Baby Jogging

Let me provide a bit of background to this post by stating outright that I ran throughout my entire pregnancy. I'm not talking a little jog here and there... I'm talking I racked up over 1500 km during my pregnancy, over 3000 km if we include cross-training. For the first five months it was enjoyable if slightly slower than my pre-pregnancy running, months six, seven and eight were noticeably slower yet still enjoyable, months nine and ten consisted of ten minute miles, occasional stops en-route for orange juice (and in one desperate incident a doughnut), they were enjoyable but definitely hard work. Yesterday baby & I went for our first run together with her outside the womb (she is now almost 7 months old). Hmmm... I am honestly not sure what is more taxing, running while heavily pregnant or pushing the baby jogger. It is hard, hard work! College physics is a distant memory for me but somehow I thought that fact that I was pushing the weight on wheels would make baby's 7 kg plus the 10 (?) kg of the jogger negligible. So not the case! I would say the baby jogger adds 10-15 seconds per km. It also definitely changes my already poor form for the worse. Perhaps I just need to adjust. Perhaps I can parlay this into an opportunity to work on strengthening and posture and both are sorely in need of work. (As an aside, I had secretly hoped that as baby gained weight my biceps and triceps would grow in proportion to her gain so that a) she would not feel heavier to me and b) I would actually get stronger - ha! how naive). But I do wonder if this baby jogging thing is an effective training mechanism for my primary goal which is, of course, to run fast!

The good news and most important aspect is that baby really enjoyed it. She slept through some of it and commented through the rest "ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba".