A bump in the road

I was a top age-group triathlete and a sub-three-hour marathon runner, spent a year as an officer cadet at Sandhurst in the 1990s and had been on operational tours. Pregnancy was going to be a breeze, right?

Wrong. I had never been in less control of my body and never been more aware of it.

I had a strict lesson in patience, achieved through eight weeks of bed rest in my first trimester. My goal of being a super-fit triathlon mum, ready to race as soon as I'd popped out Junior, went out the window. Instead, I decided to focus on gaining back some of my aerobic fitness, working on my core and basic strength, and concentrating on my swimming technique.

I spent hours on the internet and scouring books, researching various types of training during pregnancy. There is a wealth of information out there, but most of it is blogs and personal experience. Generally, the advice from doctors is that you can continue what you were doing before, but that probably doesn't apply to someone whose training schedule averaged 17 hours a week on top of a full-time job. So I needed to modify my training.

After two months of bed rest, once given the all clear, I had to go back to basics. Pregnancy makes your muscles more flexible, your ligaments stretch and many of your systems (digestive, for one) slow down, all due to a hormone called relaxin. This can put you at risk of injury, especially back (sciatica) and pelvic injuries, and your core stability decreases.

Considering I have a history of pelvic instability and hamstring injuries during running, I decided that it was pointless to even try and run while pregnant. I could regain aerobic fitness doing other things. My focus was on maintaining core strength and stability, and trying to prevent postural problems and back pain in later pregnancy, while giving me a robust platform to build on post-pregnancy.