Let’s just get to the subject of today’s newsletter and of more to come in the next few months: The reason that my relationship with running has changed is that I’m pregnant.
What a journey it has been…! Trying to run consistently while pregnant has been humbling, to put it mildly. It’s basically the opposite of a couch-to-5k program: You start out in great shape but with each passing week, the runs get harder instead of easier. See Exhibit A: my Strava fitness graph:
Most people who know nothing about pregnancy or running assume that running while pregnant is a) dangerous for the baby and/or b) only difficult for the mom once she has a significant bump. Assuming you have a low-risk pregnancy, running while pregnant is perfectly safe for everyone involved. Emily Oster wrote about it in her newsletter here (paywalled) and in her book Expecting Better. When I asked my doctor, a fellow runner, about it, she reminded me that pro runner Elle Purrier St. Pierre ran the 1500-meter event at the World Championships during her first trimester. The general wisdom with most exercise while pregnant is if you were doing it before, you can continue doing it.
As for when it gets difficult, running has been varying degrees of hard since I found out I was pregnant, for two main reasons. One of the first things I noticed was an increase in my resting heart rate. Pregnant people pump so much blood! My Oura ring kept telling me to take it easy and I was like, shut the f* up you piece of shit. (I haven’t worn it since; how does it not have a pregnancy setting?!). I’ve always used heart rate to gauge my effort while exercising, and historically, I make sure it doesn’t exceed 155 beats per minute on easy runs. As soon as my body realized there was an embryo in the room, my easy pace took a lot more effort to maintain. I did and have continued to slow down as going on a five mile run has increasingly required a lot more work of my body.
The second reason is that during pregnancy, your body produces a hormone called relaxin that loosens the ligaments around the pelvis to prepare for birth. The increased laxity makes your pelvis unstable, which in turn can make running quite painful at times. It really depends on the person, but I’ve had a good deal of ligament pain since the beginning of the second trimester. It’s prevented me from running daily, but I’ve been able to mitigate it somewhat with lots of butterfly stretches, a “belly band” that’s kind of like a sports bra for my pelvis, and incorporating more specific strength work.
Finally, though it hasn’t made running hard per se, the fact that you have to pee all the time is a real buzzkill. Some days I wake up and can tell by the tightness of my wedding ring that my body has a lot of water to flush out. On these days, I stick to the treadmill.
Despite all this, I’ve been able to be somewhat consistent. There were some days in the first trimester when I was too tired to move and others where my stomach wouldn’t cooperate, but I still got some miles in every week. My goal for the final stretch of the second trimester is to hit 20 miles a week, a number that feels modest on some days and overly ambitious on others.
That’s all for today. Before I sign off, I’d love to know what questions you have about running while pregnant! What would you like to know more about? Reply to this email, or leave a comment below.
I’ll leave you with this photo of me “trail running” at 17 weeks. I’m miserable for another reason I didn’t even touch on: my boobs hurt so much!
Elaheh