Adventures of a world-champion mom.

hen I found out I was pregnant in the fall of 2009, I was coming off a \\(ercmine 11th-place finish at the 2008 Olympic Trials Marathon and a

couple of very near misses at making the US Mountain Running Team. I was happily married and around that age when the proverbial clock begins to tick. Although we were considering growing our family, these thoughts were still theories for some time in the future. And then I found myself huffing and puffing through a workout, Googling symptoms of pregnancy, and staring at a stick in a grocery-store bathroom on my way home from a group long run. Still not connecting all the dots, I tried a different variety of stick the next day: same result. I called my doctor to ask for a professional opinion. The nurse on the phone told me there were no false positives, congratulated me, and started calculating my due date. I was in denial. Despite my insistence that there must be a more scientific way of confirming this type of thing, the voice on the other end of the phone continued to explain that my self-administered test was accurate, told me to pick up prenatal vitamins at the pharmacy, and that she would see me at my first standard checkup in some obscenely far away number of weeks. The oblivion and commitment phobia would eventually subside. I was, in fact, pregnant.

Sample Training Block: The week after | found out | was pregnant Sunday 17-mile long run with friends

Monday Four-mile easy run

Tuesday 12 miles with 4×4-minute cruise intervals

Wednesday 10-mile easy run

Thursday — Eight miles with 10×30-60 second pickups

Friday Flew out to Kentucky for the USATF Club XC National race. Ran five miles easy on the course with B.A. A. team when I arrived. (Side note: Both times I found out I was pregnant were right after booking a flight to a race. Both times I went to the race anyway, ran it as a tempo, and left everyone wondering why I was a little off my game!)

Saturday — Raced Club XC, 40th place, 21:47 for the 6K course, 10 miles total for the day. Decided to play things conservatively and run the race at a tempo effort. (Interestingly, the national champion that day was Serena Burla, a new mother at the time returning to top form.)

Week total 66 miles for a taper week. (My mileage was on the low end heading into this race as I was just coming off an injury. A normal average for me at the time was in the 80- to 100-mile-per-week range.)

Running pregnant

Having to take any length of time off from training is a blow. For the planners among us, saying we can’t fill the calendar with goal races, planned mileage, and workouts is like taking candy from a baby. Most of my friends knew something was up when I started answering the question, “So what’s your next race?” with awkward hemming and hawing. While I could sort of keep training and sort of keep planning, it all became hypothetical and distant, subject to certain change. Nine months is a long time. But I fixated on it, having no clue that nine months was just the first phase of a lifetime of changes. I read up on other runner moms ranging from Shayne Culpepper, who was just fine with stopping training altogether while pregnant, to Ingrid Kristiansen, who won the 1983 Houston Marathon while unknowingly pregnant and then came back to win again the next year five months postpartum in a PR of 2:27:51. I decided to do what felt good for me, which meant about 60 to 90 minutes of running most days. After the first couple of months, I had no interest in doing any fast running, so I didn’t.

By the final months I preferred to go alone in the woods. My daily runs became an empowering, meditative time for me when I felt most like myself in a growing alien body. I tried my best not to plan, to run by feel. In some ways, I had been preparing for this for a long time. When I moved to the hilly dirt roads and trails of Vermont, I learned quickly how to disregard my watch and train by effort. As a competitive endurance athlete, I am well versed at doling out my energy and staying shy of the red line. I am well practiced at regulating all my body’s systems in the face of heat, distance, and other variables to ensure that I can keep pace all the way to the finish line. That’s how I ran even splits during my first marathon despite 85-degree heat and humidity, and that’s how I knew I could keep my baby in a safe, stable environment.

People expressed a lot of well-intentioned, unsolicited concerns to me about being a fit, pregnant lady: “Make sure your heart rate doesn’t get too high.” “Don’t you think you might be running too much?” “Wow! You don’t look [fill in the blank] months pregnant.” And many worse things that stressed my psyche. But while I was running, I listened to my intuition, and it told me that running was positive and healthy, and as long as I felt good it must be good. I was fortunate