Training through pregnancy to be marathon’s fastest mom

Her experience is a rare one, says James Pivarnik, director of the Human Energy Research Laboratory at Michigan State University and one of the few scientists who have studied athletes during and after pregnancy.

“As far as I know, no one has ever done what she’s done,” Pivarnik said.

Here is an internationally competitive athlete, at the pinnacle of her career, who continued training during pregnancy at a level most runners who are not pregnant would find daunting. For the first five months, she ran twice a day, 75 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening. Then she cut back, running an hour in the morning and riding a stationary bike at night. She even did training regimens like hill repeats. She was closely monitored by her doctor. “People were looking at her as if she was crazy,” says Gary Lough, Radcliffe’s husband and manager.

Like the other elite women marathoners who will be competing tomorrow, Radcliffe, 33, has talent, drive and ambition. She set the world record at the 2003 London Marathon with a time of 2 hours 15 minutes 25 seconds, a pace of 5:10 a mile over the 26.2-mile course. Her full-time job is running—she says she was running 140 miles a week at her peak in preparation for the New York race.

But the great unknown is whether anything is different with Radcliffe now: will she be better, worse or the same after pregnancy, childbirth?

The answer, medical researchers say, is impossible to know. No rigorous studies have explored whether pregnancy improves or hinders the performances of elite athletes. Nor have studies asked whether exercising during pregnancy affects athletic performance later, and, if so, how much exercise. Researchers and pregnant women are not inclined to conduct or participate in studies in which women exercise at various intensity levels and possibly endanger babies. All that is left are case histories and myths.

For example, the Ingrid Kristiansen myth. Kristiansen won the Houston Marathon in 1983, five months after she gave birth to her first child. That led to hypotheses that pregnancy is good for elite runners because of the physiologic changes that mimic blood doping.

“If your question is, would a woman’s enhanced blood volume from pregnancy possibly help her in a race performed two to three weeks postpartum, I would say yes,” Pivarnik said. But that is not the situation for Radcliffe.

Radcliffe said that when she became pregnant she wondered how it would affect her performance. Her friends told her she would get much better, and she believed it. She also did not want to stop running while she was pregnant.

“Running is what makes her happy,” Lough said.