Early in the fall, Ashton Eaton and Brianne Theisen-Eaton discussed retirement while on a hike.
Neither had chosen to quit track and field yet, but each thought, if my spouse came to his or her decision first, how would that impact me?
“I would have felt bad just leaving him alone in the sport because we’ve always done everything together,” said Theisen-Eaton, the Olympic heptathlon bronze medalist. “I didn’t know what it would be like for one of us to be a normal person and the other not to.”
“What we both determined was, we can’t let that guide our decision,” the two-time Olympic decathlon champion Eaton said Thursday.