“How hard do you think it's okay to push it?” I asked my husband at the starting line of a one-mile road race. Sam and I were track runners in our Cornell University days, and still loved to pin on a number. On that day, however, there was a new factor at play: I was 12 weeks along with our first child.
"The baby is a parasite,” Sam, halfway through his medical degree, concluded. “It's going to take what it needs." Bolstered by a masters in exercise science, he reasoned that, besides the fact that women have been carrying fetuses since the beginning of time with far harder lives than ours, fetuses have a different type of protein in their red blood cells. Turns out it's even better than ours at binding oxygen.
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Sales & Deals the wrong thing, whatever that meant. But the first surprise of being pregnant was just how ordinary I still felt, even as my body—and my life—was on the brink of change. Together, Sam and I decided that it would be fine for me to run the mile-long course a notch below a typical race effort. Baby is a parasite, after all.
I ran 5:29. Nowhere near my post-collegiate PR of 4:43, but hardly jogging. A few weeks later I ran another mile race on the track—with spikes, just to see—notching a 5:15. The efforts were tough, but didn't leave me dead on the track. And I was pleasantly surprised with the times, though I mostly kept them to myself.
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for you to do that?" This was second only to: "When are you going to stop?"
The wide waistband sits comfortably through every trimester, I put racing on hold, but continued to run through my second, then third, trimester, gradually slowing as I got bigger. I noticed there was a question I received repeatedly from friends, family, the guy at my favorite coffee shop: "Is it okay for you to do that?" This was second only to: "When are you going to stop?"
These questions seem innocent at face value. But to a woman whose Google search history was already a litany of don'ts (“pregnant” plus “lunch meat,” “sushi,” “hot tubs”), it felt like judgment. For better or worse, we fixate on potential dangers during pregnancy that could lead to tragic consequences, no matter how unlikely. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciated the hiatus from cat box duty. But asking a pregnant woman if it's okay for her to run, or insinuating that of course she’ll stop running, frames a healthy activity as risky behavior. The common refrain: Better safe than sorry.
Is it actually "safer" to do less, or nothing, though? The latest guideline from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) is that pregnancy is as good a time as any to get active, even if you aren’t already. That’s thanks to the incredible health benefits of physical activity, the biggest of which have little to do with pregnancy, says Linda Szymanski, MD, PhD, an exercise physiologist turned obstetrician at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
Yes, most studies conclude that regular activity reduces the risk of gestational diabetes and gaining too much weight, and it may lower the risk of preeclampsia, or high blood pressure, during pregnancy. But the most compelling benefit is simply that exercise helps pregnant women stay healthy the same way it does for anyone. Case in point: When researchers at the Vermont College of Medicine in Burlington checked back with dozens of women 20 years after their pregnancies, those who had exercised throughout gestation were more likely to still be active. And that Races & Places.
The real quandary is how much exercise—and how hard—is "safe?" In 2014, the internet went wild when Alysia Montaño competed in the 800 meters at the USATF National Championships, running 2:32 at 8 months pregnant. The naysayers came back out when she raced again in 2017, running a 2:21 while 5 months pregnant with her second child.
Was she selfish for risking her baby's health? Was she risking her baby’s health? The online trolls certainly thought so. In the end, Montaño had the final word: She gave birth to two healthy babies.
"It's like any habit," Montaño explains. "You wake up in the morning and go for a run. There was no reason for me to change that habit. I like running hard. I like breathing hard. I like being challenged."
When Olympic-gold-medal triathlete Gwen Jorgensen was pregnant, she cut her three workouts a day to one during her first trimester, then bumped that back up to two-a-days during her second trimester. She still hit a 7-minute-mile pace at times (and other times struggled to maintain a 9-minute mile). "I still feel my best when running," she wrote at 22 weeks.
She also felt like she was self-regulating. "My body had its own governing mechanism when I was pregnant," Jorgensen says. "I allowed myself to push hard and get my heart rate up, but I could not go faster than a certain speed."
That strengthened trust in body cues was also true for middle-distance runner and three-time Olympian Shannon Rowbury. "Something in your brain switches,” she says. “There's been a certain level of confidence that I know what's best and I can trust these instincts that exist more for me than they did before.” Rowbury did tempo and fartlek runs based on feel during the first half of her pregnancy, and switched to cross training later to prevent overstressing her bones and joints as she got heavier.
Certainly, pro athletes are bolder than most women. But even the most dedicated runners tend to approach pregnancy with an abundance of caution amid the mess of rules and warnings spouted by doctors and well-meaning friends and strangers.
One oft-repeated guideline is to never allow your heart rate to spike above 140 beats per minute during exercise. But the ACOG abandoned that notion back in 1994. "It was an arbitrary number based on the 80 percent of max heart rate prescribed to non-pregnant women in their reproductive age," says Raul Artal, MD, an author of those early guidelines. The advice wasn’t based in any evidence and was discarded for lack of merit.
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For more up-to-date medical professionals, staying below 90 percent max heart rate is sometimes given as the point of caution. Which doesn’t sound unreasonable. After all, above 90 percent max is pretty much going all-out, right? Yet, during my third pregnancy earlier this year, I occasionally topped 90 percent jogging slowly uphill.
"Target heart rates don’t work," Syzmanski explained to me plainly, while also assuring me that what I experienced was normal. One reason is that the common estimate of 220 minus your age is based on population studies that don't take into account individual differences or changes during pregnancy, she says.
The constant Syzmanski could give me: Running during an otherwise healthy pregnancy—at any intensity—has never been tied to poor outcomes that she's aware of for either mother or baby, even anecdotally.
New Balance 5 Inch Printed Impact Short pregnancy—and while looking at my two healthy and thriving children, who managed to survive sharing blood and oxygen with me through nine months of running—I realized something. I worried more about being criticized for running than about any real chance I'd cause harm to my baby. I knew that I trusted my ability to listen to my body, and that I didn't need to constantly check my heart rate to know when to slow down. When running felt too hard, I pulled back. When running far didn’t feel as good, I naturally did less. My true worry was what others might say. And so, for the most part, I kept my pregnancy running to myself.
And it's not just me. As confident as Alysia Montaño looked racing eight months pregnant, she confided in me that she dropped out of a race early in her second pregnancy. Not because she was concerned that running would cause harm, but because she feared if she happened to miscarry later by random chance, the world would throw it in her face.
"Part of my running at nationals was just owning the judgment, of freeing the fear," Montaño says. "I hoped that I could give that breath of relief for another pregnant woman who just wants to exercise and everyone is staring at her."
Like Montaño, I want to own my accomplishments during pregnancy and my ability to push hard while also being mindful of what my body needed. I know that, if I don’t—if we don’t—we’ll only continue to be shadowed by the mentality that we must treat ourselves as delicate flowers during pregnancy. So here goes.
In 2012, I struck mom-to-be gold: My running partner was pregnant alongside me. For nine months we logged miles, fartleks, and track intervals. We sprinted (relatively speaking) on the track when I was 41 weeks pregnant. One week later, I delivered an 8-pound, 2-ounce son.
Pregnant again in 2015, I moved to a new city and kept up with occasional track workouts, which I'd learned often felt better than my increasingly slow-and-steady pace. My husband, now an M.D., was still in full support. I wrapped up that pregnancy running three snowy November miles the day I went into labor, and gave birth to my daughter, 8 pounds, 14 ounces.
And in 2018, I went for a final lap of running through pregnancy. There were days I felt great. There were days, and weeks, when it was the last thing I wanted to do. Sometimes I pushed myself out the door. Other times, I bagged it. I ran as fast—or as slow—as I felt like. And along the way I did some races I'm pretty darn proud of.
At 20 weeks, I ran sub-20 minutes in a local 5k. At 30 weeks, I ran a 20:43. And what feels like the biggest accomplishment: Just shy of 39 weeks, I ran my new hometown's summer festival road mile in 6:07. Five days later I delivered a 9-pound, 5-ounce chunk of a son.
That was my pregnant-running experience, but just like any running accomplishment, pregnant-running feats come in all stripes—and speeds. As Montaño put it: "I want to be an advocate for women in their pregnancy however they need to do it. If you feel like absolute butt and are just going for the walk, I want to be like, 'Yes! Let's go for that walk.' If you want to keep running, I want to be like, 'Yes, let's keep running.' I want them to be able to own their health and their body without worrying about what everybody else is saying."
I couldn't agree more.
When we support each other, when we feel proud—not just of our ability to be active, but of our ability to listen to our bodies and respect what they have to say—that is how we become more empowered as pregnant women and athletes, and how we set the tone for future mother-runners.
Want to join me in changing the narrative around pregnancy and exercise? Share your proud and pregnant moments—big, small, fast, or slow—with Runner's World here. We'll publish our favorite stories in the coming months. We can't wait to hear what you've achieved.
