At this point in history, we should expect women runners to fully "recover" from giving birth
Doubts about women's ability to return to full form after becoming mothers are grounded in the same basic misapprehensions as "If women run marathons, their wombs might fall out"
In January 1983, Norwegian distance runner Ingrid Kristiansen won the Houston Marathon in 2:33:27. She didn’t know that she was two months pregnant at the time.
Kristiansen gave birth to a son late that summer. The next year, she set a world record in the 5,000 meters; in 1985, she set records in the marathon and the 10,000 meters, though this stretch was marred by losses to Joan Benoit in the 1984 Olympic Marathon and the 1985 Chicago Marathon. Then, in 1986, she smashed her own 5,000-meter and 10,000-meter world records by about 21 and 46 seconds respectively.
In early 1990, Scottish runner Liz McColgan, who had taken silver in the 10,000 meters in the 1988 Seoul Olympics, learned that she was pregnant. As soon as her sponsor, Nike, learned of the news, it dumped her.
That November, she gave birth to a daughter (perhaps you’ve heard of her). In March, just four months later, she placed third at the World Cross Country Championships. In June, McColgan became the second-fastest 10,000-meter runner ever and the third under 31:00 by running 30:57.07, the time ranking her behind Kristiansen’s 30:13 and just ahead of Olga Bondarenko, the tiny Soviet runner who’d defeated her in Seoul and who held a best of 30:59.
The fact that Kristiansen had one of the best careers of any woman runner in history after—or really, “despite”—having a baby has been circulating ever since. McColgan’s story seems to have gained less attention, although her speaking up last year about her Nike experience when the company was already under fire for its current maternal-leave policy (not quite “Maternity? Leave!” but also not far from it) helped gain the wholeness of her career arc some traction, as has the rightful prominence of her daughter Eilish.
Throughout the 1990s and since, East African women have gained dominance over the sport of distance running. A lot of them are mothers. In 2017, 35-year-old Mary Keitany of Kenya set a world record for a women’s-only marathon in London in 2:07:01, then posed with her son and daughter afterward. In 2020, Kenyan Brigid Kosgei ran a shocking 2:14:04 on the streets of Chicago, eight years after she dropped out of high school and gave birth to twins.
Faith Kipyegon of Kenya ran 4:16.71 for the mile, 8:23 for 3,000 meters and 14:31 for 5,000 meters in 2014 and 2015, when she was 20 and 21; in 2018 she gave birth to a boy, and after resuming training in 2019 after twelve idle months that saw her “balloon” to 20 percent above her racing weight, she’s been close to unbeatable over shorter distances, running the second-fastest 1,500 meters of all time last month (3:50.37, worth roughly a 4:08.8 mile) after setting an 800-meter PR of 1:57.68 in 2020. Kenyan-born American Aliphine Tuliamuk sacrificed any chance she had of running well in the 2021 Olympic Marathon by cutting her pregnancy a little too close, but at 33 she’s now running as well as she ever has.
A dozen more names of elite athletes who threw down performances in motherhood superior to what their nulliparous selves had accomplished could be added to this list with minimal research. Yet the narrative that having a baby poses a serious risk to women’s athletic livelihood persists. While the understandable reasons for this apprehension are easy to spot, treating childbirth as a process laden with persistent micro-pathologies seems to be a phenomenon limited to Western countries.
David Roche, a windbag and intellectual coward who regularly describes himself as a fan of scientific research and researchers, recently took a stab at this topic in another untrammeled abuse of his keyboard for Trail Runner. To the science-literate, Roche’s advertorial-like writing about research and even basic physiology reflects confusion and conspicuous posturing masquerading unconvincingly as breezy academic acumen. But this piece is even more of a bias-fraught, jabbering mess than his usual “analyses.”
Anyone at all familiar with research methodology can immediately see in the above image several serious problems with the project itself as well as with Roche’s characterization of it as “groundbreaking.” You don’t even have to know what the topic is to understand the study’s limitations. But if you read the piece itself, you learn that Roche has again chosen one of his own clients to write about (another is the absentee editor of Trail Runner, Zoe Rom), and the last five paragraphs are entirely about his five-months-pregnant wife, whom Roche refers to as a world-class athlete. But I’ll save a full review of the piece for later (I’ve been operating this place like a line of credit lately; how many incomplete “series” have I sired now?) because I prefer to do some rooting around in my own ass first.
If anything, the null hypothesis based on decades of observation and individual elite (and other) data points should be that giving uncomplicated birth per se should have no significant adverse consequences on a woman's running. In other words, we* should be surprised by the suggestion that pregnancy is typically deleterious to subsequent athletic performance, not instead happily surprised when the opposite seems true.
One wrinkle among many is not knowing who gets the complicated pregnancies. But my thinking is that women on average “come back from” pregnancy in style and that this is well established at various ages and levels of performance. You would expect this of a mammal; It looks dramatic in the extreme to see someone’s parts so severely stretched during delivery (without the influence of hormones on connective tissue, this would all be lethal) and dreadful things can and do happen. But it would represent a serious evolutionary boo-boo if the act of giving birth normally led to measurable permanent losses of physical strength and endurance. Women come back from genuine diseases and major surgeries to do great things, so pregnancy—which only looks like and creates a certain amount pathology, such as gestational diabetes, but actually isn’t a disease—shouldn't incur a permanent hit.
On its own, this is just one more theory in which the application of "common sense” may not be so sensible. I’m leaving out important issues related to the unique challenges of human childbirth—for example, increasingly large infant-heads passing through a birth canal made progressively narrower over tens of thousands of years of human primates walking progressively more upright and having to keep their eyes forward. But in addition to leaving me with no choice but to be an optimist, this idea seems borne out in reality.
One “final” thought: It would be easier to put pressure on shoe companies sponsors to not penalize expecting mother-athletes if the running community simply stipulated that world-class runners often return to full or even unprecedented form after having a child. With the continual framing of the motherhood-versus-performance question as unsettled, sponsors hold an advantage: If having a baby doesn’t hurt running performance, why does everyone keep crowing about the “exceptions” who are merely fulfilling statistical as well as anecdotal prophecy?