LOSING THE PREGNANCY FLAB

One great benefit of breastfeeding is that I was able to eat like a pig. Problem is that when we stopped, after two and a half years, I probably kept eating for two. Combine that with pushing past 45 and before long I was over 70kg. It was when I was going to have to go up a size that I realized walking three times a week just wasn’t enough anymore. Lucky for me, I overheard two colleagues talking about doing a duathlon. “What’s a duathlon?” I asked. When I learned that I could walk and ride – not run and there was no swimming, I thought maybe I could do it. So, my partner borrowed a bike and February 08 I did my first REAL Women Duathlon.

The first one took me about an hour and a half. That was walking 3.5ks, riding 10ks and walking a further 1.5ks. It was hard, but I finished and that was the start of it. I did two more REAL Women Duathlons that summer and a Sarah Ulmer (SUB) Molenberg 5k walk. Then winter came and the events were over. I hadn’t lost any weight, but I did feel fitter and I’d started to try and jog a bit. Winter stews and short days with little hope of getting home in time to walk around the lagoon made the onset of winter that much gloomier.

Then I found the XTERRA Auckland Trail Series. It was a leap to commit to a running event and one that was mixed gender, but I had to do something. Walking and even riding wasn't bringing the weight down. I decided to try one. I registered for the short course, of course, which was to be about 5ks. I knew I could do that. What I hadn’t foreseen was how hard it would be to do hills. But running through the bush, on my own (because everyone else had taken off) was great. The bush has always been a healing place for me, so it sort of offset some of the physically hard part of it. I had to walk a lot still, up the hills, but I finished and was hooked. One event a month seemed manageable with fulltime work and a daughter and very little time to train. I kept going all through winter and did all 6! To celebrate, I capped it off with a mid-course 11k XTERRA Rotorua in December.

But I still had only lost 1-2kgs! People kept telling me ‘but muscle weighs more than fat.’ Was this how it was going to have to be from now on? Was I going to have to keep up the running, keep on doing these events and training for them?