I’ve just come out of the running season – for me it never extends into the raining winter months because running in gloves, a beanie and three layers of clothing just totally destroys any roadie cred … Capetonians are hardcore judgemental about these things.

When I found out I was pregnant, I was training for the Two Oceans half marathon … yes, a big yawn for everyone who has heard me harping on about that one before … so I was already four or five months pregnant when I stopped running and my biggest stress was how I was ever going to be able to take it up again after the birth. Giving birth in September helped a lot … not that we can plan these things, if any … because I expressed milk first thing in the morning and headed out for my run before hubby had to head off for work. But as the months went by, the best buy ever was the Jeep 3-wheeler which is light, comfy and even has a CD player attachment to calm down any hysterical baby on hair-raising off-road trails.

So I eventually got to take baby out in the pram and there is no denying how damn tough that was – the arms are seriously under-rated running appendages and not having the use of them when struggling to get fit again post-pregnancy was excruciating. It, therefore, wasn’t long before I had recruited the husband and the dog to join the child and me on these post-pregnancy training runs. The decision was who got to pull the dog and who got to push the pram … no surprises there then that the pram was swiftly handed off to the husband. I thought I got the last laugh but it didn’t take long to realise that pulling a very sniffy 50kg dog along a pet-infested Promenade was possibly the least clever of my manipulations.

Having said that though, it turned out sniffy provided good enough strength training to improve on my half marathon time. Out of desperation to race last season and not having anyone to look after my child, I eventually screamed into a pillow, loaded the Jeep into my car and managed a couple of very speedy short races … the Jeep provided me with a very efficient battering ram – I ran down several fellow racers and earned my child his very first silver and bronze medals.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 23rd, 2009 at 8:14 am and is filed under bhalababy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.