Sonia O’Sullivan won the 5 000m silver at the Sydney Olympics 14 months after the birth of first daughter, Ciara.
After failing to finish the 5 000m final at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, I was chasing something I felt I had missed out on and could never get back again. Once Ciara was born it was like starting over. I was not really comparing things with before. It was like starting a new job, because whatever I achieved now was totally different. It was like I had a new body: you are fresh, it is a new platform, you are not carrying all those injuries and the aches and pains.
If I had not felt like that, Sydney 2000 would have been just another championship.
But there was the distraction of having Ciara around and the fascination with how well I could run after having a baby, and having her with me all the time. It made everything I was doing different. Wherever I went had to be child-friendly.
It was not all about where I could run. Once I got into a routine I never had any problems. Before Ciara was born I’d been running for more than 10 years and having time off before her birth was like a natural break. I went to the gym and did spinning classes and work on the exercise bike. In a way you feel safer. You are not running far away. If anything happens, you are in a good place. I maintained my fitness, changing from being an elite runner to someone who was keeping fit. It was a good two weeks after Ciara was born before I was running properly. My body changed a bit. My shoe size went up half a size after each of the children had been born. I spoke and wrote to Liz McColgan (former World 10 000m champion and Olympic silver medalist). Everyone is a bit vague, because they know they trained hard when they got back and they ran afterwards. But you forget all the bits in between.
It is like when you go for a run in the day. You might not feel great when you go out but when you get home you feel really good and you are glad that you did it. You forget anything that might have been bothering you.
Ingrid Kristiansen broke the marathon record and won the world 10 000m title after starting a family.
If I had not had my first child, Gaute, in 1983, I might have dropped out of running.
I was tired. It was not going as well as I wanted it to. I had a good job, running was okay, but it was not good enough. At the time I was working as a bio-engineer. I would run to work and back, between 45 minutes to one hour in the morning and maybe two hours in the evening if I took a different way home. When Gaute was born, the change was for the better. I felt stronger than before. It is hard to say why, but maybe it was the happiness.
The running was not so important any more, so I was more relaxed. If you train during the pregnancy, you train with weight. Maybe it is one of the reasons why you become stronger. I ran almost every day before Gaute was born. I had been working full-time, but now I was free from the job and it changed everything. I would train, but if I did not get enough sleep during the night I took a day off. That was interesting, because so many runners are afraid of losing one day of training. If your body tells you to take a day off, then it is good for you.
As for Paula [Radcliffe], she is very competitive, but of course it is a big difference between running a half marathon at the Great North Run and a full marathon. I do not think it is smart for her to go like crazy, maybe she has to be a bit cautious because of the injuries. Maybe she has to be happy to run 2,24 or 2,25.
Tanni Grey-Thompson won the London Marathon and two paralympic golds after the birth of Carys.
I hadn’t spent much time around babies and when Carys was born I did not know what to expect. But I was soon to discover that the tiredness I used to feel after training was nothing compared with being a mum and issues I used to worry about took on a different level of concern. If before I used to fret about how a race had gone or chasing a personal best, that all became different because it was nothing like the worry of being a mum.
Training took on a whole new focus. I could not go there and faff about; I had to get it sorted because so much of what I was doing was planned around Carys. I will never forget one night when I said to [my husband] Ian that I would give him every penny in my bank account if he would feed her. I was that tired. The following morning I told him I’d had this dream about asking him to feed her — and he told me it was not a dream. So training gave me a smidge of a break. It gave me a lot of energy and it made me feel I could do a better job because of how different tiredness was for me.
I didn’t feel I had more endurance after giving birth, but I was more focused on what I was doing, though stupidly I had said I would do that year’s London marathon. Nine weeks and six days after Carys was born, there I was. It was important to have goals and I won it.
People told me not to race, but the only way to see what level I was at was to go and do it. I could not hide. I respect Paula for that. Maybe finishing second at the Great North Run was not the plan, but she has decided to compete again soon and I can understand why. — Â