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QOM, or "What it's like to be a mumma-athlete"

First off, this is not a blog about anything related to Strava.  I still only vaguely know what it is and still adamantly refuse to get a 'bike computer'.  I'm talking metaphorical mountains here, people.

My goal for this blog is to help reach some of the new (and not so new) mummas out there who have worked hard to regain their fitness out there after giving birth.  I had no idea how hard it would be.  So if I had no idea, maybe a few other people didn't either, and maybe talking about it might make a few people feel better.  So, here's my take.

Side note: I know now it's impossible to sing the Itsy-Bitsy-Spider while typing a blog.  I just tried.  It's a no go.

What is possible though is popping your baby into a Ergo and swaying him back and forth while he happily looks at the world while you try to do a blog.  Standing up with the computer at the windowsill.   And within 10 minutes, the little monkey is asleep.  There is no better feeling I don't think than having your baby fall asleep on you.  Just the best.  They let of a radiant warmth that is everything good about babies.  Magic.

So, I won't lie.  It's been a bit hard to blog lately because if I do get spare time, I don't want to spend it typing away at the computer.  I likely want to read a book 'just because'. I want to have a shower.  I want to brush the mats out of my hair.  I often just say, 'to heck with spare time', I want to go back to tickling my baby into giggle fits.  I used to think of exercise as my 'spare time', but it's getting more and more incorporated into daily life, which is really good for me.  Consistency goes a long way these days.

I am getting back out on the trails.  It was harder, much, much harder, than I anticipated to get going in the post partum period.  It has nothing to do with my 'fitness' level, and everything to do with the fact that you are drained beyond all recognition in the first period when your new baby arrives.  The world does us no favours in the this department, as if it's "have a baby & then win olympic gold" 6 months later as the norm (or I saw it that way).  Ironically, I have never experienced a more love filled stage in my life, regardless of the tiredness.  It is simply a different stage of life, where to me, our baby mattered more than anything else, and everything followed suit.  They are only one month old for one month of their entire life, then, it's gone.  So running could wait.  And seeing as I couldn't walk a straight line after delivery, running was going to have to wait.

But considering I ran up until 2 days before I went into labour (because the day before was a swim day, of course), I felt fitter going into labour than I did 3 months after giving birth.  Weird.  Enter the mind games. "Will I ever run fast again?", "How do other moms do it?", "I am going backwards".  It wasn't very fun. I grumbled about it for weeks on end.  I saw friends running fast and I wasn't even jealous, I was just sad for what I felt I had lost.  I was also grumpy with myself for letting these negative thoughts take over some or any of the time I could have spent focusing on what a lovely baby we had.  Arg! So I was in a bit of a pinch.  Many, many experienced moms kept telling me, "Don't worry, it's temporary, and you'll be back".  I gritted my teeth, but I had to believe them.  They were real human beings, and all of them really excelling in the post baby period.  It had to be possible.  I just thought, I guess mistakenly, that it happened overnight.

Newsflash.  It does not.  But flash forward to now, a couple of months later.  I am seeing it happen.  I am feeling the fitness come back, like fresh blood into my veins, .  It is a much more amazing feeling than I ever thought.  I definitely took being in shape for granted, and as is the case with many neurotic endurance athletes, thought I really wasn't in that great of shape (yes, even after winning Ironman), and could do better.  Well, now I know I was in pretty wicked shape.  I have a much better appreciation for that now.  But surprisingly, I am really enjoying the 'coming back into shape' period.  After really working on a high level of fitness for a number of years, I haven't touched on the basic stuff for a while.  And it's much more rewarding and full of clarity than I expected.  Here is an example.

I started skate skiing a few weeks back.  I would have started a couple months back, but as every BC skier knows right now, the skiing is the P to the ITS.  But we got some snow, and I was immediately out on skis.  Enter a trail called The Grind.  It embodies it's namesake.  I used to work my way up there working hard but could reach the top without stopping.


I suffered on that hill the first time up.  I probably stopped half a dozen times.  Feet aching, breath abating, muscles searing, coordination floundering, heart dropping (really, skyrocketing).  I'm sure I fell on the way up, feeling embarrassed that people would be watching and thinking how awfully out of shape I was.  I know that's a bad complex to have, but it's tied to my ego, the same ego that told me that if I wanted to win a race, I could, I just had to believe it.  So ego is not all bad.  But sometimes your ego is tough to deal with.  So, I struggled on in quite poor technique I'm sure, but I made it to the top.

Flash back to yesterday, 2 weeks later.  I skied up the hill.  No stopping.  I skied a few loops around the top (not shredding my elbow to bits as I had done a few days ago on the ice - bonus).  When I came back down the hill, I decided to go up it again.  I was almost giddy with enthusiasm to do this.  My legs of course protested much more on the 2nd go, but it felt so good.  I was doing it, I was doing what I could do not that long ago.  Talk about finding hope on a half scraped out ski hill.  I was in love with that moment.

And it's that moment, and the feeling today that I could do 100 pushups.  Not consecutive people, come on, but 100! I haven't been able to do that since 2012.  It's my reward for pulling myself up the ski hill, ugly if I have to, pretty if I'm lucky, and either way, feeling really quite proud of myself at the top.  Someone asked me at the top of the hill if I was "that biathlon girl" - I smiled, and said "No", but I thought to myself, what I'm thinking about myself has been validated.  I'm an athlete.  I missed that.

I think I got used to race placings as reward for my training, as it's a highly satisfying experience to win, or podium, at a race.  People take notice, and help fill up that insecure spot we all seem to have from time to time, that yes, we really are a good athlete or good person.  But I'm not breaking down any doors right now on the racing front, and almost welcome the respite from that world.  Racing would be fun right now only because there would be other people that would show up you could talk to or joke with, as I do a lot of my training alone on a mountain, often in blizzards or fog, but sometimes in absolutely gorgeous sunshine which requires t-shirt skiing and 60SPF sunblock.

But I'm loving just moving my body and feeling it get stronger.  For those people who have delivered a baby, they will understand the unbelievable feelings of bringing a child into this world.  Maybe it's just taken me 5 months to move on from revelling in how amazing my body was to do that, and maybe now is why my body is ready to move back into sport.  I don't know.  It seems a nicer theory than just 'everything was so hard and I was so tired and depressed and didn't want to spend an extra ounce of energy unless I needed to'.  As I found out with labour, your inner 'body' knows more than your brain will ever be capable of finding out, and sometimes you just have to go with it, and I guess I've done that without noticing.

Not that I want to hold anything over anyone's head, but you really won't understand this feeling until you go through it. You will not know how hard moms (or dads) work until you become one.  You will not know what's it's like to go for your first run after you've hard a baby (read: wobbly, and wobbly may be a metaphor for all things with a new child).  So to all the mummas who have come back into fitness after having a baby, I'm in awe, and I'm feeling pretty darn lucky to be becoming one of them.

I can only see a mountain of strength to be gained this year.  I can't wait.

Posted by gillian clayton at 3:03 PM 1 comment: