Caregiving is one of those words that sounds tidy until you are living inside it. On paper, it looks like someone needs help and someone else steps in. In real life, it can look like your entire calendar getting mugged in a parking lot. Appointments appear out of nowhere, sleep goes feral, meals become whatever you can assemble with one hand, and suddenly you are responsible for another person’s medication list while also trying to remember whether you ate lunch.
We tend to talk about caregiving as though it is one universal experience, but it is not. Caring for a child is different from suddenly caring for a spouse after a cancer diagnosis. Helping an aging parent you have a loving relationship with is different from being expected to care for a parent you are estranged from. Supporting a daughter through a planned surgery is different from watching a parent decline over months or years. The role may have the same label, but the emotional load, duration, support, grief, resentment, fear, logistics, and sheer WTF factor can be completely different.
That matters when we talk about training because training does not exist in a cute little vacuum where the body only notices miles, reps, and heart rate zones. Your body is keeping the receipts for all of it. Sleep disruption counts, driving 3 hours for appointments, sitting in a hospital chair shaped by someone who apparently hates spines, grief, family conflict, financial stress counts, and/or hormonal changes all count. Being the person everyone calls because you are “the capable one” absolutely counts.
And this is where the conversation gets especially complicated for women in "midlife".
There is a very normalized script around motherhood and caregiving. Women are expected to understand what it means to put children first, juggle school schedules, manage family logistics, and eventually help aging parents. There is a whole cultural vocabulary for that experience. It is imperfect, but it exists.
That script does not always fit.
Infertility can make those conversations land sideways. Someone may have spent years grieving the family structure she expected to have, only to arrive in peri/menopause and find herself caregiving anyway. She may not relate to all the messaging about finally reclaiming time once the kids are older because there were no kids. She may not see herself in “sandwich generation” conversations, yet she is still running around with the emotional equivalent of 3 sandwiches stuffed in her sports bra.
Estrangement adds another layer. We love to tell neat stories about adult children caring for aging parents because those stories make everyone feel warm and morally organized. Real families are often messier than that. Some people are caring for parents who were supportive and loving. Others are caring for parents who were absent, manipulative, abusive, addicted, emotionally unavailable, or simply never safe. A medical emergency does not magically bleach decades of history out of the relationship. Sometimes caregiving reopens things you worked very hard to put down.
Then there is the support piece, which can make two nearly identical caregiving situations feel completely different. One person has siblings taking turns, friends bringing food, a flexible job, financial resources, and a partner who notices when she is unraveling. Another person is holding the whole damn circus tent up with one hand while someone asks why she missed her long run.
That second situation is where training and mental health can get really sketchy.
For a lot of athletes, training is doing far more than building fitness. It may be their social connection, emotional regulation, decompression, routine, identity, alone time, and one place where nobody is asking them to fix something. Running can be the hour where they remember they are a person and not just the emergency contact.
So when caregiving starts eating into training, the loss is not always “I missed my workout.”
Sometimes it is, “I lost the one thing that made me feel like myself.”
That deserves more attention than simply telling someone to squeeze in thirty minutes.
There are absolutely seasons where a shorter run is helpful. There are also seasons where opening the training app and seeing another box waiting to be checked feels like being handed one more wet raccoon to carry. The solution depends on what training is doing for the athlete at that moment.
This is where coaching has to get more nuanced.
Instead of only asking, “What can we fit in?” it can be more useful to ask, “What would training actually give you right now?”
Maybe the athlete needs movement because it helps her nervous system settle down. Maybe she needs to keep one group run because that is her social lifeline. Maybe she needs strength twice a week because it gives her a sense of physical agency in a season where everything else feels out of control. Maybe she needs a temporary goal that has nothing to do with pace. Maybe she needs to defer the 100-miler because trying to maintain ultra training while caring for a parent is how you end up with two crises instead of one.
None of those choices are inherently more committed than the others. The useful choice is the one that matches the actual season instead of the imaginary one the training plan was written for.
Peri/menopause can make this even trickier because the athlete may already be navigating changes in sleep, recovery, energy, body composition, mood, temperature regulation, joints, tendons, and stress tolerance. Add caregiving and now you have two major transitions trying to occupy the same nervous system like drunk roommates fighting over the thermostat.
This is where old assumptions about training volume and recovery can fall apart fast. The athlete may technically have the same number of available hours she had six months ago, but her usable capacity can be dramatically lower. That difference matters.
A calendar tells you whether there is time. Capacity tells you whether there is anything left in the tank. Those are not the same thing.
The aftermath of caregiving also deserves more attention because the end of the crisis does not always mean the athlete snaps back to normal. Sometimes the person they were caring for recovers and life gradually becomes more predictable. Sometimes caregiving ends because someone dies, which creates time while simultaneously dropping a grief boulder through the middle of your life.
That athlete may suddenly have room to train again and no idea how to use it.
She may have lost fitness, strength, routine, confidence, and social connection. She may also be trying to figure out who she is now that the caregiving role is gone. Telling her to “get back on track” can miss the entire point.
Sometimes there is no old track. Sometimes you are laying new track while the train is already moving.
That is why returning to training after caregiving can look less like resuming and more like rebuilding. The goal may be to restore rhythm before fitness. It may mean short runs, basic strength, regular meals, hydration, sleep, and reconnecting with people before worrying about pace. It may mean choosing consistency that feels almost insultingly simple because simple is what the nervous system can actually tolerate.
And yes, that can feel frustrating for athletes who are used to doing more. We are not exactly known for our calm and measured responses to reduced mileage. Give a runner six weeks of chaos and a Garmin watch and suddenly she is conducting a forensic investigation into her VO2 max like it has personally betrayed the family.
But the rebuild matters.
A few useful questions can help during these seasons: What part of training still feels supportive? What feels like one more obligation? What is the minimum amount of movement that helps you feel connected to yourself? What are you willing to let go of temporarily? Where can you ask for help, even if you hate asking? What basic recovery habits need protecting before you start chasing performance again?
Those answers may change every week.
That is normal for caregiving. Stability is not always available, so adaptability becomes the skill.
I think endurance sport needs a better conversation around this because we spend a lot of time praising discipline, consistency, toughness, and the ability to push through. Those qualities have value, but they can become deeply unhelpful when someone is already carrying more than she was built to carry alone.
There are seasons where the bravest training decision is not to push harder.
It is to stop pretending that every season requires the same version of you.
Caregiving can change your schedule, your body, your emotional bandwidth, your relationships, and your sense of self. Training can still have a place inside that season, but the role may need to change. Sometimes it builds fitness. Sometimes it protects mental health. Sometimes it preserves community. Sometimes it simply reminds you that somewhere underneath all the appointments, responsibilities, hormones, grief, and chaos, you are still in there.
And sometimes that is enough to train for.
If your life currently feels like someone dumped the junk drawer onto the floor and called it a training cycle, you do not need another plan demanding more from you.
Under Load was built around the reality that training stress is only one piece of the load your body is carrying. It can help you look at recovery, capacity, strength, and training through a wider lens when life is asking a lot.
And if you are somewhere in the aftermath, rebuilding routines, identity, confidence, or simply figuring out who you are in this version of your life, The Alchemist’s Challenge gives you space to work with what you have now instead of trying to resurrect an old version of yourself.
You can still train in complicated seasons. Sometimes the first step is changing what you are training for.