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Month: March 2011

The ‘marathon’ at the nine-month mark

The ‘marathon’ at the nine-month mark

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When I trained for my first marathon in 2007, the LaSalle Bank Chicago Marathon Hot Marathon Year from Hell, from start to finish, it was about a nine-month journey.  In January of that year, I began incorporating running into my workout routine, and probably by late January or early February, I had signed-up with Team in Training‘s Early Bird Chicago Marathon program.

Most Chicago Marathon TNT participants don’t begin training with Team until May(ish), but I had the time and energy and wanted to start sooner rather than later.  In retrospect, doing so gave me a great foundation and a lot of time to build-up my running strength, since I was able to start on a treadmill (in the cold winter months) using something of a run-walk ratio (though I didn’t know at the time what a run-walk ratio or routine actually was).  Thus, by the time “full-blown” Chicago Marathon training began in May, I was sufficiently strong, in terms of muscular capacity, endurance, and mental capacity/state of mind (if that makes any sense) to be able to exclusively run for all of my running workouts.  Of course, I had to take baby steps to get from Points A to B, but I got there–in due time.

Come race day, even though my first time wasn’t the performance I wanted it to be (thank you, random hot day in October of 2007!), I knew, going into the event, that I was beyond prepared.  I had been waiting for the day, and dreaming about it, and visualizing it, and been scared or anxious or nervous or excited even thinking about it, for months.  And the day finally came!

You can probably tell where I’m going with this.  Today marks 36 weeks–nine months–of the pregnancy.  Practitioners call 36-40 weeks being “full term,” so in theory, if Yoda came today, s/he would be “at term” and not a preemie, though s/he might still have some slightly underdeveloped organs.  It’s crazy, and really, pretty surreal, to think that we’re already at this milestone.  I’m hoping that Yoda “bakes” for a little bit longer because as excited as C and I are (as well as our family and friends) to welcome Yoda into the great wide world, I think I’d sleep a little more soundly at night knowing that s/he held out until my 4/28 due date 🙂

I have been finding myself thinking about this pregnancy and the big day–the big labor and delivery (L&D) day–increasingly in terms of running and marathon metaphors.  In fact, others have even expressed the same sentiment.  At last week’s L&D class, a mother of a four-month old came in and described her L&D process and remarked that at the end of it, your body is so tired that “you honestly feel like you just ran a marathon.  Every ounce of you is tired.”  C poked me and grinned–most likely reassuring me that “hey, if she says L&D is like a marathon, this should be a cakewalk for you!”–though of course, I couldn’t help but wonder if this lady had ever run a marathon in her life 🙂  (skeptic that I am).

Regardless, going into this final stretch of pregnancy is making me think a lot about the “final stretch”–taper madness–that comes in advance of a marathon (or any endurance event).  Suddenly, the volume of workouts decreases, as might also their intensity, and getting ample rest becomes of paramount importance.  Moreover, staying active is still important, but activity becomes more focused on just making sure your muscles remember how to move moreso than an actual intentional stressing or straining of them.  And of course, nutrition remains as important now as it was early on and throughout the training cycle (or pregnancy, in my case).

Though the last two weeks have found me not running at all, thanks to the lower back pain that seems to be part and parcel of the later stages of pregnancy, I have gotten back into a “routine” and have become one of those regular lunchtime walkers on the lakefront during the work week.  (Between walking on my lunch break, visiting a chiropractor, and constantly icing or heating my lower back, I feel like I’ve become a glorified elderly lady, but that’s a topic for another post).    🙂

So what happens from here until the big day?  I guess lots of “dress rehearsals” – lots of visualization, positive thinking, and preparation; anything C and I can do to prepare ourselves, we’re doing (or have already done).  That has amounted to taking infant-care 101 classes at the hospital and L&D classes, maintaining good activity and sleep and nutritional habits, and constantly reminding ourselves (moreso me than C) that even in what will likely be the toughest part of L&D–the transition part, the part where many mothers will admit that they felt like they had nothing left in them to give and felt like they could not, for the life of them, soldier on in the L&D process–that transition is just like the dreaded “wall” in a marathon.  It might (or might not) rear its ugly head, but I’ve “trained” to get through it.  And really, by the time the “wall” in L&D arises, we will be so close to the ultimate finish line that, just like in a marathon, that will be my cue to “dig deep” and get to that otherworldly place that I (usually) manage to find in the toughest parts of the race, when I really feel like I have nothing left to give.  Granted, I’ve never run more than a four-hour marathon in my life, so here’s hoping that my L&D is relatively quick; otherwise, I might be singing a different tune 🙂  (cautious optimist here!)

I don’t dare say “bring it on, L&D” out of sheer fear and superstition, but suffice it to say that I’m not nearly as nervous about thebig day that could, in theory, come any time now, as I was nine months ago.  I’m trained, I feel pretty ready, I know it will be a once-in-a-lifetime sort of thing (since we always remember our first times, right??); it’s just the waiting game now.

Pregnancy taper madness is ON!

Flexibility

Flexibility

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I sat through a four-hour HR presentation yesterday about goal setting since we’re in the throes of the performance appraisal and review season at work.  It was basically the same thing I had heard last time I sat through the presentation, about two years ago, but the session reminded me how worthwhile it is to set goals in one’s personal or professional life.  Goals help us “reach” just beyond what we think we’re capable of; they provide focus to help make our day-to-day actions more worthwhile and meaningful; and sometimes, at least in my experience, they’re just fun to try to achieve, no matter how challenging (or impossible) we might think that they are.

Goals and running obviously go hand-in-hand, regardless if you’re a novice or a pro.  For many people, simply learning how to run is a goal in and of itself, while others might go for a certain time or mileage goal.  My big pregnancy/running goal was to do the March Madness half marathon on Sunday, but a couple weeks ago, when I decided that I no longer felt comfortable with the idea of doing a challenging half, one that’d put me a considerable distance away from my midwives and my hospital, I decided that my new goal would be to complete a neighborhood 8k that was just a mile (or so) away from my home.  As my experience shows, sometimes goals necessitate flexibility.  If you’re itching to run a 3:33 marathon but get a really nasty case of shin splints two weeks before the race, maybe that 3:33 goal will change to a 3:43 or hell, just to be able to finish the race.  It happens.  You just have to go with it.

All last week, I felt super confident in my ability to run this neighborhood 8k on Sunday.  Without even meaning to, I had managed to run six consecutive days in a row–not at high mileage, mind you–and I felt great.

Really.

Even pre-pregnant, I wouldn’t run six consecutive days, so I’m not quite sure how it happened, but it did.  Anyway, come Thursday of last week, I set out on a lunchtime run and about a mile in, had searing pain in my lower right back, right above the back of my pelvis, pretty close to my SI joint.  After the pain damn near debilitated me, I decided to do what I rarely do–stop running–and instead walked 1.5 miles back to the office, hoping that walking would re-set or re-align whatever I had managed to screw up.

Earlier in the week, I started to wear a maternity belt, purely for preventive purposes, thinking that I’d try to make myself as comfortable as possible for these final 5-6 weeks.  I wasn’t uncomfortable in the first place, but I envisioned that as the little one continued to grow, he/she would increasingly put more and more pressure on my bladder and lower back, and I thought I’d try to circumvent the issue before it even began.  In retrospect, and from talking to my midwives and to a massage therapist and my previously-pregnant and nurse practitioner sister, I’m pretty sure that that stupid belt managed to redistribute my weight in such a way that it put a crazy amount of pressure (or weight?) on my lower right-hand side of my back, where it wasn’t previously, and that made everything go out-of-whack.  Awesome.

Just as I had to be flexible and forgiving for not running my half marathon, over the course of the end of last week, I soon realized that my 8k aspirations might also be coming to a halt, since it hurt like hell to walk (or lie down, for the matter), and running was out of the question.  A 60-minute massage (at my midwives’ recommendation) on Saturday evening seemed to alleviate some of the pain, but it was still present, so my Sunday morning race came and went without my participation.

What a drag.

The good news is that with every passing day, the pain lessens.  The bad news is that it remains to be seen if I’ll have this pain for the remainder of the pregnancy–which wouldn’t be all that uncommon, since most prego ladies get some sort of back pain or another.  I’m soooooo hoping for the former, for obvious reasons.  Back pain is tough to deal with because we implicate our backs in every single thing that we do.  Back muscles aren’t like, say, your anterior deltoid, a muscle that you could probably avoid using if you really tried.  Just try not using your back.  It’s pretty impossible.

I’ve decided that I’m “done” being negative about my pain and am hoping that my optimism will carry me through this little blip in my pregnancy 🙂  I am still signed-up for the Shamrock Shuffle 8k on 4/10, when I will be seriously pregnant (36 weeks!), and I really hope to run it, depending on how my back and the rest of my prego body feels.

Hence, flexibility.

I’m super happy to be able to say that I’ve been able to run through at least 35 weeks of my pregnancy, and I really want to be able to continue to run up until the day the little one comes.  Whether that happens, however, is somewhat out of my control at this point.

I suppose I’ll just need to remember all that stuff about goal-setting and tell myself that I’ve got to be flexible 🙂