I laced up my Nikes, hoping the calm of routine would banish the butterflies in my stomach. Or was that my unborn child giving me a pre-race pep rally? Too close to call, but either way, I concentrated on the creeping morning light, illuminating thousands of nutcases just like me gathered around a starting line.
Just one small difference, I gulped. Probably none of these runners getting ready to run 26.2 miles are also getting ready to give birth.
I hadn’t planned it this way — not the running, not the racing, not the pregnancy, not the timing. It had all kind of happened accidentally, as most major decisions in my life seem to.
Years earlier, I had naively figured I could conquer the world by jotting down some goals. “Run a marathon” made the list, because it sounded cool and I had been born in the birthplace of Nike. Pretty much everyone in Eugene, Ore., runs for fun; why not me? So after graduating college, I signed up for my first-ever race: a marathon.
Everything was going swimmingly in my pre-race training — and given that I had always had issues with urinary incontinence during exercise, the phrase was sometimes more literal than figurative. I had grown up crossing my legs for every sneeze, wearing black for P.E. classes and mastering the artful turn after a high kick in cheerleading. My mom joked that it was our genetic lot and part of becoming a woman. “Just wait until you have kids!” she’d say. As a farm girl, I had watched more than one bovine uterus prolapse, so I wasn’t particularly looking forward to following in my mom’s sometimes-wet footsteps.
Then came my 22nd birthday and the positive pregnancy test. In between the bouts of crying, I realized that my marathon was six weeks away, meaning I would be almost in my second trimester on race day.
A resolve knit itself together inside me. If pioneer women could cross the country on the Oregon Trail while carrying an unborn child, I thought, then my baby and I can run a few dozen miles with aid stations and an afterparty.
Once I got the medical OK, it was all systems go (including, of course, my bladder). I would wake up before work and run 15 miles, stopping every so often to hurl and pointlessly dry myself on the side of the road. The high mileage seemed to help, giving me something to think about besides my terrible morning sickness.
When that official starting gun went off, my body took over, giving a taste of what was to come that fall. I listened closely to what it was telling me, walking when I needed to, running again when some invisible voice commanded. As the miles passed, I visualized my son giving me a high five: “We’re doing it, Mommy! Great job!” And when they placed the finisher’s medal around my neck, I felt deep in my gut that motherhood would be, like the marathon, hard yet immensely worth it.
My husband and I announced our impending parenthood that night. “You did what while carrying my grandbaby?!” my mom asked incredulously. Even so, I could see the corners of her mouth curl into a grin. I didn’t need to remind her that she had taught aerobics classes until labor with all four of her children.
That first birth, though, went terribly, leaving me with third-degree tearing after an episiotomy, as well as a two-finger-wide diastasis split in my abdomen. The next year was spent in constant physical pain; I couldn’t even transition from sitting to standing without wincing and weeing.
How could I have gone from a marathon runner to an old woman so quickly?
Thankfully, we moved to another state, and when I got pregnant again, midwives and doulas worked with me. They sent me to women’s pelvic dysfunction therapy, something I didn’t even realize existed. I subscribed to a holistic postpartum fitness website that slowly wove my body back together. And I kept running, announcing my second son at the finish line of a half marathon, this time on purpose. On his due date, I ran (translation: waddled) a 10K for kicks.
I figured it would be my tradition, a way to keep everyone guessing every time I signed up for a race. But running also became a way for me to prove to myself that I could do hard things with children in tow.
One day, I realized that I was no longer leaking. The therapy, the vaginal birth, the tummy-safe fitness, the running—it had all worked! My body was stronger with children than it had been without. This felt so great that my partner and I created another babe; I informed the world about my arriving daughter well into our second trimester at another half marathon. This time, no one batted an eyelash at my weird announcement method. And when my girl and I ran a 28-minute 5K at eight months along, I relished the looks on the other runners’ faces as I passed them.
My children and I were born to move mountains. It’s not always pretty, or dry (so many bodily fluids!). But it’s our race, our journey together. We will be each other’s aid stations as the years rack up, the medical tent when it hurts too bad, the cheering spectators on the sidelines.
And when one of us wants to quit, we can point to our joint finisher’s medals, clasp hands, and cross another finish line together.
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