Does having a baby enhance athletic performance?

There I was, the Monday morning after the National Track Cycling Championships basking in the glory of my two medals from the weekend.  I was a bit dazed. This was out of character for me. I didn’t win stuff at national championships. Or at least I used not to until I had a baby! What the hell was going on? On that Monday I wandered around (with a big grin on my face) and pondered it all. The most shocking win at the weekend was the bronze medal in the pursuit after riding two personal best times – I knocked a whopping 14 seconds off my last recorded competitive pursuit (6 weeks previous in the Olympic Omnium) in the first round and the time was good enough to see me into the bronze medal ride off – this had not been part of the plan! My coach had said to me beforehand that was the worst thing that could happen – that I’d get into a bronze medal ride off against someone I had no chance of beating and would have to grind out another 3k at my limit – it would ruin my chances to win any of the match sprinting. Which I had spent most of my time training for. Whatever the plan was it went out the window and there I was in the ride-off. And I hadn’t just scraped in. I had qualified third, just 1 second ahead of my opponent. It mightn’t have been the plan but at that moment I decided to hell with the sprinting – this was the medal that counts the most to a track rider. The pursuit is a true test of personal endurance and character. You have to push hard and dig deep during those 4 or so minutes of hell to keep the wheels on the cart or should I say on the pursuit line!

The pursuit is about a perfectly measured effort, and the best riders ride every lap in exactly the same time. I had done this and stuck to my schedule rigidly in the first round –a near perfect 6 x 37 second laps. But the adrenalin and emotion had me all over the place in the ride off. I went out like a rocket and my first lap was 35 seconds – way too fast to sustain – I had to wind it back rapidly and hope to god that burst hadn’t depleted my tank. I wanted it so much! At 2 laps to go my legs were screaming stop, but I gritted my teeth and just dug deep for that last kilometer. When I crossed the line I didn’t even know I had it – I was seeing stars! It turned out I did have it – by a comfortable 3 seconds in the end – and not only that, but a new PB a whole second faster than the 1^st round! I collapsed on the grass in the center of the track and tried to soak it all in. And yes the sprinting was a write off after that! My elation was complemented nicely on day 2 by a beautiful silver medal in the 500m time-trial. And another personal best time to boot.

I wondered why I was all of a sudden doing so well considering my training had been seriously interrupted by pregnancy, and having the baby by emergency C-section. Was it post pregnancy hormones? Many female athletes claim that after you go through childbirth your pain threshold increases and this helps performance – sure I didn’t feel a thing with the section! I hadn’t even had one proper contraction. So I have discounted that. Perhaps it’s the hormonal changes related to pregnancy and postpartum. But on investigating this there doesn’t seem to be too much good evidence to back this up. I did a lot of training right through my pregnancy, but not so much high intensity stuff and I had to completely go cold turkey on exercise for afew weeks after the section to allow my body to heal. I’m sure the training during my pregnancy kept a nice base fitness going for me but this wasn’t enough to fully explain my improved performance. Its part of it for sure – I believe the body is under a serious physiological stress as a consequence of all the pregnancy related changes, therefore and kind of training while in this state is probably akin to training at altitude. But more importantly there’s something else – being on maternity leave basically allows you to behave as a full time athlete! As a mom minding one baby, you get to hang out a lot. Resting those legs, allowing them to recover. The biggest stress in your day is trying to figure out where to go for coffee or what to have for dinner. So quality rest and lack of stress is a natural occurrence in your day. Secondly, you have plenty time to train. And I’m not just referring to when your hubby comes home in the eves and you fire the baby at him in a speedy handover and have cycled down the road before he knows what has hit him! A young baby sleeps a lot during the day. No matter how bad they are at sleeping anyone can get a good hour at least to do something. From two weeks post birth, my first priority when Tori went asleep was to jump up on my bike on the rollers (a form of stationary trainer) and grind out all sorts of bike related workouts. A yoga mat and a medicine ball was good for some core work after.

On hearing this Emma, a sporty friend said to me in exasperation “ I don’t know how you mange to get the time – every time I got the turbo and bike set up Molly is awake and crying again! Its military precision and focus I informed her.  You must prioritize the exercise session over everything else! Attention to detail must only be applied to exercise related paraphernalia. The house may be falling down around your ears, the dishwasher may not be emptied, god knows what that thing is living in the drain in the bath preventing the water going out ... Just put on those blinkers and get moving! Get up on your bike! Workout done hey presto.  There are unfortunate casualties to this approach of course. Just ask my poor husband!

World Masters Champion!

Exercise during pregnancy - a question of intensity..?

When I became pregnant I went on a mission to find some reasonable guidelines as to what I could and couldn’t do in terms of exercise and training. I didn’t know anything about exercise and pregnancy at this point but by enlarge what I did know wasn’t too encouraging. Stuff pregnant friends had been advised rang through my head “you better give up running just in case” one friend and passionate hill runner was told by her GP. “Easy swimming is fine” another assured me or “ Go for brisk walks every day instead of running, cycling etc..”  WHAT?? This was not what I wanted to hear! Brisk walking was not going to produce the levels of exercise-induced endorphins I was used to.

This kind of advice was all well and good for someone who wasn’t too pushed about physical activity, but to someone used to fairly moderate levels of exercise at high intensity it was not what I wanted to hear. I wondered what the hell all the elite athletes at the top end of the scale do? I was sure the likes of Paula Radcliff and Sonia O Sullivan didn’t stop training during their pregnancies. Surely they didn’t just swap running 100 miles a week for easy walks and gentle swimming. I thought I had heard somewhere that Paula in fact had run a marathon while 7 months pregnant in a pretty impressive time!

In my search for information I turned to the 1^st port of call for people looking for information on anything – the trusty internet. This turned out to be a bit of a mission. I suspected that the information must be out there somewhere and that most pregnant female athletes must be following some sorts of training programs, but any concrete reference to what they were doing remained elusive. Googling word combinations such as “athlete” and “pregnancy” and “exercise” and variations of the above yielded results with wildly different advice. Everyone who wrote anything seemed to have an opinion and I could not believe how polarized some of these views were. There seemed to be precious little in the way of advice that wasn’t ultra conservative.

Anyway at this point not finding what I wanted, I put the brakes on and took  a different tack. Being a scientist and also a veterinarian I decided the best approach would to conduct my own scientific literature review to look for good robust peer-reviewed journal articles from a range of physiology and medical journals for answers. The results produced slightly less conflicting views on exercise during pregnancy, but by en large I felt were still pretty cautious in terms of advice. The standard set of guidelines that are referred to in most publications were set by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) first in the 1980’s. These have been recently revised but still remain pretty conservative. ACOG recommend that pregnant women who are free of any complications engage in >  or = 30 minutes of moderate physical activity per day on most days of the week.

During my literature search I was astonished to find that in general there has actually been relatively very little in the way of research on the effects of exercise on pregnant women and their unborn babies in the last 20 or 30 years. I came across one recently written article that explained the reason for this - such research is highly contentious and even deemed in some cases to be unethical. Research to investigate the effects of high intensity exercise on the fetus appears to be particularly fraught with ethical complications, and therefore the number of studies investigating such could nearly be counted on one hand with very few participants in each study.  It is worth mentioning here that based on these limited studies there doesn’t appear to be any evidence to indicate that exercise at higher intensities produces any harmful effects on the fetus, which I found particularly interesting. Despite this lack of evidence, one of the most common suggestions when you seek advice about what level you can exercise at during pregnancy is to reduce the intensity! Really though this is not surprising -The precautionary principle is applied across the board when it comes to pregnancy. This as any women who has ever undergone a pregnancy will know is true, not just when it comes to exercise, everything from supplements to medicines to foods and drink, anything that has not been proved conclusively beyond reasonable doubt to be totally harmless – well you better not!! Just in case that is… No one is going to advice a pregnant woman otherwise for fear of the consequences, if there happen to be any. That’s why taking the approach of listening to your body is probably the best advice anyone can get when wondering what they should and shouldn’t do during their pregnancy: if it feels ok – go for it!

Feature in Fit Magazine

Nice feature this week in Fit Mag about me and Tori and the racing I have been doing on the track  - Check it out! Hope it will inspire afew moms to get back to their pre-pregnancy exercise regiemes or even better try something new!

National Champs with baby on board!

Hi I’m Susie, a 36 year first time mom to a lovely vibrant baby girl Tori, and just 12 weeks after the happy event getting ready to compete in the Irish National Track Championships this coming weekend. I’m feeling great and my life is back on track (pardon the pun) , and  though probably not quite in the form I am capable of just yet,  I have come back post-baby way faster than expected and am going better than ever on the track. Have even posted a few PBs in training so I’m pretty hopeful I will give a good account of myself this coming weekend.. Who says there is no life after a baby!

We live in Dublin and I’m currently on maternity leave and taking some respite from my job  running around the country  as a fish vet. More about that again. I am and have always been a pretty serious recreational athlete who thrives on exercise and the buzz and gerenal sense of well being I get from it.  Everything from running to triathlon to adventure racing, but the current obsession is track cycling. I wanted to write something for the last year about a subject dear to my heart  - I love exercise !  I do and have always done loads of it.  I love competition and would consider myself a committed recreational athlete  – and know there are many women out there  just like me. Women who compete for fun, but are serious about doing well and reaching their full potential for personal reward and fun.

Due to my circumstances I have become interested in is how to fuse this personality with pregnancy and motherhood, which I have strived to do this over the last year. Word got out that I trained all the way through my pregnancy and since the birth of Tori I have received many emails from pregnant women desperate for advice or reassurance. Most of these are like me, with a passion for sport, and represent all levels of ability. Many were told to stop exercising or cut down significantly on it because they were pregnant. They want to know what I did, how much I trained, ask me questions like did I stay on the bike all the way through, what I did in the gym etc. There is a serious lack of good information and advice out there for pregnant women who want to exercise. Note I specify “good”. There is endless not so useful information, and many willing to give advice. From hearsay and opinions of friends and family – which can sometimes be bizarre, to guarded conventional advice from doctors, physios, personal trainers and the likes, all probably afraid they will get sued if something were to go wrong with the pregnancy or during the post-partum period.  Where there is advice it is nearly always depressingly over conservative, especially for women used to high levels of physical activity. The same “one shoe fits all” guidelines are supplied to all those who ask. I very quickly realised the best strategy for me when deciding what to do was not to ask, and to go on a journey and find out what was best for myself and my baby, both during pregnancy and for that time post-birth. . My 'shoes' wouldn’t  fit or suit all either but I took my own path based on my own feeling and research I did, enabling me to make informed decisions about what to do. Despite my concerns pre baby I have found it is most definitely possible to maintain good fitness, and therefore sanity, during pregnancy and post-birth. Fingers crossed for the weekend with my new support team to cheer me on!