One of my favorite Barenaked Ladies songs and also an appropriate description for this post. It’s been a bit since I posted a non-running-specific bit, so I’m probably due.
things that will make me lose my mind. Perhaps blame the raging pregnancy hormones for my irritability with this, but yeah, apparently there’s enough people in this country who think that bringing back measles is totally cool. Even better, my family and I live in the state most affected/infected! And better still?! There have been at least two reported cases in my county! Honest to god, I thought all the bullshit I read online about “detoxes” and “cleanses” and “eating clean” made my blood boil… this measles stuff takes the cake. dear lord. I get it, I’m a parent, and as parents, we get to choose how to parent our children in ways that we think are best for them … yet … science, people. SCIENCE. One more time for good measure: SCI. ENCE.
with ebola people hoped, wished & prayed for a vaccine — but we didn't. with #measles we have one. #VaccinateYourKids
dreams. There are lots of potentially unpleasant things that come with pregnancy, but one of the more fun ones is the whackadoo dreams you might potentially have! Highlights of my most recent ones include high school boy troubles and shitty friendships; seeing and catching up with my long-ago-deceased family members; dreaming that kiddo dos ended up being a super-bright ginger daughter; and having a baby pet crocodile that I had to walk (on a leash) in my grandma’s kitchen, in the house she lived in until I was in high school. Hormones can be fuuuuuun.
Neil Patrick Harris. Totally enamored. Santa brought C his choose-your-own-adventure autobiography, though it was really probably more for Santa and less for C, and it was a blast to read. NPH is one of those crazy-talented individuals, and the fact that he genuinely sounds like a normal dude who’s also a dad just takes the cake. You should totally read his autobio. At times I was literally laughing out loud, and at other times, I was crying. (The stuff he writes about becoming a father is especially poignant and endearing).
lifting. I decided it was high time to get super stronger, so I took advantage of my parks and rec department’s awesome promotion for New Years and bought a citywide gym pass, primarily just so I’d really have an incentive to go do stuff that I should be doing anyway, like lifting. After a 30 minute shakeroo run on Monday, I lifted at a gym for the first time in probably … four years?, and it was a fuckin’ blast. I forget how fun lifting can be. It’s also great that there’s not a single soul in the gym when I’m there, so I basically have full run of the place.
fetus. All good! Just about outta the first tri and slowly but surely beginning to feel like a human (and myself, somewhat) again. CA does their genetic testing differently from what we had done in IL, so we could do it as soon as 9 weeks gestational age. The crazy thing is that C already knows the sex from this genetic testing stuff because the testing basically separated my blood from that of the kiddo’s (hashtag science is cool) and checked out the DNA and stuff. Crazy. Just like with A, I adamantly don’t want to know the sex and won’t know it until delivery. Right now, I’m feeling girl, but that means nothing. I’m already beginning to feel little movements, too. It’s so fun.
possible (amended) running goal for 2015. Initially, 2015 was going to be the year that I finally obliterated my 3:20 PR and posted that 3:15ish and then later, run my first 50 miler. Those things aren’t going to happen this year, and that’s totally a-okay in my book and called for a goal revisit. Beyond the obvious and most important grow and nourish and then safely deliver a healthy baby, depending on how life goes post-kiddo dos’ arrival, I might end up pacing a friend for the final 22 miles of his debut 50miler at TNF EC in December. I won’t be in any rush to get back to my usual fitness levels, so I haven’t committed to it. I just think it’s pretty cool to consider. We’ll see.
the flying fish. My current love for popsicles is beat only by A’s love for swimming.
I love her teacher’s “oh, shit!” face
winter in SJ. It has been rough. These are from Sunday, when friends and family in the midwest were getting hit hard and heavy with snow.
I say this all the time, but here again, let me preface everything that I’m about to say with this because, hello, litigious society and the need to disclaim: everything I’m about to write–as well as every other word on this little blog of mine–is proprietary to me and my experiences. That’s it. Please don’t extrapolate and project my experience onto yours because YMMV. Pregnancy is very much an experiment of one, in terms of how greatly things can vary. Basically, please please please don’t be an idiot or irresponsible, and talk to your practitioner if you’re pregnant, wanting to get pregnant, or whatever and wonder how and if your running can intersect with your pregnancy. Please.
Phew. Alright. I know there’s no shortage of talk on the internet from bloggers, practitioners, and people who don’t shy from voicing their opinion on the matter when it comes to running and pregnancy–should you do it, how much, how often, what should it look like, what can it look like, do you need to stop when you’re approaching your due date–and I thought that I’d chime in with my own experiences.
When I was pregnant with A in 2010-11, I blogged pretty regularly (for me) and talked about what was going on with my body and how I was feeling, so now that I’m pregnant with kiddo dos, I figured it’d be worthwhile to compare my experiences and put it all out there. It’s probably more for my own edification than anything, but then again, what isn’t. 🙂
First, though, I’ll back-up and give you some maybe-but-probably-not-entirely pertinent information about our pregnancies. In both 2010 and just recently, in 2014, when we decided we wanted to start and then, subsequently, grow our family, I was on birth control of some manifestation: specifically, the ring and then a Mirena IUD. For both pregnancies, we stopped using birth control, I had exactly one super short cycle, like, barely 72 hours, and six weeks post-BC cessation, boom, I was pregnant. I know we’re super lucky in this regard and am quite thankful that both times we were able to conceive as quickly (and truthfully, pretty effortlessly) as we did. I know many people have to try for much longer to get pregnant, and some people’s practitioners will even go so far as to assert that there’s a connection between running/endurance stuff and difficulty conceiving. That hasn’t been the case for me either time around.
When I got pregnant in 2010, I was in the throes of marathon training for Chicago in October. Fun fact: we conceived right before–like, nights before–I flew from Chicago to run the San Francisco Marathon in late July. That was my girl’s first introduction to endurance racing 🙂
hey guess what, you’re pregnant! circa mi 25 at TSFM in ’10
As I said, I was in the throes of marathon training for Chicago, wherein I was going after my very ambitious sub-3:35 goal (I think), and when I found out I was pregnant, I was super excited and also (naturally) wondered how running and pregnancy would intersect… assuming they could and would at all. I continued with my training as prescribed, speed and distance stuff and all, in the first trimester, and in fact, a 20-miler that summer, the CARA Ready to Run run-the-entire-lakefront-path-from-north-to-south jaunt, was one of my fastest and strongest 20 milers ever at the time. It was unreal. I felt fantastic during my first trimester and if anything, I actually felt faster, lighter, and more efficient; it was like all that increased blood volume that comes with the first tri somehow gave me a set of wings or something.
one way to make a 20 miler FLY by is to tell your gaggle of Boston training buddies, at mile 3, that you’re about 7 weeks pregnant. love them!
Our midwife group in Chicago (amazing, by the way– you need a recommendation, you let me know) advised us that since I had been a runner for a long time pre-pregnancy, I could still safely continue to run for as long as I wanted and as long as I felt comfortable. With that, they gave me their blessing to run CM; I just had to be smart with my pacing and hydration (but really, who doesn’t have to be smart with pacing and hydration during a marathon?). By the time CM rolled around, I was about 10 weeks pregnant (+/-), and the day was atypically warm for Chicago in October, so I kept things comfortable and ran a low-4 marathon and just had a blast. I really didn’t care about missing my goal because a) pregnancy, b) warm day in October, and c) there will always be other marathons and future Chicago Marathons.
I ended up running through about week 36 of my almost-41 week pregnancy with A; by then, the anatomical changes that come with pregnancy and late in the third trimester necessitated that I shift from running–which was probably more like slogging–to power-walking. Running during pregnancy made me feel good, it made me feel strong, and it was just something I did because it was something I had always done. Of course, I got significantly slower over time, and since I was running through the winter and into May, dealing with the winter conditions in the midwest also added some nice challenges into the mix. I still ran some races pregnant for the hell of it (my memory is rusty, but I think it was a Trick or Treat Trot 10k, dressed up as Robin, at about 14-5 weeks; the Hot Chocolate 15k around 17 weeks; and a Santa Hustle 5k maybe about 20 weeks). In part, I credited my positive labor and delivery experiences (and relative speed therein, for a first timer) to being able to run and stay active for the entirety of my pregnancy.
this is actually a fantastic costume to run in, pregnant or not. That Batman feeling me up is my husband, don’t worry.
Hot Chocolate 15k in Chicago with a bunch of my Boston ’09 and ’10 training buddies. It was quite crisp that morning.
This time around, when I learned I was pregnant back in December, I quickly realized that, again, I somehow managed to get pregnant at the peak of my 50k training, if not specifically during one of my peak weeks. Crazy. Much like A, this little fetus has already been introduced to the world of endurance racing, a la long long long training runs and a trail 50k at around 4-5 weeks gestational age. 🙂
unknowingly 50k-ing with a buddy in my uterus
For the first half of my first trimester this time around, I felt great–completely unfazed. With A, I didn’t have hardly any of the classic first trimester annoyances like morning sickness, nausea, dizziness, headaches, indigestion, sleep issues, gastrointestinal issues, food aversions, a crazy/voracious appetite, or the opposite, a suppressed appetite. Anything I had was fleeting and more of a blip in my day (at the time, I was working FT, going to grad school FT, and still running a lot) and less of an oh-my-god-my-world-is-coming-to-an-end meltdown. I was confident that this time around, my first trimester experience would mirror that of my first first trimester experience… because really, why wouldn’t it? … and then reality smacked me in the fact with a good ol’ serving of vegan humble pie. A gooooood ol’ serving.
Everything that I just listed, all those first trimester PITAs? Yeah. That (and more) has been my jam for the second part of this first trimester, since about mid-December. It is a really, really weird feeling to be used to operating at 100%, 100% of the time, and then suddenly be relegated to just trying to stay horizontal, on the couch, with my eyes closed, in a cold and dark and quiet room, in the hopes that I can convince myself that I’m not going to throw up, I’m not going to throw up, the world isn’t violently spinning around, there aren’t screwdrivers digging in at my temples… as well as some more colorful things as well that you really don’t want to hear about. The good thing, of course, is that all of this stuff that my hormones have thrown at me over the past month+, the stuff that I was more or less spared during my first pregnancy, is all normal–yay raging pregnancy hormones!–and that’s what I care about. I can be miserable if it means that everything is healthy. Promise. I try to keep my bitching to a minimum because, guess what, it doesn’t make anything feel better.
Like many of you, on any given day, running for an hour, an hour and change, is no big deal. A 13-mile long run on the weekends is usually a cutback LR. We all have our usual paces, our usual routes, and know more or less how much distance we’ll be able to cover if we set out on a standard hour-long run or even a short two-hour LR. The past month has totally knocked me off guard, and many (most) days, I can’t even fathom running for an hour, much less doing any sort of LR, because I feel that outta whack. Of course, I know many women have far rougher first tris than me, and deal with it while still having a 9-5, if not also kid/kids at home, and seriously, I give you all my love and respect; for me, though, this is a brave and brand new world and one I can only hope to exit quickly and successfully with the advent of the (hopefully) honeymooning second tri. It is crazy. The human body–or I guess, more specifically, the pregnant body–is unreal.
While I’ll be honest and say that my usual motivation has dropped some–in large part because I know I’m just going to get bigger (read: heavier) and slower over time, regardless of any training “advances” I might make (which won’t happen, obviously)–at the same time, I feel actually pretty content about not running much or at all right now. I know that when I feel well, I’ll run again, and I’ll run at a pace and distance that feels comfortable because a) it’s good for my fetus and b) it’s good for me (and c) it’s good for my family, surely, because I’m more pleasant to be around post-run than I am when I’ve been trying to stay horizontal in a cold, dark, and quiet room all day).
I know some people are really concerned about running in the first trimester because of the potential to miscarry–not from running necessarily but just due to the higher chance of miscarriage in the first tri than in the other two–and I totally understand. I think that ultimately, you have to do what’s right for you and do what you and your practitioner have agreed will be right for you and your burgeoning family. Just because you can’t (or are choosing not to) run today doesn’t guarantee that tomorrow is a wash, too; you just have to listen to your body (and your practitioner) and take it a day at a time. Everyone is different; every pregnant body is different; every pregnancy is different.
While I’m itching to be back running on the regular, I’m also itching *more* to begin to feel human (or more specifically, more like myself) again on the regular. I’ve never had a serious injury during my marathoning tenure that has necessitated taking more than a day or two off, so while I can’t liken my somewhat self-imposed let-me-get-over-all-this-first-trimester-PITA timeout to that, I kinda have been thinking about it in those terms: that, while my spirit to run is (ever) present, my physical hormonal state is kinda precluding it. No matter. Just because it is today doesn’t mean it will be tomorrow…
…and the nice thing about running is that it will always be there for you tomorrow. The roads, the trails, your hills, your track: it’ll all be there, waiting patiently for you to give it whatever you got, whenever you’re ready to give it to it.
While I don’t have a lot to give right now, and most days, the very thought of even trying to give anything sends my mind into a whirl and makes the world feel like, yet again, it is spinning faster than I can lie down and convince myself you’re not going to throw up, you’re not going to throw up, this will pass, just close your eyes and imagine nothing but darkness, I very much look forward to the day(s) that I’m back out there, regardless if it’s tomorrow, or the next day, or the next week, or the next month. Some of my fondest memories from my running life have come from running while pregnant, and continuing to share that with kiddos dos in utero, just as I did with A nearly four years ago, is something I am eager to do. When that day/those days will manifest? Your guess is as good as mine. Until it happens, though, all I can do is wait this stuff out and, kinda like marathon training, trust in the process and take each day at a time, keeping my experience my own.
