It's all fun and games until...

It's not!

If you’re new here, welcome to Run the Shoes, a not-too-serious newsletter about running and fitness. If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe to get emails like this in your inbox — it’s free!

I’m writing to you from week three of an unplanned break from running. The first week I had the flu, the second week I had bronchitis. I may have had a mild case of pneumonia in one lung, but I didn’t confirm it with an x-ray because I am pregnant. I took some antibiotics, and they worked. I’m generally feeling better but I still have shortness of breath and fatigue, which could also be from pregnancy. Or anxiety. Probably a combination of all three. If I weren’t pregnant, I’d be itching to get back to running and pushing myself with some brisk cardio, but I have been humbled! I can’t get sick again! I have a toddler on the outside, a baby growing on the inside, plus a job to go to and dinners to make and lots of other things that require me to be healthy.

I hope that my cough and breathing improve over the next few weeks so I can run again, but even so, I don’t expect to do much. I’m about to enter my third trimester, which is when I stopped running during my last pregnancy due to pelvic girdle pain. On the one hand, it’s a bummer that my “slowdown” has come earlier this pregnancy than it did with my first. The last run I went on was around 25 weeks, when I did 5 miles on the treadmill with two, possibly three, pee breaks. I’ve been lucky to have had a relatively easy pregnancy so far and was able to average 20-25 miles a week until I got the flu. I had mild morning sickness in the first trimester that was easily quelled by a handful of saltines and have had little to no pelvic pain so far. Things were going great, relatively speaking, until I got sick. But running while pregnant is generally unpleasant because pregnancy wreaks havoc on your body in weird, uncomfortable ways, so on the other hand, I’m embracing the break. It’s quite freeing actually.

Though I’m not running, I have started exercising again this week, as I find it important to keep up the habit of regular exercise for my mental health, as well as to prepare my body for labor and postpartum recovery. I haven’t done much, just a few Sculpt Society prenatal classes that are kind of kicking my butt. My heart rate went up to 140 beats per minute during dancing arms yesterday!! I also got a membership to my local Y so I can start swimming again. I love swimming while pregnant; if I could spend my entire pregnancy in a swimming pool I would.

I won’t spend this entire newsletter talking about being pregnant because it’s honestly just a drag. However, I did take a lot of notes on my phone back when I was still running consistently because there are a lot of takeaways from running while pregnant that all runners should consider. Here are a few:

1. Listen to your body, not your mind. It’s really important to listen to your body when you’re pregnant—if you’re having trouble catching your breath or having a weird pain: STOP! But I also find it useful to just ignore my mind, which likes to run through all the reasons why I shouldn’t be running—there’s no point because I’m not training for anything, it’s boring, I’m too slow, etc. Your brain will always find a way to talk you out of going on a run because it’s uncomfortable, but as long as you’re physically able to do so, JUST GO!

2. Don’t look at your watch. I think I said this in my last post on how to make running suck less, but seriously, it works. Often, knowing your pace will only make you want to stop. I sometimes had such little energy in my first trimester that I would literally just get to Central Park and… not run, not walk but like… bop? I wouldn’t even turn my watch on, just bop around the lower loop for half an hour and come home and feel accomplished. Maybe the key takeaway here is that bopping is running.

3. Stop when it feels good. Haruki Murakami said something about this in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and I’ve thought about it often in my pregnant running journey. My overarching goal with running is to be consistent, so it’s important not to overdo it.

   Sometimes I run fast when I feel like it, but if I increase the pace I shorten the amount of time I run, the point being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end of each run carry over to the next day. This is the same sort of tack I find necessary when writing a novel. I stop every day right at the point where I feel I can write more. Do that, and the next day's work goes surprisingly smoothly. I think Ernest Hemingway did something like that. To keep on going, you have to keep up the rhythm. - Haruki Murakami

Honestly those are all notes I can decipher for now. I have some other random ones in my phone that I’ll try to interpret for another newsletter, like “Christian Louboutin 60 minutes of running,” which I think has to do with an article I read more than 10 years ago about the shoe designer Christian Louboutin running for 60 minutes every morning around Paris. Have to factcheck that but seems inspiring.

Before we part, let’s take a moment for the:

Baked Good of the Month

I only remembered to take a picture of the cake after I ate a piece. That doesn’t excuse the quality of the photo but it does explain the missing slice.

I come from a long line of pound cake lovers. My mom and sister are always baking pound cake, and they follow a recipe that my grandma typed up on a pink notecard. I eat a lot of pound cake because I live near both of them and they usually have some stocked in their freezer, but honestly, I don’t think I’ve baked one myself since I wrote about a version of my grandma’s pound cake for Bon Appétit in 2017. That changed in January because I had a carton of sour cream to use up. I followed my grandma’s recipe, which was written about 40 years ago when ovens were less efficient and cakes took 1.5 hours to bake—luckily I checked on mine way earlier than that and caught it before it got too dry. Anyway, it was delicious! It lasted a lot longer than intended because I lost my sense of taste while I was sick, and there’s no joy in eating dessert if you can’t taste it.

That’s all for today, talk to you soon.

Elaheh