Have you recently seen a sweating woman with a watermelon stuffed up her fleece, wheezing her way behind a bush mere metres from a towpath to have a pee? If you have, please say hello next time – for that woman, I suspect, is me.
At seven months pregnant, I am still running three times a week. By “running”, I mean hurling my lumpen body through various woods, fields and city parks at a speed slower than walking, while wearing a pair of gently disintegrating trainers. Do I have to stop every 10 minutes to empty my bladder? You bet I do. Am I running half my usual distance in twice the usual time? Yes, ma’am.
Like so many pregnant people, I am facing an array of physical challenges right now. But rather than take anti-emetics or pain relief, I have been advised mainly to keep active. Regular physical exercise, after all, can be incredibly effective at reducing blood pressure, regulating hormones and improving mood. According to the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, “women who exercise during pregnancy have a 40% reduction in the risk of developing gestational diabetes, gestational hypertension and pre-eclampsia”.
During my booking-in appointment, the wise and wonderful midwife told me in no uncertain terms that running is brilliant for pregnancy. A consultant obstetrician on whom several women I know have a thumping great crush told me to keep swimming. Joe Wicks has a set of pregnancy workouts that my son likes to do with me before school.
But you know what is so great about exercise when you feel as if you have swallowed an air fryer whole? You are bad at it. You only get worse. And so, as an act of enforced humility, it’s hard to beat. Being pregnant makes you heavier, slower, bigger, more wheezy, less continent and more conspicuous. It forces you to stop thinking about exercise as a tool of vanity and status and instead start treating your body like the fleshy instrument of survival it really is. It makes you bad at something and makes you carry on doing it. Like parenting, I suppose.
So this isn’t harder, better, faster, stronger. It’s slower, wetter, louder, shorter. And that is the point.
• Nell Frizzell is the author of Holding the Baby: Milk, Sweat and Tears from the Frontline of Motherhood
