Hardcore Romantics: Chase and Moye can’t decide exactly how to share their beautiful physiques.
We asked our jacked-up readers a simple question: Should you date outside your sport of choice? A full 67 percent of you thought athletes should put love first and to hell with how your significant other recreates. But athletes Adam Chase and Jayme Moye wanted to create a little friction, so we let them butt heads over just what makes for an ideal outdoor-sport relationship.
cross training
Years ago, I switched my primary athletic focus from ultra running to adventure racing. It truly amused me to see the consternation on the faces of my Boulder friends as they struggled with the change, especially now that I’ve switched back since then. It was as though I had changed my name and they couldn’t handle the new one, like when your yoga friends assume pseudo-Indian identities.
People change. Someone could easily evolve from swimmer to triathlete to mountain biker over the course of a post-collegiate athletic career. This only parallels the personal and professional changes we undergo as individuals over these dynamic years in life, which is why we shouldn’t attach our relationship’s identity to our sport. Relationships are hard enough to navigate but they can hit crisis mode quite easily when they rely on a shared sport, especially when one person suffers an injury, forcing a change in disciplines and challenging life as the couple knew it.
Besides the cross-training and fitness benefits gained by pushing yourself to try to keep up with a lover from another sport, dating outside your discipline serves to introduce you to a new community. I once had an girlfriend who was a pro cyclist and she taught me to never, ever half-wheel her and, in turn, she learned not to half-step me.
While it is a great pleasure to do the activities you love most with the person you love, that doesn’t require that you do everything together. If your sport is yours and your partner’s sport remains his or hers, you can support one another and then get out and cross train and explore new disciplines together.
What is really important is that your partner understands and enables your passion. What a treat it is to have someone waiting for you at the finish line, especially when you can reciprocate. It may be hard to date a non-athlete but having a “cross-amour” with whom you don’t compete is a recipe for harmonic convergence. You can “get” one another’s selfish athlete lifestyles while being selfless to one another.
Adam Chase is a contributing editor to Elevation Outdoors and a Salomon athlete.
play the niche
After reading Mr. Chase’s thoughtful argument in favor of dating outside your sport, I was almost inclined to agree. Until I found out that his current girlfriend is an ultra runner also. The truth is that athletes like to date other athletes, and sometimes, it just makes more sense when it’s an athlete in your same discipline.
Consider training for triathlon. How do you tell your outdoorsy boyfriend that you can’t ever go camping with him on weekends because that’s when you do your brick? Or climbing—do you really want to try to explain to your new girlfriend that you spend half your time in the gym staring up at your gorgeous female climbing partner’s perfectly harnessed ass, and that this is somehow okay?
It can even be challenging for me, as a former road bike racer, to date my boyfriend, a former mountain bike racer. We’re technically the same genus, just a different species, which should still work, as evidenced by donkeys and horses. But like the resulting mule, it’s not exactly ideal. He takes me out on the trail and I end up crying. I try to get him on the road and he wants to bring his mountain bike and ride in the gravel next to the road.
Maybe it would be easier in another region of the country, where people don’t define themselves as strongly by their sport as we do on the Front Range. Let’s face it, most of us here live, breathe and love our sport. And it doesn’t matter if we’re sponsored pros or weekend warriors—we still spend most of our free time engaged in our sport. We even label ourselves (and our vehicles). Boulder probably has the highest per capita concentration of Ironman tattoos, Ski Naked bumper stickers and Run Like an Animal t-shirts in the nation.
In a culture like this, it’s not enough to respect and admire your partner’s sport. You need to understand it, to truly live it, in order to truly understand your partner. For something short-term or casual, it wouldn’t be such a big deal for me. But in a life partner, I definitely need that level of sport-to-sport connection.
Jayme Moye is the managing editor of Elevation Outdoors and just began mountain bike racing.
Reader Response from the Web
Because in the world of anonymous online comments everyone has a say.
“If your sport(s) takes up a significant portion of your waking hours then, yes, you should, or your significant other may never see you, or understand you, or remember what you look like…”
—Leisa Grant
Get ready for our next question,
dear readers: is it safer to go minimalist fast-and-light or old school uber-prepared? Let us know and butt heads at ElevationOutdoors.com
