How Training for Ultras Can Empower Your Pregnancy Journey with Carla Meijen PhD and Stephanie Howe PhD | KoopCast Episode #184

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i am your humble host coach Jason Koop and on the podcast today is repeat offender carla mayan who you all might remember from KoopCast 171 where we discussed one of carla's books which is titled endurance performance in sport psychological theory and intervention which today remains the most dog-eared and bookmarked book in my entire library but today carla returns to the podcast to discuss something very different and that is how women can leverage their athletic journey during maternity and the birthing process carla has a new book out called empowered birth that gives a framework to what many mothers who were also athletes have experienced athletes have this ability to take their experiences that they have had on the field of play and in the field of training and parlay them into being a parent a business owner or whatever other challenge life presents however all too often we are haphazardly applying those lessons simply because that is what we know overcoming athletic challenges is what we've been accustomed to for decades and that works at times

yet at other times does us a disservice so carla has masterfully distilled and encapsulated those learning lessons into this new book and i wanted to i wanted to bring her on the podcast today to expound upon some of the book's main themes now although i've coached many women before and after becoming a mother i'm the first to recognize that i need some help with this conversation so to bring in some personalized context i had one of my trusted colleagues who's also a badass mother and a badass athlete in her own right stephanie howe PhD to add her personal experience into the conversation finally it would be cliche for anyone listening to this intro out there to pigeonhole this conversation into being one that is just for expecting moms that is not the case although the primary audience with this podcast and carla's books are expecting mothers there are nuggets of wisdom that the entire support system which includes me as a coach that surround the mothers can take away that are valuable for their journey as well okay with that as the out of the way i am getting right out of the way here's my conversation with carla mayan and stephanie howe carla thanks for coming back on the podcast um i really appreciate it i i've like i said the first time that you came on i really appreciated your work because it helped me kind of conceptualize

some sports psychology aspects that i was working through and more importantly it helped me like put a framework around it because we have all these different kind of like disjointed ideas it's almost like physical training right we have all these different ways of applying physical training in terms of workout structure and strength training and endurance training and do they match and do they not match and then bringing it all together is a whole different uh as you guys would say in the uk a kettle of fish and that that that the the first book that um that i was familiar with from you help put all these sports psychology tools into kind of an organized framework and that helps me a lot so thank you for that the second book is going to kind of do the same thing even though it's just recently out and i'm just i'm just very vaguely familiar with it or i would say superficially uh familiar with it having having kind of gone through the content so i have no doubt it's going to serve that same purpose so so thank you for doing that um before we jump into anything to with with uh with any with with a whole lot of detail just give the audience like like a broad overview of what it is and who it's intended for yes yeah thank you for having me again on the podcast really excited to to speak to you about this actually and to speak to steph about it too um so yeah the book as it kind of says in the title it's about what can we learn from sports psychology on our journey so it's the idea that you know what can mothers-to-be take in terms of sports psychology inspired strategies people who

are in sports or maybe they've played sports themselves um have probably developed a lot of different mental techniques on the way so how can they then use those to see that kind of maternity journey as the positive challenge rather than negative threat so they probably have a lot more in their toolbox than they're aware of so it's kind of building what you've already got rather than trying to to kind of start from scratch and i suppose there's a couple of different themes that run throughout the book if you like so it's things like uh building on your strengths what i've just said uh but also how can you then approach that situation as a positive challenge what goes into a challenge state uh but also what's really important is to personalize your approach so have that individual approach so rather than having one tool that fits everything understand what you need what are your demands what do you need so you know if you're gonna fix your car like let's say you've got a flat tire um if you've never unpacked the jack if it's still in like it's packaging you're not gonna know how to use it so you need to kind of understand what those tools are how you can use it and how they would work for you and there's no single one tool that fits for everything so i think that's a really important thing to kind of emphasize and something that runs throughout the book and then how do you know that works is through reflection so it's that whole thing yes we plan we do but we also need to reflect to then kind of understand what works for us and being able to adapt so i guess roughly those are kind of four very broad themes throughout and obviously with the

audience is you know people on their maternity journey um they can have a background in sports but sports actually a really powerful vehicle to see something in a different kind of light so even if you don't have a very strong background in sports you'd still be able to relate to some of the content maybe from a performance domain maybe from the performing arts or you've done lots of kind of presentations that are in the workplace or those types of things and then it's also those who are kind of part of that maternity journey so it could be the birth partner but also you know if you're an athlete the coach around that kind of understand that uh could be the physiotherapist so a lot of pelvic health is really important so how can you engage the physiotherapist but also midwives so um there's a story in the book that um i've interviewed women for the book uh about their birth stories and she's personal trainers did a lot of kind of high intensity intervals and um her partner was very aware of that and she really struggled at a certain stage and he told the midwife and together they pulled together kind of her confidence that she had from doing those hit sessions to say yes she can do it and that really helped her to push through some of those really tough and really high intensity uh pushing stages so it's not just for you know the woman on the maternity journey but also the people around her to support her it's it's interesting because i've always had this experience that whenever athletes go through something that's like novel to them and i would i would consider pregnancy and the birthing experience a novel experience right you might experience it a few

times in your life right versus training for an event that's going to be a dozen a few dozen four five six dozen events that you're actually training for in your life whenever you go through that novel experience irrespective of what it is and here we're going to talk about a you know a very specific novel experience they rely on what they know and they pull tools into the equation from what they have experienced more from a almost from like a comfort standpoint right it's like a blanket that they can kind of like wrap around them because they know how to train they know how to get up and you know get ready for a workout and plan out the season and things like that and with athletes they take they just kind of like almost naturally take those parallels or or those analogies and bring them into these novel experiences and what i feel like this book is is is doing very well is once again it's putting like kind of a formalized framework around it i saw steph like kind of like nodding about this because we were talking off air that her her her pregnancy and birthing journey was kind of a whirlwind there's a whirlwind in her life and things like that and i and i and having gone through that like with you as a coach and as a friend i could kind of see that writing on the wall that was just a lot and whenever whenever that's the case it's a novel experience a lot you just kind of hey i've been an athlete for my whole life going back to your skiing days right i'm going to naturally pull in those things and i kind of want to know from like your perspective steph like you didn't have this

formalized framework but what did like what did you draw from your like athletic journey when you initially knew that you were going to have to go through this process oh so much um i mean i think we tend to focus on the physical part of like dealing with pain and like i'm an athlete so i can handle a lot of pain and although that is true i found that i like pain that i can control this is out of my control um so i didn't actually think that part for me translated that well but going into the unknown um dealing with adversity having to switch plans like on the drop of a hat um having my whole like race plan or birth plan go out the window those are things i really drew on and i think i i mean everyone has a very different and incredible amazing birth story and i think mine at the very end i really drew on my athletic background because i was in a panic state i had been pushing for four hours he wasn't coming out and i was just losing it and the um i think it was the nurse she pinned me down and she was like what are you doing you are an athlete use this pain when it hurts push hard like lean into it and that's something that i i do i do think i i recognized um from training you know like when it gets hard you lean into it and actually went from like potentially having to have a c-section emergency c-section to having a vaginal birth because that nurse knew

that i was an athlete and she she pointed it out to me of like you know how to do this use use that um and push harder so carla this is your wheelhouse right and i can see like the light bulbs going off because one of one of the big themes that you pull out in the book is being able to control the controllables and to try to realize that there are going to be uncontrollables that you are not going to be able to like wrap your arms around that stuff just that stuff just mentioned can you kind of like expand upon that a little bit and like give the just give the listeners out there just some strategies in terms of how that how those two actually can parallel each other yeah 100 i mean i love that stuff how you're the nurse is kind of capable of drawing on that and that's what you really need right you kind of need to know who's there and what their strengths are and draw from that so that's such a great thing to to hear that she was capable to do that um but yeah when it comes to perceived control so when we see kind of challenge seeing something as a positive challenge that's one of the ingredients for positive challenge so you've got things like self-efficacy so you're believing your your ability to do something successfully so maybe that's around you know managing pain or those types of things tough as a as a first-time mom sometimes to kind of think about previous performance accomplishments as one of those sources to draw from you can use things like vicarious experiences having others in similar situation kind of done that well um and then there's also the idea of tackling things head

on so that kind of approach motivation rather than sticking your head in the scent uh which is very easily done especially when you're kind of in pain you kind of just want to ignore it push it away which is much more like a threat state and then it's that sense of perceived control so kind of having that real awareness of what's in your control what's outside of your control and this is such a key thing when it comes to the kind of maternity journey um feeling that you're out of control mucks up the kind of that hormonal equilibrium so you know you get like maybe get into that stress state cortisol jacks up which is helpful to kind of get the energy going but ultimately what that does it kind of suppresses um things like oxytocin which is a hormone that you need to push the baby out if you like to kind of get not push the baby out but get the contractions going it's you know you need to have those kind of like hormonal levels so this is why control is such a key factor so if you're trying to control everything you get into the kind of this fight-or-flight state you get in this like stress mode and it just feels like this is going to be tough you know if you want to control i don't want to have like a cesarean for example you know if you don't want to have a c-section you don't always have control over what the baby does so steph like the example you gave like sometimes you have to have that emergency c-section because that's just the safest way of for everyone out there but actually if there is some level of controllability there which in this instance there was

like okay let's give it a try let's like really um breathe into the pain that's something that you can then control so yes you have a situation but within that situation there are aspects that you can control and then there's those things that you just have to hand over in this instance to the medical staff and kind of trust their their knowledge and what i tend to do i think with with athletes that translates quite well to the book is kind of do this awareness exercise of what's within your control what's outside of your control so what's the situation what are the demands within that situation and how much can you kind of stay in the task and what are things that kind of take you away from that and within that how much can you control so there's things like comparisons to others you know i i've been pushing here for four hours the baby should be here and kind of you know that the clock watching is a big thing isn't it and that's completely out of your control and then what then happens is you move so far away from kind of that task focus that it just becomes quite overwhelming so what you had in that situation had someone kind of helping you to get back onto that task focus through reminding you to really tune into that pain don't see it as kind of i guess your enemy um yes the pain is much more intense than what you've probably ever experienced during ultra because that's much more as you know you never go i suppose an rp of 10 out of 10 you know well maybe it's but you don't tend to do that for a whole you know endurance race but it's actually when you go through that transition

and you go into some of those pushing phases it is a 10 out of 10 isn't it like you just can't give anymore it comes out of your toes so it's about how do you then translate that okay well what can i do i can still engage with my breathing i can still have a really powerful breath to then push that and then okay i've given it my all i know i've given it my all if i now need to hand over to the medical staff for an emergency c-section it's fine i've done what i've could you know as an example so that's just one one thing you know you're hitting you're you're really resonating with me on this control piece because everybody out there kind of anecdotally knows that athletes have high levels of control but i'm going to give a really specific example of this so several years ago we had this consultant come into cts it's a it's a company of coaches but we all have athletic backgrounds and they did a fire OB assessment which carl you're probably familiar with but the audience is not and all it does is it tells you your kind of emotional needs right and they did it as a group and one of the kind of emotional needs is control so there's three of them inclusion control and affection and our whole group was off the charts on control having all these athletes in there we all wanted a lot of control and we all wanted to express our control to our to our peers and i'm using that as it's a little bit our group is a little bit of a microcosm of the entire athletic space i don't think that's a

a big stretch to actually make because athletes are kind of athletes or athletes so what my question to you is is is this element of is this element of control is it that when you're doing consulting with athletes do you actually see that as one of the bigger parts of the things that they need to work through in advance given that they're in a that they're in a situation that they're not going to be able to apply a whole lot of control uh uh to yeah definitely i think it's that acceptance element that's that's really important so um in the book uh one of the chapters and steph already kind of talked about the birth plan overboard thing that's actually the title of that chapter is kind of around uh goal setting and um yes it's you know we always promote this whole idea of autonomy right so you want to have autonomous goals goals that are meaningful to you uh that aren't imposed on you by others um and that quality of goal is really important but what happens a lot is that we we tend to then develop this one kind of super goal that we want to uh work towards and you know sometimes i label that as a as kind of a do or die goal maybe it's better said as a do or fail goal um and you know if what you see a lot of that is that people hang on to that particular goal and if they don't get close to it because the fact is that might be out of their control it imposes so much guilt and kind of negative unhelpful emotional states and so what i'm trying to do when i'm working with athletes and and what

i write in the book as well is think about different levels of goals so yes if everything's fantastic on the day and yes you know in in this instance the baby is in a perfect position and you know you're quite calm and have like a super smooth kind of transition between the stages fantastic but a lot of times that doesn't happen so what is it that you can then revert to to still kind of not giving you those feelings of guilt so maybe your your goal is that um i'm really going to kind of tune into uh the experience and trying to see how far i can go so you know like in steph's example what i've pushed for a couple of hours and i now acknowledge that you know there's not much more i can do i've given it my all and that's okay um and so you're kind of having those plans a b and c and yes sometimes you can revert back up which is exactly what you did there steph like you you kind of were reverting to another goal and actually you were able to tune back into that goal so it's not always that you're going downwards you can also go back upwards and i think that's really empowering to give you some control but at the same time giving you that flexibility can really take some of those stress levels away or tune those down if you like it almost seems like like you have to learn you have to learn how to release the control from things that you have not experienced before right because you're trying to apply that control like across like universally universally across the board but since

the situation is so new or novel as i was talking about earlier you just have to realize that there are going to be these things that come up that you can't predict that you're just going to have to be you know what this is this is out of my control go ahead steph yeah no i think i exactly what you both just said of as an athlete you want to control every single piece i myself am a very type a person i like lists i like having a detailed plan and with birth you can't really do that because you don't know it like there are things you can control yes but so much of it are not variables that you can impact yourself they're out of your control and so i think the flexibility i like that word a lot going in with a plan but being flexible that that plan is likely going to change and i think when you're when you're open to that and it's not like a detailed plan of like a list of like this is hour one hour two this is what i'm going to be like when i'm you know eight centimeters dilated like if you don't have it that detailed i think that gives the room for the flexibility and the ability then to work through it in the right way for you rather than following like a strict um list of rules that you've created for yourself kind of like what you do though for a race you make you make a fueling plan you make a race plan but then when you apply it it never comes out like that right you have to change you have to troubleshoot on the fly you have to change what you're doing you might have to change your full nutrition plan because you're getting stomach issues so i i do think there there

are elements of both of like the control piece athletes need to just like take a deep breath and know there's less you can control because they're new things but then also think about what you've done in your past and know that you've probably had a really detailed plan but have had to change it on the fly yeah i call that having a strategy not a plan because when you have a strategy you have like in once again i'm leaning on my coaching background here when you have a strategy you have themes that you're trying to angle your actions towards versus check boxes that you absolutely have to have stephanie are laughing because we always joke about stephanie's elaborate list that she starts out with in the morning it's like i'm gonna wait i'm gonna wake up and get out of bed and make my bed that's the first thing okay i get to check that no i get to make my list make my list and then check that check that thing off the list uh or off the check box but anyway i guess my point is is is like that's the way that i that i internalize it is is you have to have strategies that you're you that you're using and deploying as opposed to having these very specific endpoints that need to be met because the strategies offer a little bit of malleability to how you get to those endpoints versus strictly aiming at the endpoint yeah 100 i think if you go straight to the endpoint and that's all that matters you kind of also don't take in anything that happens on the way there and so when we think about kind of types of goals yes you know like those kind of outcome or performance like a time

based goal yes they're very helpful uh to kind of give you that motivation and understand what needs to happen but but really in the moment it's those kind of process goals isn't it that you want to rely on and kind of understanding what the types of process goals are that will work for you gives you that sense of control back so can you use breathing so how when you're overwhelmed what happens to you like you know when you're in a in a race and you feel completely you know you're tired you're shattered and you're misnavigating you're making a mistake like how have you come back from that like what did you do rather than you know focusing so much okay well i'm not gonna make my time now and that's gonna you know make you feel really bad about yourself that's not gonna help you in that moment um so it's about okay what can i now do to you know maybe regain myself uh can i draw on some statements to help me navigate again to where i need to go um you know maybe i'm so inwards focused i'm tripping because i don't see what's you know those stones on the path ahead of me um you know like what can i do can i maybe build in a routine to like focus outwards inwards notice how my body feels and those are things that translate really well because what sometimes happens in birth is that we're so kind of focused on dissociating ourselves from the pain that we don't actually realize what's happening with our body um so it's about kind of allowing yourself to sometimes tune into the pain and that's you know you gave that example and that can be really

empowering because then you kind of you're tuning into your body you'll be able to communicate those levels of pain and then maybe decisions need to be made around pain relief uh that otherwise you wouldn't have done and actually that will give you a much better experience and i'm kind of drawing on a podcast that i did a couple weeks ago with uh dr scott fry who's a neuroscientist and one of the things that that he mentioned that made a big impact on me is there that our relationship with pain is malleable and we don't know what the kind of what the flavors and the extent because i don't want to just like put it in like uh a term of magnitude right because it's different you don't know what those are until you have actually experienced them and that's the malleability piece of it and so to your to your point carla of you don't know if it's going to go all the way down to your toes right before you actually do it but then you experience and you're like okay like this is just a different experience that i'm going to accept yeah exactly i don't know steph what was that like for you oh yeah no i think my idea of an rpe of 10 out of 10 definitely uh shot through the roof i think i probably perceived i was at 10 out of 10 when i was at 5 out of 10 um so that that was a whole nother level for me we're we're going to get into later like how you can use reflection to then become a better athlete and a better person after having gone through this journey

but i kind of want to table that a little bit because i want to i want to get to something that is kind of tangentially related to this that you mentioned in the book carla and once again this is something that that i identified a lot with as a coach it's this element of personalizing the experience for the individual and that's a big role of what i do as a coach is i take these general training principles that we all know okay we know how physiology adapts and we know how the cardiopulmonary system works and we know how the musculoskeletal system works and things like that we're taking these big generalized principles and i'm tailoring down them down to steph i want you to do a two-hour run on saturday right that we're from whatever principle that is we're trying to pin it down to how is it going to affect that one individual based on any number of factors how they've you know adapted in the past what their strengths and weaknesses are what their goals are and things like that and you mentioned this in the book that that there's this one kind of uh i guess specific uh specific thing that generic advice is very easy to forget and i want you to expand upon that a little bit very specifically with this maternity and birthing journey in terms of how can people who are going through this or are going to go through this personalize the journey for them yeah i mean there's and i'm sure steph can relate there's so much information out there and you know if you go to like a birth preparation class there's a lot of kind of information being thrown at you but just you know

you digest some of it but it's really hard to kind of remember everything of it and actually what's what's a good thing to do is to really think about what you what your strengths and what your weaknesses are so when you're thinking about these are the potential demands of the maternity journey what what do i already have like do i feel confident in my body i know my body is strong so i you know i can probably take off some of those things in the in a kind of you know those nine months or you know in your case definitely less than nine months uh leading up to it um you know these are things that i know i know about nutrition so you see this a lot with you know athletes they have a really good knowledge and understanding of how to look after their body so actually yes i've ticked that box those are things that i i'm really good at um but actually what i struggle with here is some of my self-belief because this is a completely new situation and i've got no clue what to expect i feel that a lot of things are out of my control so actually those are the types of things that i need to work on so then it's about breaking that down how can i then fill my self-belief so what can i do maybe it is about speaking to other athletes so thinking about those vicarious experience have been in the same boat understanding their journey and kind of you know when that pain intensity ramps up to levels that are beyond what you've ever encountered you know what are some things that they found helpful okay is that meaningful to you so maybe they use some very specific process goals and they drew on very specific statements okay well what can i do what's a statement that would work for me

can i put myself in a situation where okay maybe that pain intensity wouldn't be a 10 out of 10 but you know can i put myself in a situation maybe um you know some of the listeners might be a yoga pose or it might be like something that's you know you can do whilst on a maternity journey um whilst you're being pregnant but that actually puts you in a position of discomfort can i practice some of those things and so yes actually this statement works really well for me but this you know i will not remember that um so it might be you know like um i'm welcoming my baby but for some people that just doesn't resonate so you know for others it's more about my body is strong i'll breathe through i'll breathe into the pain i can do this so it's really about what's meaningful to you is then how you remember those statements and you know it's it's this as i said earlier on there's no single like strategy that fits every single demand and so it is first doing that assessment as to what do i need to work on what are my strengths what are my weaknesses what you've already got and what are some of those strategies and i cover a couple of those in the book that i can then practice on that journey to set myself up as much as i can in that kind of positive challenge state to put myself up hopefully for in in good kind of state if you like steph is there anything like right off the bat that like you individualized for you well yeah yes sort of so like carla said there's so much information out there there's people telling you how you should do it how you should think about it and it's overwhelming

and so i chose to not really engage in any of that um i didn't read a lot about it before i i mean i prepared myself i read one book called bringing up baby the french book um and that's all and instead of like trying to sort through all of that and get overwhelmed and confused i just thought about like carla said like what are the things that i'm good at like what you know like i i do have a strong body like i know i can handle this whatever it's going to be whatever whatever my body's going to go through i know it's going to be able to handle it and then focusing on like you know what what is actually happening and then again in early motherhood like what does this little infant need not like let me read a book to tell me how to put him down to sleep or how to make sure that he's eating or to change like i just and not to take away from all of those guides but i think we can over complicate it for ourselves when we take in too much of the information and not think about what we're trying to do so with birth especially like it's it's a very i mean it's i don't want to call it simple it's not simple but there's not like there's like a you know a process that you're going to go through and so i think when you break that down and think about what you know which is kind of what i did um even though i said my birth story was a little bit um i wasn't well prepared for it because he was a little early i still think i handled it all right because i drew on what i knew about myself you know what's hilarious about that stuff is like you're so academically rigorous

in other areas of your profession which i know very well and yet when it comes to this you're like i'm gonna figure it out myself and you you wouldn't you wouldn't do that when we like talk in our research group about whatever like oh let's go let's go talk about carbohydrate metabolism or something like that you're like i'm gonna go to the research and i'm gonna look up 20 papers and you know spend two hours reading them and marking them up and things like that it's just i i kind of just want to know personally like why the divide in strategy between those two right one you're super signed you're you're going to the literature and to material that's been written right and the other one you're like screw this i'm gonna figure it out myself yeah yeah no i i think it's it's a very maternal instinct i think we have that in ourselves of like knowing what to do and um it's two reasons so i i feel that that i actually can figure it out because you know like a child is an extension of you it's like he was inside me like he is part of my body and so i i know i feel confident that i can i can figure that part out and then the other piece is i'm not an expert in that field and so that's the science hat coming back on of like oh well i can't understand all the research on like all of this and um but that's a smaller piece i think i think it's more of like i just if i really am honest with myself and put away all the noise or clear out all the noise i know what to do um and especially with like a little baby of like he needs love he needs

food he needs care and i don't necessarily need a journal article to tell me how to how to do that well it's almost to carla's point if there's a lot of information out there once again if i kind of relate it to the training front i would add a clarification to that there's a lot of information out there that has been colloquialized to meet the masses there's a lot of research uh that is in the physiology and coaching and training space and things like that and we can draw a lot from it but to stuff to your point not everybody's a domain expert and so they look to the colloquialization side of it and that's where we get like static training programs right to this individualization piece we get these these static training programs that are meant for a completely different journey right they're meant for the pregnancy and the birthing journey and my same issue with static training programs would be or my issue with static training programs would be that they cannot and they are not individualized to a person that same criticism can be applied to this like colloquialization of of the information that's that's more in this other world a hundred percent agree with that and i think if i could hire a coach to take me through this journey that i could check in with every single day um that would be the best case scenario um so i don't know carla if you're looking for a career um addition to what you want to do but i think there's a market for it there we go we just started up a new uh new career for carla no no uh no pressure there um yeah so if i can just

add to that i think one thing that really resonates there is is one of the reasons i actually um wrote the book was that people who kind of attended some of these generic you know i went to one birth class um and i did some some pregnancy yoga and you know very knowledgeable teacher but i stayed clear from the books i just you know for my day-to-day job i'm already reading so much i kind of stayed clear for very similar reasons that you've outlined as well it's like that's just going to be too expert and it's just not going to be resonating with my individual kind of situation um but what i noticed is like i became aware of how much i actually drew on a lot of sports psychology on my journey and then when i spoke to other women afterwards and they all had these really good intentions of using whatever came up during the birthing classes or maybe using some you know statements mantras um using breathing or but they never really practiced it under pressure and so there was all these like really good intentions but it didn't translate into action and i think that's where i hope with some of the information in the book there's a space to allow people to actually narrow that gap between those good intentions actually putting it into action because you've already done this so when you've been out in like sports you've already done some of these things under pressure giving you hopefully that confidence to then apply it or trust your body like what you said steph like i know that my body

is strong and can handle this and kind of giving you that confidence so but you can only do that through understanding you know and personalizing your approach like that's why none of these kind of very generic bits of advice will probably resonate if you don't really practice it so you need to practice to actually own it well it's like you said earlier carla you've got the tools but it's a different it's a totally different thing from that to understanding that you have the tools and then actually deploying the tools to the task that they need to get deployed to those are kind of three separate steps in that whole in that whole deal and if you have kind of framework around how to go through that entire process this is the tool this is i know that i have this tool i kind of recognize that and here's how i'm going to deploy it if you have some sort of framework to like work through all three steps of that process then that's that's the only thing that's going to matter right doesn't matter if you've actually done it before it doesn't matter if you actually know it it matters if you actually deploy it but you've got to go through all three of those uh three of those steps yeah um i want to pivot to another area that was extremely interesting this is this kind of goes around identity and um steph you and i kind of like went through this during your athletic journey right i mean i coached you as an athlete a very very good athlete as a mother who was also an athlete or as a as somebody who's pregnant and also an athlete and then as a mother who is still also an athlete and i noticed the way that you just kind of your self-identity how that changed

throughout this throughout this entire process but i want to kind of start out with with carla because there's actually been a reasonable amount of research uh in this area with how athletes identify or how athletes identify within themselves at different points of this entire process so carla can you kind of like take the take the listeners through that and how that changes and also how we can kind of like leverage that that knowledge to then become better in each of those roles yeah it's a fascinating one isn't it because um when we think about you starting out sports and you kind of start to develop that identity you don't develop your sporting identity overnight it takes time um and a lot of times when you do sports you have this quite big part of how you see yourself is defined by you being a you know an athlete so you know it's called athletic identity so a lot of times if you ask people to draw a circle and say okay tell me what chunk of this circle is you know defining you as an athlete you probably see a really high you know when you have a pie chart it's usually like something like you know eight out of ten bits of that cake or kind of defines defining them as an athlete and then suddenly that changes because you have to navigate this whole new identity after you've given birth and sometimes you can make a little bit of a parallel it's like a sports injury so that kind of you know you can't at that particular moment in time play sports and then you know that identity gets a bit of a hit if you like it's maybe not the best way of saying it but

you're hopefully you're physical no no no let's touch on that a little bit your physical capacity is different and i've noticed this with every with every athlete that i've worked with that has uh that has become a mother is there becomes a certain part within the within pregnancy usually about halfway through where there's a noticeable and appreciable amount of just physical difference that they feel within their capacity i go from running eight minute miles to running 10 minute miles it's usually you know maybe not that dramatic but it's dramatic enough that they can actually kind of like pinpoint it and that's a big part in my experience that's been a big part of the identity shift they're like oh shit i can't i'm not in pr territory anymore like it's just we're taking all the prs off the table for the next six months well it's that and what was interesting to me is that the the 10 minute mile now feels like the eight minute mile effort so it's not just you're running slower it it feels hard to run slower but and that's something i didn't necessarily think about but that that impacts you in a different way psychologically as well but it's so logical that's what always takes me aback i'm like didn't you can't you forecast this like didn't you kind of like the writing's on the wall stuff like come on but when it hits it's different when it happens yeah it feels different yeah it's fascinating isn't it and i think that's why sometimes that comparison to kind of especially that period where you just come back from an injury um can really resonate because you're what you do is you're comparing

kind of you know what it was before the injury you're kind of coming back expecting to be at a very similar level and obviously when you're pregnant you know your body you know changes and um you can still do a lot and there's some amazing examples and i'm i'm really pleased that you know foundations like the active pregnancy foundation in the uk but also like a lot of people have now much more embraced and kind of promoting that whole idea that yes you can stay active um during pregnancy but it does feel different like you know what you say how you how you run your pace changes but it feels like it's still the same effort level um but then it's also that period after so uh kelly massey who's at liftpool john moore's uh university former athlete and now kind of doing her PhD she's done an amazing study where she interviewed two um kind of world-class athletes when they came back so she kind of followed them and when they came back and one of the big themes that came out from that was the kind of navigating that identity what does that look like and one of the examples that she gave which i thought was it was a wonderful example was that rather than focusing on their pb they were focusing on their post baby pb and that gives you back that level of control so you're not trying to achieve something that kind of goes pre-baby if you like that might be 20 years ago or you know like 10 years ago so it's about kind of regaining some of that kind of perception of

control i suppose but also it's about that appreciation that when you're an athlete you didn't develop that identity overnight you know and suddenly when people become moms people expect them to suddenly just get it as like okay well here's your mom identity and here's your athletic identity and then it becomes like a real um kind of conflict and there's been some really fascinating research papers out there um mckenna who's in um canada she's done some research around kim clijsters quite a few years ago like a media analysis of how she was portrayed in the media and the conflicting messages that were relayed so one side it was kind of her as a a mom and then when the other side was her as an athlete coming back and winning again so you know and then she had to try to navigate it's like where do i fit in with those identities and sometimes they're really much in conflicts um so it's about finding that kind of identity um where you can marry that up uh without feeling a lot of that pressure which a lot of times comes with that comparing how it is with how it should be um is a big factor that comes in there this is an area where i feel like the athletic experience kind of fails mothers because the athletic experience for for most people who are going to become a mother has lasted their entire lives so 20 to 30 maybe even 40 years you know stephanie we joke that you had a geriatric pregnancy right you don't like that term but um my point my point is is it's decades

in most situations their athletic journey has lasted decades and yet their maternity journey is nine months right and so developing an identity across those two different time frames that are so markedly different is in a lot of ways unfair but yet to your point to your point carla earlier we're expected to be able to flip that switch very quickly and that's not something that is in my estimation in my experience having to having to work with athletes having gone gone through this journey i don't think that that's fair and that's something that i consistently tell them is is like you you're not going to figure it out you're not going to figure it out across this time frame because it's going it's just going to take longer and actually now that i'm thinking about it the athletes that i've coached that have gone through you know two or three or four children they're the ones who haven't figured out the most and a lot of that is just they've had time right it takes time it takes time to figure all that stuff out yeah i think social media does us a bit of a disservice um with this switch or not even switch with just this emerging of identities and i i struggled with it personally i didn't think i would as much as i did i thought i would be the person who three months postpartum i would be back to running and i'd be happy and i'd be like like see you child i'm gonna go for a run and come back and that was not how it was for me at all and like i adjusted to that piece right the physical piece of like wow

i am not ready for this physically um it's going to be a while but the part of me that struggled was the part where i felt like i had to be relevant as an athlete i felt like i had to be putting something out there on social media um for external um gratification not for me but for showing that like hey look i'm still an athlete i've been an athlete that's how people know me and i'm still here i'm just you know working my way back up um and if i'm really honest i'm still struggling with that but i think i also it doesn't feel like an injury whereas an injury you have that piece but it's a really negative part of your life right this is a really positive addition so i feel that that struggle but then i'm also like but it's okay because i've got this other thing that really makes me happy and fulfilled and i wouldn't trade it for anything um i don't know if that that really gets to a point other than i just think it's like you said there's a a lot longer it takes a lot longer to develop that identity and then merging the two i still don't know how we do that um and i still somewhat blame social media for portraying that this is how it should look because i i usually post photos of happy things right most moms do like look at i got out for this run i don't post the photo of me like yesterday laying in bed holding a feverish child um all day you know like you don't see those things but they're just as

much there you know what also um i think everybody should be kind of cognizant of and stuff i've mentioned to the this to you several times and i'm somewhat drawing on my experience of to carla's analogy earlier managing athletes through injury is to forget the forecasting model take things as they're in front of you you might be able to get you know a few days or maybe a kind of a couple weeks ahead or whatever but this uh to to use your words carla return to your previous pb right your pre-pregnancy pb or pre-birth pb forget that forecasting model because for some women that's actually pretty quick some women they just get back into it and they're freaking you know back on the track back in the mountains kind of in their formal former physical athletic self very very quickly other ones it's a couple years right and so i i just i think that that whole i think that that whole element of forgetting the forecasting piece and just taking things as they come is an extremely important part of that whole journey especially once the baby is there once you are a new mom one thing that i did when i started coming back to training um coop you might remember this is i was doing workouts but i wouldn't use my watch yeah because and it was super helpful for me because then i actually enjoyed it rather than like oh my gosh i'm i'm way slower than i used to be so i think like letting go of some of that you know however that's defined for you as an athlete but like some of that those numbers and

just metrics i think is really helpful yeah i think you're touching on so many really relevant things and social media can be so poisonous um in those terms it can be helpful because you know it can be your perceived social support you know network like but people um see how you know you you can recover like there's a lot of things now around pelvic health and you know reaching out so it's doing some really great stuff but then at the same time like these really raw experiences are rarely shared so it's what then happens is that that performance narrative becomes very dominant and that you know navigating those two identities it becomes quite a challenge and you know especially with toddlers like small children you tend to get so many calls along the way and so there's so many bumps onto some of the training especially if you don't have um someone who constantly might look after you know the child whereas you're maybe still the main kind of care care for the child then constantly you're going up and then you're going down you're going up and you're going down so it's kind of that those expectations of what that path looks like it's it's not a straightforward one and i think you know what you said jason that kind of forecasting model is just not gonna gonna happen but you need to have that appreciation of the coaches and the support stuff around you and that understanding because otherwise it's just another layer of pressure being placed on you so i think it's a it's a really important point that you erase that there

and kind of you know forget about people you know you will do pb immediately your post baby pb fantastic and you know build it up from there rather than you know comparing how it is with how it should be but it takes for a really strong person to be able to to do that and you know that's then something that possibly you can start practicing during your pregnancy journey where you're starting to tune into how different it feels um to do that particular pace at a certain rpe and then kind of really learning to tune into your body in terms of the growth and i think jason will come on to that later the growth that you'll then experience from that process um as stepping stones rather than kind of constantly and this is where those do or die goals come in right i think this is kind of going full circle there those do or die goals those one kind of performance or outcome based goals are so much fueling this so we're we're gonna get right into growth because i i noticed this from the onset like right when you first sent me the book carla is it's written in kind of this almost this one-way fashion not not exclusively but predominantly in this one-way fashion and that one way goes what can we take from our athletic experiences and and apply them to the this whole pregnancy and birth process right but what i started to think is is because i have i coach a lot of moms right stephanie's one of them i think that there's a lot that we can learn from the like the opposite

direction what from the pregnancy and the birth process can we then take into our athletic lives to make us better to make us better athletes and better humans right better humans first and then better athletes second and uh and you made a you made a really kind of astounding comment when we were kind of preparing for this podcast that you wish you'd spent more time on that and so here you got the platform to do it like like how does this work in the not in the reverse direction but how does this work in that direction right and so now they're on the other side of this whole pregnancy process they're a new mom or their mom for the second or third time like what can they take out of that process to now help them be a better better a better athlete yeah i was reflecting on that actually because i did talk about it a little bit in the book where you know we have all these narratives of amazing you know women coming back and winning gold medals and so on but actually that's not for everyone so i think you know in the final chapter i talk about the postpartum period and kind of you know what's happening there when you're trying to navigate that new identity and although i've kind of talked about that growth a little bit um for some women that's quite a challenge so um i think i gave you that example that some women still feel guilty about the birth that they didn't have um and so they get stuck in that rather than kind of learning the amazing feats that they've experienced and kind of accomplished throughout so there's definitely scope to to kind of really engage in that reflection so what i have

done in the last chapter i talk about decompression is predominantly kind of focused on emotion so when you come back from you know maybe it's it's based uh from the eis or the english institute of sport um who kind of developed this based on the tokyo cycle where you know you come back and you have this humongous intensity of emotions coming over you like how do you decompress from that or you know so when you have a like a major event and like it's that kind of post marathon blues post event blues like how do you navigate that um but part of that is also kind of sense making and action points like what's the meaning coming out from this and how can i utilize that meaning for looking ahead um in the horizon so it's yes it's about decompressing and making sense of those emotions but actually you can use that also as a reflection tool to then look forward and and have a bit of a we say a framework around how can you then go forward and and focus on your strengths and i think there is a lot more scope there's some research out there and like lessons learned from you know the maternity journey but there's a lot more that we can do in terms of moving away from feeling bad about what might have happened during maternity journey or pregnancy but actually focusing a lot more on a strength model in terms of hey i've i've done something pretty amazing here um what can i learn from that um you know obviously that that applies to things i've gone to plan uh there's also obviously some really

sad um examples that you know we shouldn't we shouldn't overlook or or forget you know yes we are empowering but we also need to make place for situations where that that's maybe not the case steph what did you take from that because once again i i kind of noticed like a shift in you i probably haven't done the best job of verbalizing this but like you just kind of take stuff that's thrown at you a lot better that's the best way i can describe it great way great way to put it um yes i think i've become a better more adaptable athlete because in the past you know things didn't go as i planned i would that would upset me or i would change my plan um you know if i didn't get a good night's sleep i would sleep in and skip my workout or move it or and now if i did that i would never run so i just like you know i i'm just it's like okay i didn't sleep well it's a wednesday that's just another day great here we go or it's like okay your window now suddenly you can go at 11 a.m and you just slammed a huge burrito like go i just think i care less but i mean that in the best of ways like i just don't put the same emphasis on making it perfect i put emphasis on being consistent and and doing something for me and whether that be how i saw how i thought it was going to be versus reality how it actually is i think i take that much better now um and i think

it's really um my dad actually used the word this word and said that motherhood has really softened me in in a good way of just being a little more like forgiving of myself or gentle to myself of like you know if we were to look back at training peaks and look at the comments i wrote in like four years ago they're probably like pretty hard on myself whereas i think now i i am somewhat but i'm also like hey i'm doing a good job and my training is not like on paper nearly as good as it used to be but i think i just have this better perception of um things can go not as planned and they can still be pretty good so okay so here's my coaching moment that everybody gets to listen to on the podcast between you and i stuff i think you're okay with that because we've been coach athlete and friend relationship for a long time i would say i would disagree with you to say your training is not as good now it's just different and it's perfect for what you need at this point in your life and i think that that mental like switch that it's worse than it was before or not as much volume or i'm slower or whatever you just got to take it as an individual experience and say you know what this is exactly what kind of what i need right now because you'll adapt you know you'll adapt to training stimulus and you know it's not it's not going to be as much but that doesn't necessarily or as intense or as whatever but that doesn't mean that it's worse right worse versus better it's just

what it is for what it is right now i mean even your story with the burritos like i just slammed a burrito and i've got an hour right now you can you can drill that down and say you know what the quality of my workout is going to be reduced because of whatever and you above anybody else can pin it down to the physiological kind of mechanisms but who you know who that's what you need right now that's what you needed in that one particular moment yeah and i i do think i'm happier which is a word i don't i don't really love to just say like i'm so much happier now but i do feel a better sense of um my pie chart is a little more balanced in in a healthy way there's not so much weight on an external performance piece because at the end of the day i love this um tim and diana fitzpatrick are kind of legends in the altering world many people know them and um they had a young child and um diana won the dipsey and her child said to her but mom when you come home tomorrow you still have to wash the dishes so i think that's just a great analogy of like they don't care they don't care if you win or lose like they're just happy to to be there and you you are gonna have to wake up in the morning and change a poopy diaper anyways yeah i love that and i think that's that's quite a few examples out there i mean they're obviously anecdotal much more than yes there are some research out there that kind of looks at this and how you know like identity shifts there's some transition in sports there's i'd say maybe a dozen or so studies that have actually consistently

looked at this and you know when you're talking about training peaks i was like i'd love to do a study on like training peaks comments of like women throughout that kind of oh god i've got them i mean how amazing would that be just do an analysis of that and kind of see what the themes are you know and how that may or may not change um because there's so much scope and i think that reflection is just so so important like you can't grow without reflection i think that's uh i guess a key and i do talk about that in the book like it's going to be pretty difficult to know what you've going to take away from this if you don't engage in that reflection and you know kind of love that also you know at the end of the day your identity it has changed it has shifted and you know being able to be okay running without the watch you know like some that doesn't happen and before right you're kind of addicted to the watch and it doesn't go but being able to make those uh changes and being able to reflect that you can make those changes is really helpful so i think it's about reflection not just on the physical things like what it looks like but also kind of reflecting on that what have you gained psychologically and so on so the themes that i take away from this is is to harp on one that i mentioned earlier is to try to forget the forecasting piece because for every chrissy wellington or serena williams or whoever we want to put on a pedestal that has these amazing

athletic stories after they have become a mother and they are amazing for every single one of those there are multitudes more that just don't they just don't happen like that right either but either by chance or circumstance or deliberate action whatever concoction of all those kind of kind of come together but they don't get thrust into the spotlight and that's why this forecasting model is saying well freaking serena did it look how many titles she won after she became a mother like you don't necessarily need to take that experience that she had and try to forecast it onto your own you need to individualize it coming back to that theme you need to individualize it for what for for whatever the future is going to hold for you and you don't know and you don't know what that is and then the the final thing that i'm taking from this is just reflection like there's a lot of what you can just go back and deliberately look at your comments and training peaks as we're very jokingly like talking about but the whole process right it's not just simple it's looking at the comments and training pieces the whole thing and using that for hey now what are the things that i've learned just like any other life lesson what are the things that i've learned there that i can now apply into my life going forward and and or your athletic life and whether that's dealing with pain or being malleable or being flexible or learning how to kind of like work with a framework and not necessarily a detailed checklist whatever those are for you that kind of comes back to the individualization component that's what i really

take from that and how i'm gonna help athletes in the future is just to realize how this whole thing flows and what those major with those major themes that emerge actually are yeah yeah i think you've summarized that really nicely um it is really important to you know pace yourself it's it's not a competition uh when it comes to the maternity journey stop with the comparisons is very tempting um we all do it but be aware of when that happens uh you know that perception of control comes to that individualization individualization gosh what a word and then that practice and reflect you know you've kind of got that all in there so carla i'm gonna actually i'm gonna turn it over to steph first and then carla we'll kind of like wrap up with you with like the kind of the big theme that you took away from from writing this book and what you want the listeners to take away from it but steph as you reflect individually what what's the most dominant thing that you kind of like learn through this that you can apply to or that you would either would apply during the journey kind of looking back at it retrospectively or that you now take into your future role your current roles as being a mom and being an athlete yeah i think i just am softer i i don't know a better word to describe it or i'm just um a little less type a um because i've had all these things thrown at me that are out of my control and i've had to just kind of roll with it and that's not something that

i've done in life before i was always able to just like hunker down and work harder and get them back within my control so i think that's something that really resonates with me and it's such a good thing for me for as a personality as um in my professional career and as a runner myself if you think about races like that's just going to be so much better if i don't sleep the night before or i miss a drop bag or my pole breaks i'm going to be totally fine because that's no big deal right you just figure it out um the one thing i will say i i wish i paused a little more on is that immediate postpartum period of time um there's some like research out there calling that the fourth trimester and i think that's a really powerful time for women to just settle in and maybe as carla you were saying to do that reflecting like that's a great time to do it and that's a great time to like you've got this little baby and maternity leave um sounds like a dreamy time but it's honestly the hardest time i think of a woman's life because you're sleep deprived you're physically not able to do much you're you know struggling to figure out how to feed and change and your identity is thrown out the window and i think that's a really vulnerable time but a good time to just give yourself some grace pause maybe stay off social media and just reflect on you know what you've been through and that i think will help set the tone for for moving forward and like really i guess leaning into motherhood and who

you are as a person um outside of that because those those can support each other if you let them step to the softer part of things i noticed you know i think you probably can uh imagine where i'm gonna go with this pre pre motherhood you were always somebody that would you would woman handle everything and it doesn't matter whether you're getting your PhD or you're gonna win western states or you're gonna you know figure kind of like whatever at what whatever it was in front of you you would just freaking arm wrestle it to the ground and do it through sheer will because you could right because you could control a lot you could control a lot of that a lot of that process that that that behavioral pattern didn't serve you as well once you became a mom because you had more things that were kind of like out of your control so your your your uh your change of becoming a little bit softer and kind of like letting those things go was was was very was very palpable you still have the capacity to arm wrestle things to the ground like you have that in you regardless of whether it's an intellectual task or a physical task you still have that within you but you know where to apply it better and where to not apply and where the tasks that you can't apply that against and i think that's kind of cool yeah i like that assessment yeah okay carla you get the floor finally to wrap it up here what can listeners take away from all this um gosh yeah i think we've captured quite a

lot didn't we um so it's it's about kind of returning i suppose to some of those main themes of the book so um i'll start with the kind of reflection theme is don't feel that you need to do this straight away um so sometimes you just feel overwhelmed and that's okay um so take the time to you know even if it's just a a message you're sending to some friends so you can come back to that and use that as a a way to start reflecting but do allow yourself to not just plan not just do but also reflect ultimately to you know you've achieved some some really great things there and engage your support team with that so uh don't feel you're on that journey all by yourself so engage you know it might be the coaching staff but also you know whoever was there uh with you perhaps during the kind of birthing journey um so don't do it on your own uh i think is a is a key thing and we talked a lot about kind of control and flexibility and i think that's definitely one of the kind of key take-home messages for people is don't feel you need to control every single bit um i know this is probably the hardest thing to do uh but think about how you can use some of those strategies to enable yourself to become more flexible so whether that is through drawing into process goals tuning into process goals whether that is through uh having some kind of self-talk statements to remind yourself to be

flexible or whether it that is to draw on things like imagery to um see things in a perceive things in different way or getting yourself into like a place that that's a happy place for example think about happy gilmore uh can you use that as a nice example of imagery um and i think that's a really important thing and then the other thing is pace yourself like honestly it is your journey it's no one else's journey own that journey but don't feel you need to be a warrior and push through when it's not necessary to do so really amazing concepts there carla where can uh i'm going to give you final chance plug the book where can people get their hands on it um so the book is published by sequa books uh so i can either order it directly from them um you can spell it i'm sure i'll leave a link in the show notes and it's uh all the kind of main booksellers uh should have a copy or should be able to to order a copy so it's empowered birth uh lessons from sports psychology for your maternity journey um is the title or you can go to my website where there's a link to the bookshop as well this has been awesome i'm gonna leave links in the show notes to everything including some of the research papers that we just uh talked about because i've got those queued up right now um i'm looking forward to getting to the rest of this i'm about halfway through the e-copy i'm looking forward to getting the physical copy and i the reason i'm mentioning that is that it'd be very easy and cliche for people to think oh this is just for people who are going to be new moms or think they are going to be new

moms and it's not i am absolutely 100 going to use this in my coaching practice probably within the next few months because just the way things go i just have athletes that are you know going to be new moms every maybe two three times a year and i'm i'm it this is going to be another tool in my tool shed you know so you know to your point that you that that that to be mothers can bring a village around them that it's not just them going through this process they can leverage other individuals i'm going to take heart to that and i'm going to you know put it i'm going to sharpen this tool definitely and this is going to be one of the things that i use to do it i think step absolutely loved your examples no yeah thanks for for letting me uh join you both today and thank you for all the work you're doing in this area i think it's a much needed space for for women to have resources um so i also am looking forward to reading the book all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to carla and steph for coming on the podcast today this was a really fun conversation and i gotta tell you i got a lot out of getting initial copy of carla's book it's something that i'm going to take into my coaching practice something that i'm going to continue to work on as a coach and hope to develop that tool in my toolkit on how to support expecting and new moms all across the entirety of their journey and i know a lot of you listeners out there who are on different parts of that entire journey in that

entire spectrum can resonate with parts of this conversation so i encourage you all to go and check carla's book out it is a fantastic one and i hope that she does well with it switching gears a little bit next week is western states week i will be out there supporting a number of athletes i hope to see all of you out there if you do happen to see me give me a high five tell me what you want to see upcoming and the podcast it is always a wonderful week to see the entirety of the trail running community rally around one fantastic amazing race i wish the very best of luck to all the athletes out there that are going to have to navigate the snow and the heat all in one race it's going to be a really good one hope everybody tunes into the amazing coverage there that is it for today folks and as always we will see you out on the trails you