Pregnancy, the hardest race of all: 'If miscarriage is so common, why does no one talk about it?'

Getting pregnant gave one runner a licence to relax – then, just before the 12-week scan, she lost the baby. She explains how she coped with her feelings of grief, anger and betrayal, and talks to Olympian Liz Yelling, who went through a similar experience

“There’s no heartbeat,” the nurse said.

Earlier that year, I had finally accepted that my 40th birthday was not going to magically go away. Nature was not to be messed with and time was running out if we wanted to start a family. A couple of months before, chest issues and a health scare forced me to opt out of my big race, a 100km alpine challenge. As a non-running runner, I had developed multiple variations of talking about my health issues – most of which were engineered to make the scare sound like a niggle. I didn’t want to appear weak or fragile and didn’t let the lack of training eat up too much of my mental resolve. However, the night before the race, fear started creeping in as I was staring at my neatly packed race bag: what if my heart gave up in the middle of the night, up in the misty mountains? Was a race a risk worth taking? Through teary eyes, I could also picture a life worth living – one with a cabin in the woods and children running around. With a heavy heart, I resolved to let go of the dream of finishing my first 100km before the adventure of motherhood.

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from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://ift.tt/1H8hoM3