Loyal reader, you will already know from one of my earlier posts, (https://midwifemotherme.com/2023/11/13/anything-for-chocolate) that I ran the London Marathon back in the PME (premotherhood era). I still feel pretty darn smug about that, hence my constant urge to over share. It was really really long! And that last nought point two miles was vile. Your brain thinks you’re there, I mean, you’ve done 26, that’s what you signed up for, right? WRONG. But now, all the adrenaline that was keeping your heart pumping adequately enough, your blood passably oxygenated, well, it stops flowing. Because you weren’t supposed to STILL be needing it! Your muscles are now operating anaerobically, which is desperately inefficient, but you can’t quit, not when you can (just about) see the finish line. You feel sick, faint, extenuated. But you push past the pain, you harness every last ounce of strength  from reserves you never knew you had. And you make it to the line! Jubilantly collect your medal. And then you eat chocolate, sleep for a day or two, and go back to work possibly minus one or two toenails!

Surely it wouldn’t so unreasonable to suggest that childbirth can’t be harder than that  right? WRONG again!

Here’s why:

You don’t get to fall into the arms of Morpheous after giving birth. At all. Your new mother prize is to stay awake for the next three months and feed your baby.

If you train for a marathon, there’s every chance you’ll finish and finish well. That’s fair. But you can do everything by the book in pregnancy and yet not be rewarded  with an easy labour. Where’s the justice? (FYI, your baby will never thank you for acing the pregnancy but kudos to you for doing it anyway).

You know exactly when the marathon is, you can plan your life around it. Pregnancy lasts somewhere between 37-42 weeks. Unless it doesn’t.

You know roughly how long your marathon will take, it’s capped at 8 hours. You have absolutely no idea how long your labour will last. Probably 24 hours. But then again…

There are no diet restrictions prior to the marathon, you can still eat juicy steak,  sushi, proper cheese. You can still have boozy evenings. None of these are permitted for nine and a half months of pregnancy. That’s a lot of days.

You can opt out of the Marathon if you choose. Any time. No strings. No guilt. No side effects. You can change your mind about pregnancy (thank heavens) but there are many caveats. And drawbacks. And unpleasant side effects.

You lose a toe nail after the marathon,  and you think that’s bad. Pur-lease! That’s civilised compared to the state of your nether regions post childbirth (FYI, toe nails grow back and perineums really do heal well).

You can go to work the day after the marathon. Sure, you’ll have to take the stairs backwards (I cannot explain why it hurts so much to descend a flight of stairs in the conventional manner post marathon, but it’s backwards or not at all!) And sure, you discover muscles you never ever knew about because every single muscle cell which you destroyed by using it to foolish excess is  rebuilding. Painfully. But that ain’t nothing compared to how battered you are post childbirth when every single system in your body, which temporarily shut down while your body focused solely on the labour, is now creaking back onto action slowly and painfully. Your stomach stopped digesting. Its been on reverse peristalsis mode – in case you tried ignoring the fact that it was on strike. Your kidneys quit making urine. Well, they took an enforced break while your stomach was violently expelling any oral sustenance. Your brain had to power off. Sensory overload. You even forgot how to breathe. You’ve lost a pint of the red stuff, having already spent the last 6 months anaemic, that’s gonna take a while to rectify. And despite that, your best nutrients, whatever’s left of them, are now heading out via your boobs.

You get a medal for completing the Marathon. Not so much for childbirth. Seriously, where’s the justice?

Perhaps second marathons are easier than the first. I wouldn’t know. I swore I’d never find out. There are some things you don’t forget,  apparently, and some things you do. I blame the cerebral shut down. While your brain did an ostrich number on you for self-preservation reasons, no memories were being forged. What a sick-but-astoungingly-effective evolutionary joke! I had one marathon and three children. Case closed! And I’ve often witnessed that thunderbolt moment when a woman in labour realises, much too late, what she should have remembered nine months ago when she blithely embarked on her second/third/fourth pregnancy. That moment she realises that there isn’t enough chocolate in the world to make it ok.

But she’ll dig deep, she’ll  push past the pain, she’ll give birth, because it’s amazing what you can do when you have to. And she’ll forget. Maybe not such a bad thing after all!