Hi readers,
It’s been a minute since I sent out a newsie—between now and the last one, I had a baby! I almost sent out a newsletter in July talking about the pain of labor and how it relates to running, yada yada yada, but postpartum life got in the way. I’ll just say that I once listened to a podcast where the guest said that running a marathon is more painful than giving birth and… I do not agree.
I’m back in your inboxes today to talk about my return to running. First, a quick recap of my last weeks of pregnancy, as they relate to exercise. I stopped running around 33 weeks, when the weight of my belly became too much for my pelvis to bear. I continued to swim and spin for a few weeks after that, but soon the stationary bike got too uncomfortable. I swam until a few days past 40 weeks, and walked a lot, especially towards the very end. If you’re wondering if exercise induces labor, it didn’t for me 🙃.
I started running again around five weeks postpartum—I got a bit too antsy to wait until my six week check-up and felt that I was ready to begin a walk/run regimen. That said, I was VERY conservative. For my first “run” back, I went on a three mile walk and ran for 30 to 60 seconds every few minutes. The next few weeks of running comprised of walks with run intervals that gradually increased from one to six minutes. I’m now back to continuous running but am keeping the paces slow and the mileage low.
Returning to run postpartum has been very hard—physically, emotionally, logistically. The first run was really brutal, like the kind where your heart and lungs hurt. Luckily, my cardiovascular fitness came back quickly after a few runs, but my musculoskeletal system is still FRAGILE! Running is dependent on the core, and my core is arguably weaker than my baby’s. (She can do a dead bug better than me.) There are a few other things I’m hyper aware of right now, like that breastfeeding is associated with lower bone density, and I’m desperately scared of getting a stress fracture. I also go to a pelvic floor therapist and have been doing lots of little muscle activation exercises, but I can’t run too long without my pelvic muscles reminding me that not too long ago, I pushed out an eight pound baby. It’s a weird sensation and not painful, just uncomfortable.
Probably the most challenging part of running, and exercising in general, has been balancing it with my baby’s schedule, or lack thereof. My whole existence revolves around feeding my baby and getting her to sleep. The sleeping part has gotten easier and can easily be managed by other people, like my husband and my mom, but the feeding, the feeding!!! Feeding my baby has been a journey. The main thing to know is that she drinks breast milk every two to three hours, and I never really know how long she’ll go between feeds. On mornings that I run, I feed her, hand her off to my husband, and race against the clock to exercise and come home before she gets hungry again and my boobs fill back up with milk. It may seem straightforward written out here but there are so many little tradeoffs that can impact my whole day. If I get back and the baby is still napping, I feel so accomplished that I pulled off another day of exercise. A lot of days I don’t even want to exercise because of all the energy that goes into it, but that sliver of time completely to myself is crucial for my mental health.
Anyway, that’s a brief window into my fourth trimester fitness regime. More to come, but if you’re returning to running from any time off, remember that the first run is the hardest and the more you do it, the easier it gets.
Elaheh