Elite Female Runners Juggle Parenthood, Running, Making You Feel Lazy
LatestCompetitive running’s tough on a woman’s body, and so is having babies. Put them together and you get a smorgasbord of interrelated challenges that could sideline even the most dedicated athletes and exhaust the most devoted parents.
An elite female athlete may have difficulty even becoming pregnant. When American distance runner Kara Goucher and her husband decided to have a child, she reduced the number of miles she ran per week from 100 to 30 so that it would be easier for her to get pregnant. (Elite distance runners often experience amenorrhea due to low energy availability.) In addition to reducing training enough so that it’s possible for them to become pregnant, female runners must also accept that they’ll have to reduce the number of miles that they run during the pregnancy. There also comes a point, for some women, that running during pregnancy becomes impossible. A female relative of mine who is also a distance runner reached a point where she was simply too uncomfortable to run. Furthermore, after giving birth, female athletes have to wait for their bodies to return to competition form and balance the demands of parenthood with the demands of their grueling training schedules.
In spite of these challenges, more and more elite female runners are opting to start their families now rather than waiting until they retire, often because running contracts now are much heftier than they used to be. Elite runners can make millions using their bodies, and thus it’s in their financial best interests to stay an active competitor for as long as they can, and by the time the body gives out, it’s often at an age where a successful pregnancy would be difficult.