20 week milestone! Runners, you know what this means? A pregnancy is 40 weeks. This is the half marathon point in a marathon. If this was the Boston Marathon, I would have just passed the Scream Tunnel at Wellesley College and would be grinning widely and hitting the 21.1km mat with a split over the last kilometer that’s a little quick. At the 20 week pregnancy mat, I’m grinning widely because everything is going well.
Update on being a pregnant runner:
1. It is still awesome.
2. Watching my body change, adapt and continue to run well is a fun and intriguing process.
I continue to run 4 or 5 days a week. Some things are the same and some are different. I have been pretty consistently logging 40km per week since week 10 of pregnancy so this is the same.
Long runs: I’ve been running 12 -15km as long run. My long run has turned into a relay from one public bathroom to the next. A 15km long run requires 4 bathroom stops: the Tim’s on Oxford/Quinpool, the upper bathroom at Point Pleasant, the lower bathroom at Point Pleasant and the Irving on Robie. Baby Poirier seems to enjoy long runs and is doing her own running, swimming, circus-ing, jumping roping or trampoline-ing while I’m running. I believe her to have her father’s sense of humor as she stops when I stop at a stop light and continues when I continue to run (note, we are not going to find out if our baby is a boy or girl but I choose to go with “her”).
Track workouts: Most of the credible writing that you can find about pregnancy and running refers to opening your front door and running for “x” unit of time. This is not the running routine that I follow in real, non-pregnant life. I am runner who does a long run, 1-2 track or quality workouts plus a few easy runs per week. There’s very little written about doing workouts while pregnant. My coach and I devised our own pretty easy solution to this. Cliff set a pace for me to run each 400m lap on the track in. I run that. If I do 2 workouts a week, one will include longer intervals of 800, 1000 or 1200m. The second workout will include shorter intervals of 200 or 400m. Remarkably, at 20 weeks pregnant, I’m still hitting my track pace as easily as I was at 10 weeks.
Sadly, the portapotties have been removed from the track.
Strides: (50-60m relaxed sprints done as part of track warm-up/cool-down): These present a strange phenomenon. I’ve done thousands of strides in my running life. My brain and my muscles know exactly how a stride should feel. Experience and muscle memory has ingrained the feeling in my mind. This ingrained feeling is with me when I begin strides. My body knows what to do but what my body executes feels nothing like it’s supposed to. It’s slower. My leg extension and stride is shorter. So strides are different but they still work.
Baby bump and body weight: Weight gain during pregnancy is really gradual and aside from a few situations (one being the pressure on my bladder during long runs), I don’t notice the weight or feel heavier. In fact, I often feel like my non-pregnant light self while running at the track. Although most of my running clothes don’t fit over my growing baby bump.
I have started to notice the weight during yoga practice. At week 18 of pregnancy, during 3 legged downward dog, with my weight on 3 instead of 4 supporting limbs, I felt heavier for the first time.
Balance: It’s a weird feeling when your proprioception, your sense of where your body is in space, what had kept you balanced for your whole life, no longer keeps you balanced. I noticed this first while doing the core workout that Candice developed for me. I was on all fours. A position I’ve held in yoga practice for years. The workout involves arm and leg extensions. All of a sudden I was in danger of tipping over. Centre of gravity = shifted. Balance = gone. So weird.
Then at yoga a few days later (I practice yoga with youth in my Youth Health Centre as part of a weekly lunchtime program), instructor Stefanie said “now we’ll do something fun!” Our young yogis love challenging poses like crow and headstand. This is the pose that we were trying: 8 angle pose. I could balance my body on my hands but absolutely could not extend my legs because I couldn’t find my centre of gravity to do so. Also this requires a lot of core strength. I used to have a lot of core strength. My core is no longer in the same place!
Godfathers: My training partner Mike read my blog about etiquette and talking to pregnant women. He was teasing me at the beginning of track practice, reciting what I wrote to say to pregnant woman: “You look great. Your bump is very cute.”
Self-professed ‘godfather’ J heard him and came stomping over and got in Mike’s face.
“No! No!” J says to Mike. “We are the only ones who get to say that to her. WE are the godfathers,” he says on behalf of him and G.
“Don’t you be moving in my territory,” G orders.
What can I do but smile.
SI Joint: rudely moving all over the place. Working on it.
Taking pleasure: I’ve been consciously enjoying each outdoor run to the maximum. On Sunday, my long run partner McKim was sick and I didn’t want to run solo. As soon as I hit the road and began breathing in crisp December air under brilliant sunshine, love for my sport washed over me. I loved my long run and was happy to catch up with Norma for the middle 5 of my 15km. See, I know that my days and runs outdoors are limited. When the snow is the on the ground and the sidewalks become slick and slippery with snow and ice, this pregnant runner will be done- vanquished to the treadmill in my sunroom.
