What To Expect When Expecting

When Randy and I first found out I was pregnant, we had a host of emotions: ecstasy, excitement and terror, as any first-time parents would have.

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As an athlete I was also afraid of what pregnancy would mean for my body. Most of my time and energy during my adult life had gone into training for peak fitness for climbing.

One of the first questions I posed to my OB-midwife was, “Can I still climb?”

As I settled into my new pregnant body, I learned to love having more purpose for it than just use and abuse in sport. I started to think of how to nourish my body instead of just how to use it, but I still wanted to climb.

I started blogging about climbing while pregnant mainly because I could find so little information on the topic. Within a day of publishing the blog I had heard from dozens of women around the world, including two doctors, all of whom had climbed or were climbing while pregnant. The doctors not only offered tangible medical advice, but also came up with the idea to conduct a survey, asking women a variety of pregnancy-related and climbing-specific questions. A total of 339 women responded and helped produce some really interesting and helpful results (see sidebar) that I published on my blog in March 2016. Based on these results, my own experience and the experience of others, I believe that climbing can fit into both a healthy pregnancy and parenthood.

CLIMBING DURING PREGNANCY