April 12, 2011

Once a runner, always a runner?

I used to be a runner.

Now, I’m a waddler. And that’s on a good day.

Pregnancy changed everything — or rather, pregnancy after a year of living in a European capital city composed entirely of cobblestone streets and steep hills. I gave up running while we were abroad, as I couldn’t stand the thought of putting in time on a treadmill after years of trail and road running near our Central Californian beach town home. But as soon as we moved home, I gladly hit the trails again, slowly trying to rebuild my stamina.

A month later, I got pregnant. So much for that idea. On the rare days that I wasn’t just too dang tired to run, it felt all wrong, even from the very beginning. I know many women who have continued to run all the way through their pregnancy, but it wasn’t for me. Even before I  put on any discernible weight, everything felt… floppy. I hated it. So instead of doing it badly, I decided to do it not at all, and went cold turkey again when I was barely six weeks pregnant.

For a few months, I kept going to spin classes. Then those became too strenuous for me, and I would either leave totally exhausted or having taken it so easy that I didn’t even break a sweat. Not very satisfying, either way. But I thought, “That’s OK, I can still keep walking.”

Um, wrong again.

The Slippery Downward Slope

I just finished my seventh month of pregnancy, and these days I’m lucky if I feel up for a leisurely stroll a couple times a week. Brisk forty-five minute power walks are now a thing of the past, and even my shorter circuit, which once took me less than thirty minutes to complete, now takes closer to forty-five, or an hour on a bad day. (On one such day, I actually got passed by a little girl on a bike. With training wheels. Oh, the indignity of it all!)

Luckily, somewhere in between the spinning and walking phases, I also started doing water aerobics. I began with one class at a local pool, mainly because my aunt was teaching it. Soon, the pool became my lifeline, both a way to get some semblance of exercise and also a means to build community.

Now I go to swim classes twice a week, which I refer to as my Big Bellies Bobbing class. That’s essentially what we do: float around, chat about various aspects of our pregnancies, and get some sun and exercise in the meantime. It’s like listening to a PregTASTIC episode in the swimming pool. Talk about a win-win situation.

And as a fringe benefit, I now have the best tan I’ve had since college. With my English skin, that’s saying a lot.

You Want Me to Do WHAT???

Despite the rapid (and extremely humbling) devolution of my abilities as an athlete, however, I’m discovering that you can take the girl out of the running, but you can’t take the runner out of the girl. As I stare down the barrel of my final two months of pregnancy, I am finally starting to focus on the one thing I’ve been trying to ignore this whole time. That’s right, the dreaded L-word: labor.

Up til now, I’ve been happily doing the first-time mom thing, reading everything I can get my hands on about pregnancy and new parenthood. But I have largely skimmed over the intermediate stage — you know, that whole giving birth thing — figuring well, this kid has to come out somehow, why stress myself out about the details?

With only eight weeks to go, my carefully maintained indifference is starting to wear very thin, especially after we started our birth preparation class last week. With the first video we watched, I thought, “Wait. Hold on. That looks really painful. Is it too late to rethink this whole thing, maybe adopt instead???”

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

In working through my ensuing panic, I’ve found that what helps me the most is to think of giving birth as a long race. Five years ago, back before I was married or even thinking of having kids, I trained for a half marathon. Events kept me from actually running the race, but I did all the training, and worked my way up through the long eleven- and twelve-mile runs that my training program called for.

When I look back at those long runs, I don’t think of the pain I endured, although there must have been plenty of that. Instead I remember the mental focus and concentration it took to get through ninety minutes of running without pause or break. On each run, no matter what length, I put my head down, focused on my music, my feet, and my breathing, and looked only at the pavement right in front of me — not at the next hill, definitely not at the finish line, just at the next five or ten feet. To this day I can still remember how elated I was when those long runs were over, how proud I was to have accomplished this huge task with only my own body… and how incredibly tired I was after each one was over.

This is exactly how I’m imagining labor to be: painful and tiring, yes, but also a task that requires great mental and physical stamina to accomplish. The pain I’m still not sure about, but the stamina part, the pacing and breathing — that I can do.

So perhaps I am still a runner, simply because I still think like one. Giving birth will be an entirely different kind of race than the one I trained for five years ago, but one that I think, I hope, I’ll be ready for when the time comes.

What’s more, I already know that the end result will be far better than any runner’s high I’ve ever had. And that, in the end, is what will make it all worth it.

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Listen to PregTASTIC, Episode 196 to learn all about common exercise myths, both prenatal and postpartum.