Pregnancy and running – my journey in brief
Running during and after pregnancy brought unexpected challenges and triumphs. This is my story, from pregnancy runs to the postpartum return to running, and how motherhood transformed my running experience.
In the period prior to having a baby, I was running up to 15 marathons/ultras a year having started with the London Marathon in 2011 and following it with the Druid 3-day Ultra in the same year. Alongside a career in finance, this is who I was and wanted to continue to be. So I was concerned about my ability to come-back to this way of live following birth first and foremost. Perhaps I was short-sighted but I did not read past the recommendation to nurse for the initial 6 months by the NHS and sought out articles about women who ran when pregnant and who achieved a high level of running quickly again (to be fair, that’s what is in the press predominantly due to a greater focus on elite athletes).
My expectation was firmly that I would be able to run during pregnancy, that birth and having a child would be uncomplicated, and that I would then get back into it straight away clearly not giving much thought to the compression of free time that we’d have with a baby in tow….. Whilst it is clearly nice that I had such confidence in myself – and my body in particular – what happened during pregnancy and after it bore no resemblance to these expectations because of the physical and emotional changes that having a baby created. No doubt this will change with each baby as well and not only women to women.
More so than with general running coaching, the myriad of additional factors that having a baby brings with it, make it impossible to know the journey ahead in advance. There is no knowing how you will feel during and after pregnancy and how you will change. I am writing from my perspective, and with hindsight, more than 5 years after conceiving. I am amazed by women who reach their previous level of running quickly again; for me this was impossible both physically and emotionally.
During pregnancy, every runners experience will be different. I put on a lot of weight and my softening ligaments made it arduous to jog along at gentle pace as my pregnancy progressed, but it started earlier than that – right after conception, I was tapering for CCC (a 100k run in the Alps with 6000+metres of elevation gain) and instead of feeling more energetic, I started to slow and find even short efforts hard. I had trained more consistently and better than ever before, so this came as a surprise.
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After starting the race in Courmayeur, Italy, I found the first climb (1200m of continuous climbing that I had trained for) very hard and slow. I was not having any fun. It did not bode well for the rest of the race. But as I had once before DNFed the race at Arnouvaz less than a third of the way in, I was determined to push over the Col de Forclaz into Switzerland. And although the weather turned and it became stormy, I kept going. Beyond the col, the usually fairly good trail had turned into rivulets that made descending at any speed in my state very hard. So the slow pace continued until I made it to La Fouly. It was getting dark now and I could not imagine to push on so after around 11 hours, felling cold and miserable in the aid station which had been much depleted at this point, I called it quits. It later turned out that I was pregnant and this would explain why I felt this way: my body was protecting its precious cargo. It was difficult to cope with this disappointing race until I took a pregnancy test a week or so later and found out why I had failed to finish.
Later on during the pregnancy, in months 3 and 4 respectively, I completed 2 trail marathons. The first was along the Ridgeway and was a good day out whilst the 2nd was very hard due to the conditions along the South Downs Way (December) but also due to the increased weight I was carrying. I finished, but it did not give me an appetite for more. I persevered with easy running, but it became harder and harder until around 7.5 months when I stopped. I was too big (I weight just above 90kgs) and had no ‘bounce’. This was not unexpected and I did not particularly mind – I had kept going. Soon the baby would be here and I could start again….
How wrong I was. I ended up having an emergency C-section and this clearly put me onto a slower road back than under the optimal conditions I had expected. But then my baby had issues with breastfeeding and I developed severe anxiety and depression (see tongue-tie baby for more) which also made my supposedly blissful runs, my ‘me-time’ (30 mins at a time in the mornings) unappealing. I did not want to leave my baby and my body did not feel ready to return to running so that was that.
I did 35 runs (all up to 30 mins) between birth in May 2019 and February 2020). From February 2020 I ran consistently between around 2-4 runs a week (ii.e. Between 1h15 and 3h a week) until I had more of a gap in the summer of 2021 (July) and December when my running became more irregular with multiple week-long or more breaks. I started training again consistently in January 2022. I then once again trained more consistently but only put in a concerted effort when I decided that I would have a proper build to my first marathon post-pregnancy. With this I started lots of Z2 training and strength; see earlier blog posts from 2022 and prior to Windermere marathon for more 🙂
Up to the the time of this decision my weight fluctuated and I did non do consistent strength training. I would say that I tended to weigh around 75 kgs and I did not try and drop it because I was scared about not having any milk for my baby. But in the summer of 2022, at around 3 years and 2-3 months, my son stopped napping and regular feeding and I then stopped lactating. It was a natural end to a beautiful experience which in turn enabled me to restrict my calories and develop my running volume and I have averaged 5h30 a week for 2023 so far. At this point, my weight started to drop as well going down from my then peak of 78 to around 68 kg within 6 months or so.
To recap, for me, my baby clearly became my priority after giving birth – something that I had not anticipated. This in one or other way meant that I was proritising him and not running. Juggling a child, career and running also is harder than just having a career and running (even though preparing for a marathon is clearly very time consuming) and I was definitely not prioritising running for a while. The levels of running I was doing should have been sufficient to support mental health (other than when I had breaks, clearly!).
I had never anticipated feeling this way and that my priorities would change given my prior focus and identity. They will perhaps not do for everyone. My weight also did not drop naturally so this made running harder. Given the feeding difficulties we had, this was also a complicating factor for me and had a lasting impact on my priorities. I am clearly not a wonder-running-women and my choices did not support being one either – these were mine and everyone will have to make their own. And this is my point. Every journey is unique. We should talk about them to share experiences and to support each other so that we are better at juggling competing priorities during this time. Merely focusing on the success of the elite is unhelpful for the other 90% of us. And clearly, even the journey of an elite is not going to be straightforward either and they will have other pressures to juggle themselves.
