Staying active while pregnant?

Anyone who knows me or has followed my blog for any thing of time knows that I am a recreational runner. I ran 2 half marathons and a 10K this past year, and I had started to train for the Blue Ridge Relay. Now that I am pregnant, things are a lot different. Up until I was about 5 or 6 weeks pregnant, I kept running and doing strength training, although my runs were all 3-5 miles and easy. However, once the nausea set in, I took a break from running. This was for a couple reasons. Firstly, I usually go running in the morning, but this was the time of day where I felt the most nauseous, and running kind of made me feel worse. I couldn't really go during the middle of the day because it was just way to hot outside. Therefore, I tried going to noon spin class at school, and I enjoyed that. Unfortunately, my school schedule over the past few week has been busy, and I my nausea isn't always just a morning occurrence, so my exercise has become very sporadic. However, I did go for a 3 mile run on Friday morning, the first in at least a month. At the beginning, I was thinking, wow this is really nice. But after a couple miles, I was thinking, okay I'm ready to be done with this for the day!

While women who were active before pregnancy can usually continue throughout pregnancy, some modifications do need to me made. First of all, no more high-intensity cardio workouts. A good guideline is to keep it between "light" and "somewhat hard" (an 11-13 on the Borg RPE scale for those exercise physiologists out there). If you can talk while you're working out, then you're at a good intensity. Secondly, you don't want to get overheated because then you're shunting blood towards your skin to cool off, which means less blood is available to go to your inner organs, including uterus and baby. Thirdly, I think you just really have to listen to your body. If you are feeling good, then you should definitely try to get out there and move. Going for a walk, hopping on the exercise bike, swimming, lifting weights, yoga, whatever you feel like doing. However, if you're feeling really tired and gross, then I would say definitely take a rest-this is not the time to "push through the pain" so to speak (that will come soon enough during labor and delivery!).

So as for me, I am going to try to stay as active as I can. I would like to continue to go for 3 or 4 mile runs a few times a week and lift weights. I'm nearing the end of the first trimester, so I think I'll be feeling a lot more energetic once I get into the second trimester. I initially thought that I'd be sad about losing fitness or not being able to go for a 10 mile run or really train for a race because that's been my mindset for the past year. But I can now honestly say that I'm okay with taking a break from that for a while. I believe that exercise should be fun, and if I focus on what I can't do or am not able to do, then I'm not having fun anymore.

So for now, I am going to enjoy my much shorter, slower-paced runs. Now that fall is here, hopefully there will be some nice foliage to look at while I'm outside.