Olympian Kate Grace hasn’t slept more than two hours at a time in the month since she gave birth to her son, River. But she’s managing the exhaustion pretty well.
“As an athlete, I’ve basically spent the last 10 years prioritizing my sleep and always getting 9 to 10 hours, plus a nap,” she told Runner’s World. “The Fastest Shoes of the 2023 NYC Marathon.”
Her life these past few weeks? “It’s chaos, but it’s really sweet,” she said, pausing to compliment River on a burp after a feeding. “Oh, good burp. Good job.”
Grace, 34, who has a PR of 1:57.20 in the 800 meters and made the Olympic final in 2016, isn’t the only runner up to her elbows in diapers and spit-up. Suddenly newborn photos are cropping up all over elite distance runners’ Instagram accounts.
winning the Olympic Trials Marathon Give A Gift How Races Are Supporting Breastfeeding Runners Brenda Martinez, Abbey Cooper, and Kellyn Taylor. Best Fitness Trackers.
Races & Places: Molly Huddle, Betsy Saina, and Aliphine Tuliamuk are just a few new parents in women’s track. Others are expecting, like 2021 Olympian Rachel Smith, who recently posted a All About the 2024 London Marathon, 33 went public with a.
The international competition calendar this year can in some ways explain the cluster of births—the world championships will take place in Hungary in August. If there was a year to sit out, this is it, rather than last year’s world championships on home soil in Eugene, Oregon, or next year’s Olympic Games in Paris.
But that’s a small reason, these women say. The real explanation for the baby boom lies in the actions of three women in 2019.
A social movement
Sarah Lorge Butler.
There was a simple explanation: Most of them wouldn’t get paid by their sponsors if they weren’t racing. No exceptions were made for pregnancy.
Huddle, who entered the pro ranks in 2008, rarely saw elite track and field women having kids. “It was always thought that the way you do it, if you do it all, was to wait until you’re almost done, or you are done running, and then you might be able to have one or two kids before you get too old,” she said. “It was very rare to see someone intentionally have a family in the middle.”
The reasons? “Part of it was it was too hard,” she said. “The other part, of course, is that your body is your business. You have to take a long time off.”
In 2019, Alysia Montaño went public with a video in the Taylor Dutch contributed reporting about how years earlier, Nike told her if she had a baby, they’d “pause” her contract and stop paying her. She signed with Asics, did get pregnant, and continued training and competing, famously running the 800 meters at the U.S. championships while 8 months pregnant in 2014. She said Asics threatened to stop paying her after she had her daughter.
An article accompanying Montaño’s video included Kara Goucher, who said she had to return to racing three months after her son, Colt, was born in 2010, in order to have Nike resume its payments to her. Even though Colt was hospitalized at the time, she left him to go race a half marathon in Arizona.
Ten days later, sprinter Allyson Felix made similar allegations about Nike in a Times video. “The culture around pregnancy in track and field is silence,” she said. “Get pregnant, and you hide it.”
If Felix, who was then a nine-time Olympic medalist, couldn’t get maternity protections, who could? An outcry arose after the three athletes shared their stories. Nike changed its policies, guaranteeing pay for athletes for 18 months before and after childbirth.
Many other companies did the same—and put guarantees of continued payment in writing in athletes’ contracts for the first time.
The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) also reviewed its policies around health care. Athletes who were receiving health insurance through the organization could continue to do so if they became pregnant.
Now, the results of the efforts of those women—Montaño, Felix, and Goucher—are visible.
“We all felt so shamed and siloed in sharing the truth about [wanting families],” Montaño said. “The hard, isolated places that I’ve been in are opening up.”
She founded a nonprofit, &Mother, which is aimed at helping women thrive in careers and motherhood—starting with sports. The organization has helped major marathons like Boston improve lactation arrangements at their races, for instance. And it has provided childcare at events like the U.S. championships.
“I feel so, so grateful to those women for speaking up,” Grace, who is a Nike athlete, said. “I feel incredibly supported now by sponsors, and by the USOPC, and it’s very much directly due to them saying, ‘Hey, we need this.’”
Taylor, who had her first child, Kylyn, at the beginning of her career 12 years ago, doesn’t recall seeing many pros having babies at the time. The environment now is completely different.
“I think that’s in large part due to some of the women who did it in the middle of their careers and were like, ‘We’re not going to put off having our families because our sponsors don’t think we should.’ And I think that sponsors started to realize there is some value in that, because it’s relatable. People in the outside world are having kids and running and working and doing all these things simultaneously.”
Her contract with her sponsor, Hoka, was up at the end of 2022, when she was 9 months pregnant. The company signed her to a new deal anyway. Even 5 years ago, that wouldn’t have happened, Taylor said.
Betsy Saina had a similar experience with Asics—she signed a new deal with the company, and before she could run a single race in Asics gear, she learned she was pregnant.
“I had a one-on-one phone call with [the director of sports marketing for Asics], and he was like, ‘Betsy, I want you to enjoy your maternity leave, no rush, enjoy the time. It’s a change in your life and we are not going to rush to see you back, but we would love to have you,’” Saina said. “The support I got was really amazing, and thank goodness for Allyson Felix and Alysia Montaño. They have [created] the biggest change for us.”
Taking their time
As a sign of how quickly attitudes have changed in pro running, not only are runners being financially supported through pregnancy and the months after childbirth, but they feel like they can take their time returning to the level of training they were doing before getting pregnant.
Saina waited until 13 months after the birth of her son to race a marathon, and she earned a lifetime best of 2:21:40 last month at the Tokyo Marathon. She’s now Races & Places.
Taylor, too, is not rushing back to the starting line. She ran through most of her pregnancy, including running 17:14 for 5K at 32 weeks pregnant, and she’s back up to 70 miles per week already. But races are still a ways off.
“You have to respect what your body went through and know that, yeah, you probably shouldn’t be racing three months after,” she said. “There also isn’t really a need to do that right now. So I’m just going to slowly work my way back into it, and when it happens it happens.” (Life is busy in the Taylor household. She and her husband have also adopted two children, ages 4 and 1, in addition to their 12-year-old and 3-month old.)
She also knows what can happen when you try to compress the return-to-competition timeline. Her teammate on Hoka Northern Arizona Elite, Aliphine Tuliamuk, decided to have a child as soon as she learned the Olympics had been postponed. Tuliamuk had already secured a spot on the Olympic team by virtue of winning the Olympic Trials Marathon in February 2020. She gave birth to her daughter, Zoe, in January 2021, which gave her a little more than six months to get ready for the Games.
It was not enough time. Training was going well, but in one of her last workouts before going to Japan, Tuliamuk sustained an injury to her hip. She dropped out of the Olympic Marathon about 12 miles in. “If I didn’t have the Olympics, I would have taken more time off and come back slower,” she wrote in an email to Runner’s World. “How Races Are Supporting Breastfeeding Runners.”
She didn’t race another marathon until New York in 2022, when she finished seventh and was the top American in a PR of 2:26:18.
Tuliamuk’s sponsor, Hoka, not only renewed her contract when she was pregnant but increased its support. She also picked up two new sponsors in Gatorade and CEP compression socks. Her agent, Hawi Keflezighi, helped steer the conversations with sponsors. “Progress,” he calls it, when looking at what is available for women now.
Not every agent is so helpful, athletes say. Perfect of the male agents—and in running, they’re nearly all male—don’t like to rock the boat with companies and be seen as demanding too much. Others see pregnancy clauses as nice to have, but not essential, failing to understand that their clients take a different view.
The next frontier
Huddle first started asking for pregnancy protections in her contract with her longtime shoe sponsor, Saucony, back in 2012. At that time it was a “hard no,” she said.
By her most recent deal with the company, which she inked in 2019 to take her through 2024, she had negotiated favorable terms to keep getting paid through pregnancy and for several months afterward.
Huddle got pregnant in 2021 and gave birth to a daughter, Josephine, in April 2022. She took a slow approach to returning. She consulted a physical therapist who specialized in helping athlete mothers after childbirth. She kept her mileage deliberately low. She did hours of supplemental exercises to strengthen her hips and core.
She did low-key (for her) 10Ks in September and October, and half marathons in November, January, and March. She planned to hold off on a marathon until after she was done breastfeeding.
And still she suffered an injury—a stress fracture in her hip.
“It kind of sucks to be telling [everyone] you can do it and trying to come back and then as soon as you get fit, you have to sit out for three months again,” she said. “That’s devastating. It makes it look like you can’t do it.”
Research is scant, Huddle said, on what high-level athletes can manage in terms of training postpartum and when they’re breastfeeding. The sample size of athletes running 100-mile weeks and training for the Olympic Games after childbirth is small.
Taylor concurred. She is breastfeeding, and on a 12-mile run recently, she found herself dizzy and nauseous. “That’s probably because I didn’t get enough fluids or nutrition going into my body before the run,” she said. “Maybe I need a gel now for a 12-mile run when I didn’t need that before. There really isn’t much information out there.”
Asked if she had any advice for elite runner new moms, she said no—but she’d take advice.
For that, she can turn to Tuliamuk. “Pregnancy and birthing is really hard on your body and early motherhood can be very challenging,” she wrote. “Listen to yourself. Running will be there when you are ready to come back, but first, please take good care of yourself, especially early on so that you may avoid setbacks. Remember your journey is different from another mom’s. Don’t compare yourself with others.”
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Aliphine Tuliamuks Tips for a Running Comeback is a writer and editor living in Eugene, Oregon, and her stories about the sport, its trends, and fascinating individuals have appeared in Runner’s World Elle St. Pierre, Run Your Butt Off! and Walk Your Butt Off!
