Locked In

My husband’s competitive drive drove us apart. After his brain hemorrhage, it brought us together

- Karla Mcintyre

HUNDREDS OF SWIMMING CAPS bobbed in the blue-green wa-ters of Northwest Indiana’s Wolf Lake. I strained to catch a glimpse of my husband, Todd, among the Leon’s Triathlon competitors.

“Do you think he’s okay?” I asked Emily, my teenage daughter. We’d come from our home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The first racers were already making their way across the beach to their bikes for the second leg. “He’s been out there a long time.”

Emily nodded, her lips pressed tight. This wasn’t easy for either of us.

I’d never worried about Todd the first seven years of our marriage, the second for both of us. He was strong, tall, independent. Retired Navy, though he still worked the same job as a nuclear health physicist. He absolutely lived to compete. He’d done 75 triathlons and 35 marathons, a passion that bordered on obsession. Vacations were spent traveling to competitions. His training regimen—times, distances, splits, routes, heart rate and more, all recorded faithfully on a spreadsheet— took priority over everything. Including me, I sometimes felt.

I resented the time it took away from us, from family, from the church. I’d never understood it. Until our world turned upside down in 2015. Nearly two years later, all that mattered to me was helping him reclaim that drive again, to be the old, competitive Todd. The thing that had bugged me most about him. Now I’d give anything to get it back.

June 2015. We’d just come back from dinner, our third night in Aruba, an early anniversary celebration. It was the first time in more than a year we’d gone someplace, just the two of us. I’d planned every part of the trip. I was working for a corporate travel management company at the time, a dream job for someone who thrives on attention to detail and no surprises.