visit. We all do Heaven of the South together, trips to BPW etc. I absolutely love our rides together, real bonding stuff and memories being made. The only issue is my lovely wife doesn't really like the idea of off road cycling, so gets a bit left out of this. I have floated the idea of an ebike to entice her in to some gentle trail riding and saw a glimmer of interest. Maybe...

I did 15 miles round Loch Leven with my parents and girlfriend (her first time on a bike in 30 years!) yesterday.

It was a good day out

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The only riding I've done in the last two weeks was yesterday. We rode from the end of Barmouth promenade over the bridge to fairbourne and back. 4 miles. My little man aged 4 rode it all two wheels. My other little man aged 2 sat on the back. Happy days. Can't wait to get out on a big ride though.

In my case my wife does cross country running, so I spend time with the kids whilst she's out training and I get a few hours in the bike whist she spends time with the kids, so it's a nice quid pro quo. We're all more pleasant people for having the 'time out' though, but I do find myself sneaking out of work early sometimes when my bike needs maintenance (nothing worse than a 4 yo disappearing with you tool box, only to find they've emptied the contents on the kitchen floor 🙂). All this will probably change though when my kids are old enough and fast enough to come on rides with me.

We also each arrange the odd weekend away with friends, so for example I was able to do the Bowderdale route in Feb as a birthday treat.

Don't get me wrong, being able to do what I want, when I want is great, but would I swap the single life for a family and everything that comes with it? Yes. I'm 38 and I get to see my neice and nephew (9 and 4) several times a week but its not the same as having your own.

Everything I have planned for the next year and beyond (including hopefully buying a house before I'm 45!) is based on it just being me, I'm perfectly happy with the single life.

I do have a little smile at seeing families out all on bikes though, get them started young and you might have an EWS ripper on your hands 😁

I’m single. Occasionally family stuff does get in the way buy 98% of the time if I want to dissappear for the day to go riding, I do. I’ll be doing some weekends in Wales this year, I’ll probably decide less than a week beforehand when I’m going. Spend £5k on a new bike? The only person I need to justify it to, is me 😁

And this is just one of many, many reasons why I will never have kids! Fair play to those who do but it is 100% not for me.

Wouldn’t mind if I’d dragged them on some tough ride, but I’m talking a flat disused railway trail with a stop at a decent cafe

IMHO that's your problem right there. I recall the completion opprobrium that my kids met a perfectly pleasant ride along some disused railway line near Glossop. They just moaned the whole way. So i abandoned the easy angle and focussed on doing stuff that was exciting. With liberal use of a tow rope they happily did llandegla blue at 3 or 4 years of age, red soon after and then covered all the Black by the time they were seven. Don't get me wrong, they didn't do it all under their own steam. I towed them up the long dull fireroad and they whooped along the flats, down the downs and up the minor hills. They were so wired on adrenaline and excitement that they forgot to be tired.

Still recall the sense of disbelief when we did the north face trail at grisedale in the dark and the nine year old was a distant whooping spec of light in the dark trees some 300m ahead of us. His seven year old brother was babbling away next to me with no though that it was hard work and way past bed time.

Don't reduce the effort levels, increase the excitement levels.

I don't want children but it's not because I want to spend more time and money on myself. It's because raising a family is not just incredibly hard work, it's ridiculously expensive.
Unless you have accommodating parents to babysit their grandkids, or have tons of money, I think it's become unbelievably expensive, especially with both parents having to work to pay stupidly high house prices. And no government has pursued family friendly policies since the 60s.

Yeah, raising kids is hellishly expensive.

And things like house prices don't help - as I mentioned I'm hoping to buy my first house in the next 7-8 years, even then to get something decent (£250k) I'll need to be earning £45k and have a £50k deposit.

My parents bought their first house in 1998 for £28k (we weren't a particularly well off family), that same house now is worth £150k+.

then covered all the Black

Just realised that is of course bollocks. They didn't do either of the rocky steps/plummets near the leat.

@ta11paul I'm in a similar position.
Throughout my adult life my parents have told me house prices will come down, so I kept on renting, but the exact opposite has happened. If I'd have known of course I would have got on the ladder earlier. Even if they do come down, with my age it is doubtful I will have much time to wait it out.
Now the only option I have is to move to a cheaper area and do more remote working and a longer commute. I think that is a realistic ambition - but having a family ontop of that, unfortunately, is not.
I should mention I'm not a low earner, I earn ok money, but that's how crazy house prices have got - I blame Bill Clinton, who worked out he could get re-elected by engineering house price inflation - that was since copied by Blair and Cameron, and now the bubble is too big to burst without collapsing the economy.

Throughout my adult life my parents have told me house prices will come down

If there's a single thing which is almost guaranteed to go up in value over the long term (riding out any small dips) it's property.

It's why I don't have a pension pot, partly because I used to work in that industry so I know them inside and out, the advantages and disadvantages, and when you work out how much you need to have a comfortable retirement, unless you start putting away early, you've got no chance. Buying a house is the main priority, then if I can get it paid off in 15-20 years I'll be mortgage/rent free and can get a minimum wage/part time job to keep me going in later life.

By then ebikes will be about £500(0) so I'll ride one of them until I cant ride no more 😁 there's a guy on a group ride I go on who is 72 and is hitting bigger drops than me, he rides a Canyon Spectral:ON.

Similar here. Working long hours 5 days a week, Mrs is a nurse doing 3x12hr shifts randomly scattered through the week.

We both work hard, i'm doing HNC/HND Engineering and she is doing a Masters ANP which both take up time, then when we are off together we've been renovating our house, plus she has two horses at home and we've got two dogs (one is a 5 month puppy) phew! When you list it like that it sounds a lot (!) and we've made a conscious decision not to have kids as a result.

Even then, i do feel guilty if i'm out on the bike for too long locally and i cant remember the last time i loaded the bike up for a day away. Don't sweat it, priorities change and they can just as easily change back again! Started working on my mates bike in the garage for him (he is now a proud father of 2 boys) so we can start riding again, hopefully when they are old enough I can tag along with them for the fun family rides, I get to give them back at the end of the day then as well!

When they were really small I resigned my self to trailer pulling but a year later I raced and smashed out the hills as all was relatively easy when not pulling a trailer with two toddlers in! Don’t know how old your lad is but when mine was 10 or a bit younger he was starting to join me on mega days of initially canoeing and sailing and road cycling and climbing and walking - sometimes all in one day. When ten we did all the DDay beaches by bike and started proper off road rides, a decent bike really encourages them. I thought I’d have till he was 14 of staying ahead but by 12 he was faster on XC, willing to jump higher further and way faster on any dh run. Before you know it they have gone and, though a bit older and slower, I’m back to old rides on the new fancy (skill compensator) bikes, one of which he’s just bought for me so I can join him.

I feel ya!!

Our situation:
A difficult 4 year old boy and an easy 7 year old girl.
We both work full time with limited in law support, we do all the chores ourselves (we don't use gardeners, cleaners, car washers etc)

My resulting riding pattern:
I ride after they are in bed..
Or before they wake up at the weekend, aim to get home at 830ish to start the breakfast routine.
This means not many daytime epic rides.
If I do a daytime ride I book it in the calendar, well in advance.

The morning rides are getting tricky now as the 4 year old has started waking up at 6am, this now leaves my wife to sort them while I am still riding. I feel guilt because she also works during the week and deserves a lay in at the weekend the least.

It's all compromise, finding what works and no 2 families are the same.

Comparison:
I have a mate with a similar family demographic and he manages to do regular early evening rides at 6pm for 2 hours.!! That's prime time in our house!. (dinner, getting ready for bed, story time, get them to sleep, clean up, eat) it's a serious mum and dad effort to complete the above in 1.5 hours on a good day. I would feel a complete sh1t3 to my wife to leave her with that on a regular basis.
It works for him but not me as I could not live with the guilt. Also I like to do my bit and be there for bath and bed time with the monsters..

My Missus has worked out that my mood is intrinsically linked to my regularly spending time on a bicycle, to that end she will normally try to give me a *day to myself once every couple of weeks and at least a morning or afternoon each weekend as well as evenings while the sun is out later.

*by a "day" she actually means about half a day, and it often comes with strings i.e. I can't just come home knackered from a ride and relax, I'll be coming home to WW3, or I'll have to fix some food for the clan and sort the kids homework etc, while she has a relax.

Maybe twice a year I get a full weekend away with friends riding (Road and/or MTB), last year I had a full five days with friends riding in Tenerife, this year we're again doing the same but only going to Wales for four days... The bigger/further the trip the more recrimination and complaints of having things "Dumped" on the missus comes my way when I return. so there's another trade off to consider.

I do score some brownie points for taking our eldest riding, the younger one isn't bothered about bikes and neither is the missus.

TBH so long as I get something like ~6-10 hours of riding time a week in during summer and maybe ~4 during winter I'm kept on a pretty even keel. The bigger trips are great, if I'm honest I look forward to them almost as much as family holidays, but I could live without them if I had to.

I think the thing is that having free time to do your won thing, without other commitments becomes a bit of a tradable commodity for many couples once they have kids. It's the whole "time poor" thing in action, in theory once they're older/have moved out you get some time back... Right?

Time back is wishful thinking. 😎

I think we were lucky in that we both love doing the same things. When we had kids we made a decision that we wouldn't let them change the things we did and to most of that it hasn't. Both of them were involved from an early age in all our out door activities and I supposed that we were lucky in that to some extent.

My best rides and most memorable are family ones

Verbier 2004 Abigale aged 5

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Pila 2018

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With thousands of rides and memories inbetween

Sunday we were up at the PMBA Enduro. Last night we arrived in the Dolomites.
Eldest daughter had to cancel coming with us last week due to some training stuff for her new job and was gutted that she was missing it as Was I.

Never felt a conflict as I don't think there has been one

Make the most of those kids, they won't be there for ever. GtiJunior has just moved to that London to start a 13 month attachment at a huge software co in Feltham and we are missing him dreadfully. When he was at Man Met we saw him often.

I'd love to go out riding with my lad, unfortunately the teenage years have told hold 🙁 Hoping he comes out of the other side soon!

Awesome pics Tracey, you and Kev have a lovely family.

In the last couple of years I've made the conscious decision to step away from MTB as much, used to be my go to, but my daughter is 12, and both her and m,y wife love the outdoors and the mountains as much as I do, so we spend our days together going up hills together, parkrun etc as well.

Joined the local running club together as well, it's awesome having the same interests, I don't regret 'missing out' on biking at all, as it was always about the outdoors over the actual biking part for me anyway.

I still get out now, maybe a couple of rides a month, and with the running I'm fit enough to just slot back in, actually much quicker uphill now. 🙂

@Tracey that's a fantastic post. Family goals for sure!

I got into cycling relatively late, and I already had my daughter. She's now 7 and loves coming out with me, albeit for relatively tame rides. I'd take a bimble around a cycle path with my daughter over no riding at all for sure, as I fear that one day she won't want to come with me. That day will be heartbreaking, so I make hay while the sun shines.