Trimester One- Summer 2017

Trimester One- Summer 2017

Five pee stops in yip just under 40mins, seriously!!! I guess at least I am deep in the forest, no one is around and I am not stuck out in the streets desperately trying to find a loo, but seriously even the dog is giving a look of utter disbelief and with her constant Pee-mail antics that’s saying something!

I am a Pilates Instructor. I have good Pelvic floor muscles. I seriously felt like I emptied out a full bladder just 5mins ago, how could my bladder feel ridiculously full again!

So this is what its like little one, I guess you have to grow and find some room somewhere but do you think you could just try not to sit so tightly above my bladder some days.  Could you just shift back to where you were yesterday and stay there? That worked pretty well for me…

Okay deep breaths enjoy the view. I remind myself to just take a moment and be thankful I am running at all, for the beautiful place in which I am able to run in, and for my ever patient, four legged training buddy who doesn’t seem to care whether it’s a shuffle day or a racing day. She is up for anything as long as it involves adventure.

Frustrations, fears, panic, anxiety, and pure amazement of the miracle that is happening inside me are amongst the hugely contrasting and complex emotions and feelings that seem to have made up the experience of been pregnant for me so far.

We say it was a surprise that we got pregnant and that is true, we didn’t expect it to happen so easily or so quickly. But to be honest I suspected something was different in my body right from a few days after conception and although I desperately tried to just ignore the signs and feelings and just carry on with training, thinking “no not yet I just need a few more months…a few more races”…each week the signs just kept adding up.

It started with a massive bout of intense completely random stomach cramping as I sat on the couch recovering from a long run session. Then the growing discomfort in my breasts, followed by the random nausea that didn’t follow the patterns of my normal food intolerances, and then the main indicator - the unexplained light headedness and dizziness at the top of the “BIG HILL” in the Hanuas in the midst of my 2&1/2 hr. run. I guess when you’re an athlete you are constantly checking in with your body and monitoring how it is feeling/responding and dealing with things, so its hard not to notice these changes.

 So when my period never showed up and neither did any of the normal premenstrual symptoms I was pretty darn sure even though I had never experienced it before that I was going to get a positive result on the pregnancy test.

I waited 3 days and when there were still no signs of it arriving I got the test from the store and told my Husband Marc matter of factly that I was taking the test and that he needed to be ready for it to be positive.

At that point I am not sure if I was more afraid of been pregnant or of not been pregnant and worrying if I ever could be. But I switched off to the feelings and just did the test. At first it didn’t seem like the second line was going to show and I handed the stick to Marc and said “sorry for the stress it looks like I was wrong.” As I washed my hands though I heard Marc’s voice saying “Ummmmm, wait a minute you may want to re check that … its showed up… the second line that is…”

So much has gone on since the day we found out and so much has changed… Literally…

I have put on 4 KG’s in 4 and ½ months something which I would never let happen mid summer in amongst some of our biggest training and racing blocks, and my once toned stomach has as they say “popped” out.  I had kind of breezed through the first month and a half training hard oblivious or more honestly ignoring what was going on inside of me, but then it hit, subtly at first and then full whammy - the morning sickness and the tiredness.

For the next 2 and ½ months I felt like I had toxic waste sitting bubbly away in my stomach, I just felt so ill and disgusting and so tired. Sure there were good patches but they were just a nice surprise, the norm became dealing with the constant urge to throw up and never been able too.

The hardest thing I found about the first trimester months was the huge conflicts and anxieties that you are dealing with and the fact that you can’t really tell or talk to anyone about it.  All the things I could rely on as an athlete in terms of healthy eating and training and who I am as a person and how much I value honesty and yet you are living with this massive secret to which you have only told a very small select group of need to know people. So when people ask how are you? How’s everything going? How’s training? What’s your next race? You have to carefully side step questions so as to make sure your answer is not a flat out lie. So instead of saying “I feel so disgusting, I want to throw up and I am so tired I just want to be curled up in bed because I am pregnant”. You have to smile and say doing good thanks, still planning my races for the year and yes training is going okay thanks.

You also have this conflict within you of the fact that no matter how much exercise you are able to do and how healthy you eat you are going to put weight on and that needs to be accepted as a healthy and necessary process, but while your not telling anyone and it’s the middle of our summer racing season and your training buddies are all super lean and fit and getting more so the closer there races get, you worry about people thinking you are just not training hard or getting old and lazy. The training world can be an awesome place but it can also be a place of harsh judgments and as a female athlete I am more then awear of this.

The other struggle was that you feel so sick and gross but you are been told by the health professionals that that is a great sign of everything been very healthy and progressing well… Feeling so sick but been told that your healthy just didn’t match up in my brain.

Weird cravings also caused massive conflicts… for example I am a clean eater and a lover of fresh veges and then suddenly one day I woke up and I couldn’t even stand the sight of lettuce or anything green. All I wanted and all I craved were chips, olives, meat and salt. So I had the huge controversy of wanting to be healthy and eat healthy but as much as I tried I just couldn’t even look at the green stuff without feeling violently ill.

Its summer and the weather for the most part is awesome and it’s the time of the year I am normally clocking up as big a cycling miles as I can. Spending hours each day outside soaking up the sun and trucking up the miles and the training hours. But not this summer, this summer I have very little or no interest in riding my bike. All I want to do is run and swim, which is funny. Running I can understand it has always been my first love and I have the best 4 legged training buddy ever, but swimming… swimming was always the thing I struggled the most to get done and here I am choosing to swim over cycling…. Go figure I guess for me that is as weird as feeling so adversely towards green vegetables.

Take into account all this conflict and there is also the reality that although I have been super lucky to have been able to continue to run, swim and do my Pilates sessions and stay very active despite feeling so sick in the first few months, that the training hours that I have been doing are hugely reduced from what I am used to and there is a huge transition from racing as a professional athlete to been pregnant and exercising to stay fit and healthy.

I thankfully was able to work with my coach right through till 14 weeks and for me that made such a massive difference as my coach has become one of best friends despite the fact he lives in Boulder, and to have had to loose that support as well as deal with everything else just would have been too much at once.

Dealing with all this internal conflict and feeling so sick also indelibly brought about quite a bit of anxiety and for me this anxiety as it got closer and closer to the time that we would need to start telling people that I was pregnant built up to a level that I found that I needed to get some support to deal with it. I am not sure if it was the loss of control of my body and the internal changes and conflicts or if it was the fact that once we started telling people it was all becoming very real.

You always hear people talk about that glow that people get when they are pregnant and how awesome and exciting it is, and how bonded you feel to this wee thing growing inside of you and how special it is. Well I kept waiting amongst all the morning sickness and tiredness for this glow to appear and this overwhelming feeling of bondedness and it just wasn’t there… it just wasn’t coming… the only thing I felt that resembled any kind of impending motherhood was that I felt furiously protective of this baby inside of me and who it will become and terrified of anyone hurting it…even though I also felt at times that I felt so disgusting and so anxious about the whole thing that I just wanted to get it out, right there, right then.

I keep reminding myself that I am hugely thankful and that I definitely am. After been an athlete for so many years I know what a huge gift it is to be pregnant. I keep reminding myself about the amazing process of how the baby is growing, day-by-day and week-by-week. But I am also a thinker and a problem solver and used to been able to control if not the immediate world around me at least my body, and so I have to accept that this is a very different time for me and try not to judge myself for not naturally fitting into the role of been pregnant.

Thankfully at 19 weeks now I am feeling so much healthier and more energetic and able to deal with the emotions and fears of the last few months, with a more relaxed and accepting view of where things are at. But wow it really has been and will continue to be quite a process of adaptation… emotionally and physically.

I realize that this is a somewhat raw and I guess different side of pregnancy and it has taken quite a bit of courage to choose to be so open about what I have experienced. As so many athletes are pregnant this year and having babies and from the social media posts it sounds like they absolutely love it and are so excited about it which is awesome. But I also believe that there maybe one or two that like me have waited for that excitement and glow to kick in and it hasn’t yet and who may have really struggled with the changes. I want them to know that they are not alone in those feelings and struggles and that even though it seems hard not to, to try not to judge themselves for finding it challenging.

The core of where I am at is that I am hugely thankful. It is just that we are all different and as I am finding out even something as beautiful and miraculous as been pregnant can also be a very challenging and confronting time.

Out on a long trail run at about 8 weeks Pregnant with Hollie