Running and tiredness/ sleep deprivation

Before having a baby I would usually expect to be on top form before I'd go for a run. Had less than 9 hours sleep? starting a cold? near the end of a cold? had to get up earlier than normal? Had a broken night? Don't run, wait until you feel better.

Now that I never get an UNbroken night, I have realised that actually it's possible to run no problem even if you're not feeling entirely on top form. I should add the usual disclaimer that I don't try to run particularly fast and I'm relaxed about stopping for drink and photo breaks...but nevertheless I would never have expected that I'd be able to train relatively regularly (I'm aiming for 3 runs per week) despite feeding the baby every 3-ish hours around the clock.

I actually (shh, whisper...this is tempting fate) feel relatively ok despite Angel's comprehensive feeding demands. There are a variety of ways that parents try to deal with babies waking up at night, many of which are more or less controversial, and infant sleep is a MASSIVE topic that so much has been written about: one of those things that you just don't realise until you have a baby...see blogs like http://www.sweetmadeleine.ca/2013/10/14/here-are-some-lies-people-tell-you-about-infant-sleep/ for a run through some of the issues if you're interested!

My husband and I have gone for the "just have her in bed with you" sleeping option which works wonderfully for us: Angel can wake me up for feeds without needing to cry (in the early days I was so sensitive to her that I'd be awake as soon as she started stirring, whereas nowadays I've got a bit more relaxed and she sometimes has to do some hearty kicking), I can latch her on to feed and fall straight back to sleep, she goes straight back to sleep once she's fed and I very rarely have to actually get out of bed during the night. As I've got more used to it I've started to lose track of how many feeds she's woken for, and most wonderfully of all, I feel ok in the mornings. I can't recommend co-sleeping enough (as some friends of mine who've had babies recently can vouch for...but clearly, everyone can choose where they want their baby to sleep themselves) and it's ridiculous that the NHS routinely advise against it because it's supposedly dangerous (it's not, but you do have to follow certain guidelines to reduce risks: https://www.nct.org.uk/parenting/co-sleeping-safely-your-baby).

So in general, I feel pretty good in myself at the moment, but this Friday was a massive exception, which was NOT Angel's fault. She was sleeping beautifully beside me at 11pm on Thursday night, my husband on the other side, while I was still awake reading my book and very close to drifting off...when I thought "what is that strange crackling noise? And is there a weird chemical smell in here? hmm...it's probably nothing, but I'd better check."

Thank goodness I did - as soon as I reached the kitchen which was in a cloud of evil-smelling smoke, I remembered that I'd put a load of breast-pump attachments on to sterilise in boiling water on the stove top after finishing dinner that evening...at about 8.30pm. And promptly forgotten about them. The pan was a mass of molten, boiling and strangely crackling plastic, though luckily no flames had yet broken out, and in my horror and haste to move it off the heat and throw open all the windows I moved the pan onto the laminate kitchen worktop, which will never be the same again.

Once I'd sorted the immediate threat I had a crisis about how I could have let something like that happen with a baby in the house...while said baby continued to sleep peacefully. (Luckily our bedroom is at the far end of the flat from the kitchen so she was pretty protected from the smoke). Altogether, I was up very late and then woken at 6am because the bedroom was boiling hot - having left all the windows open to clear the smell, we'd forgotten to turn off the central heating which had kicked in!

So altogether I was not feeling my best on Friday, but I had planned to do a longer run, and determined not to let a little sleep deprivation put me off. I set off with the Maclaren at about 4pm with the aim of covering 10km and also popping into Mothercare to see if I could replace the melted breast pump attachments. This meant abandoning my usual routes (either the Southwark Park one I have blogged about, or Greenwich) and heading to Peckham instead.




The great thing about running with a buggy, as well as being able to take your baby, is that you have scope for stopping at the shops as well without it cramping your style...on this run I impulse bought a quarter watermelon and there was no problem carrying it shoved under the buggy for the final 4 km. My trip to Mothercare was fruitless, but it gave me a nice mid-run breather.

I have a quiet route into Peckham via Meeting House Lane, and then from Peckham Library I was followed the Surrey Canal path all the way to Burgess Park where a funfair was setting up across the lake.

London's parks are really wonderful. People fish in this lake, and there's an amazing children's playground that I can't wait to bring Angel to when she's old enough to appreciate it. On a Friday afternoon pre-bank holiday weekend the park was full of families playing, kite flying and cycling, couples walking, colleagues drinking beer after work, and groups of teenagers relaxing post-GCSE exams.Additionally on this run I discovered the old lime kiln which apparently was used during London's rapid growth in the 19th century.

On the topic of London's rapid growth, this view from the park is wonderful for showcasing London's changing housing fashions...the block on the left looks EXACTLY like our flat, as a lot of current new builds do. The middle one is super modern, while the right hand block is classic 1960s/70s housing estate. (My husband is studying a Masters in housing, and researched an essay on the history and controversial regeneration of the Heygate and Aylesbury estates in this area, which makes me take more notice of housing than I used to).

By winding around Burgess park before returning home by the same route I'd come by (I could have experimented by coming home via the Old Kent Road but decided not to for two reasons: it might have cut my route too short and stopped me reaching my 10km goal; and I try to protect Angel from the worst of London's terrible air quality by keeping her off congested roads with lots of micro-particle spewing buses and polluting HGVs, since reading this article about it) I reached my 10km goal in 1 hour 17 minutes, according to my Runkeeper app (the "pause" function of which is very unreliable, to the extent that I don't know if that time estimate is likely to err on the side of generosity or caution!). I still felt sleepy, and my kitchen counter was still ruined, but the post-run endorphins had certainly cheered me up. Plus the baby had got in a solid hour of naptime, which as all parents know is a very positive outcome!

Evening training, or, how is it possible to organise evenings with a baby?!

Most people with babies will tell you evenings are the most difficult time. Children are getting tired and grumpy, adults are getting tired and grumpy. There's the main meal of the day to cook, eat and clean up, and there's bedtime to tackle (often an extremely emotive issue!). Plus you've got to finish work, get home, and crucially stop stressing about it (I'm trying not to think about how we'll manage once I go back to teaching after maternity leave). So, already a lot of pressure on the evening, which unfortunately is ALSO my favourite time to run.

It's not that I'm not a "morning person"...I can go running in the mornings, and occasionally I've even managed it at 6am before work. It's lovely to be out on a sunny June morning before most people are awake. But it's also lovely running at the end of the day, when it's a great time to wind down and process everything that's been going on. I also feel like my body is most energetic and read for exercise at about 5 or 6pm...although that could just be psychological as I'm sure I've read multiple contradictory articles about the "best" times of day to work out.

Until having our baby my husband and I were pretty relaxed about dinner time and happy to eat at 8 or 9pm so that one or both of us could fit in a run first. Maybe this is left over from the fact that we met in Rome...I used to work teaching evening classes so I'd finish at 8:15 or 9pm, THEN make my way to his flat on the metro and bus, and THEN we'd start cooking dinner, so we were often eating at 11pm. It's the south European way...

And up until now, Angel has been a very late-sleeping baby so there hasn't been particular pressure to get her to bed early. In the early months she used to be an evening crier several nights a week on average - we'd do our best to get her to sleep when our friends' babies slept, at 7, but no matter what relaxing activities we tried (bath, massage, story, feed...) from about 8 - 10.30pm was her cry time and we just had to comfort her as best we could and wait it out. She grew out of that at about 3 months thank goodness, and since then she's kept up a late nap at 7pm which means she's a chilled and lovely evening companion until we all go to bed together around 10.30.

However, now at 5 months it feels like we're in a period of flux. I think she's starting to drop the last nap of the day and need bed a bit earlier - it's moved from 10, to 9pm and this week around 8 she's started getting shrieky and rubbing her eyes, clear signals that it's bedtime.

Additionally I'm looking ahead now that she's nearly 6 months to starting baby-led weaning. It's key with this approach that meals are eating together so that the baby learns to eat along with the rest of the family...so that means we'll need to have dinner early enough that she's not too tired, and be ready to put her to bed soon afterwards. This all points to the need for more organisation in the evenings: I'm thinking we need to be eating dinner no later than 7 to catch Angel in a good window, assuming that she's not having the late nap. That means correspondingly getting the cooking done a bit earlier. Now 7pm sounds pretty reasonable, but what if she starts needing to go to bed even earlier? I know babies who are ready for their night's sleep at 7 or even 6.30pm! That would involve major habit-change for both me and my husband, juggling all our other commitments (work/exercise/shopping/socialising...) so that we're home and cooking earlier.

And this is already sounding stressful while I'm off on maternity leave...let along when I'm back working full days of teaching with all the marking, planning and admin that goes along with it! But I know there are a lot of people out there with more children, more stressful jobs, longer work hours and more commitments than us. How do they do it?

Yesterday was a Sunday, so a bit more manageable than a weekday to begin with. Angel and I woke up from a nap at about 5pm, and I was planning a buggy run before it got towards dinner time, while my husband studied. However, just as I was getting my trainers on, the heavens opened. I briefly considered going anyway, in waterproofs. Angel would be fine in the Maclaren with rain cover, but my feet would get wet, and that is no fun. As an alternative, I decided to get dinner (mushroom risotto) ready first, and see if the rain eased up enough for a run a little later.

Sure enough, it did, but what with one thing and another (cooking, nappy changes, getting the pushchair down the stairs...) it was 6.50pm before I set off. "But I want us to start eating at 7!" I told my husband, who sensibly pointed out that I wanted to run and I should do it.

So, I followed my usual route to Southwark Park, as detailed in my last blog post. The rain held off and I made good time with the buggy...5km in 33 minutes according to Runkeeper, which is perfectly respectable while pushing a 7.5 kilo buggy containing a 7+ kilo baby. The evening light was lovely, the streets quiet after the downpour. I felt energised, refreshed and happy...only to notice about 10 minutes in that the motion had proved irresistible to Angel, who'd decided to reinstate that 7pm nap, thus rendering all my planning, scheming and agonising totally null and void. The one thing I'm learning about babies is that you just CAN'T control them!

What can you do? ultimately I had a great run, my husband and I had dinner, and Angel got to bed, just a bit later than planned. If anyone has any tips or magic tricks for how to organise the evenings so that everything gets done and the baby gets to bed at a consistent bedtime, PLEASE post them in the comments!

The run, or, hidden beauty in New Cross

My partner and I moved to this area at the end of August. We didn't have a huge amount of CHOICE about the area we moved to, since we wanted to stay in London and buy through shared ownership, and the options were limited. We consider it huge good fortune that out of the few shared ownership developments that were available and that we were eligible for, we got a place in south east london a 5-10 minute cycle away from both of our places of work. London with no commuting? awesome!

I try to remind myself about that good fortune every time I leave the house sweaty, flustered, with a screaming baby and unbrushed hair and hear a "Hi Ms King!" pipe up from an ex or current student. If I'm feeling good, then walking around the area at 3.30pm on a schoolday makes me feel like a celebrity. On a bad day, it has me cowering round corners and crossing the street to avoid eye contact. (Sometimes I'm just not up to the "Yes, this is my baby...how's English going?" conversations).

Anyway, we started the process of buying our flat before it was finished and we occasionally used to rock up on our bikes at the weekend to check how the building work was going and explore. It was on one of those excursions that we discovered the cycle path that today is my favourite training route when I go out for buggy runs.

Leaving our flat, you turn away from the Old Kent Road and head towards the chimney of the waste recycling centre which looms over the New Cross skyline. First of all, you come to a little undeveloped park, bounded on the west by the Overground railway tracks.

It may not look like much, but it's a welcome little patch of green in a very urban area and is a lifesaver to the dogowners of New Cross. It has a sparkly view of Canary Wharf to the north and the Shard to the west...and on a recent sunny afternoon I spotted not one but two families having makeshift barbecues there. (Maybe disposable barbecues aren't the best thing for the grass or the environment...but they are fun and it's nice that people with no gardens have a space to enjoy).

Continuing up the cycle path you come to the super urban/post industrial landscape of the waste recycling centre on your right, while Millwall football stadium looms on the left. They've just opened a new stretch of cycle path which leads from here to South Bermondsey station, with spectacular views of the Gherkin.

Following the cycle path another 800 metres or so along the Overground tracks, you just have to cross Rotherhithe New Road and navigate a short section or busy road near Surrey Quays station and you arrive at the leafy oasis of Southwark Park. It's about 2 km from our house to the park, which means once there I can choose to prolong the run (over 5k) by going all the way to the river at King's Stairs (The Angel pub is a favourite when Mario and I walk/cycle this route and want some refreshment) or keep to a shorter 5 km route by going once round the lake at Southwark Park, then home.

I know a lot of people choose to leave the city before they have children because they think children will have a better quality of life somewhere greener. I grew up in London too, so I have no problem with my daughter having a city childhood, but I know it's important that we make the effort to find quieter, greener, less polluted spaces in the city for Angel to explore.

The buggy: running with the Maclaren

As you can see, there will be brand names in this post, both in the interest of being specific but also because I'm hoping the good folks at Maclaren might think about sponsoring me for the run, since so many of my training miles will be accompanied by my trusty Techno XLR. However, far from "you must buy a Maclaren" the message of this blog is intended to be "you DON'T need a super expensive special running buggy with massive tyres". It's an anticonsumerist message rather than a brand promotion. Let me explain...

We dithered for weeks over which pushchair to buy before Angel arrived. I knew I might not use it very much at first (I have several devoted babywearing friends who'd told me "I didn't use the pram for the first 6 weeks/3 months/6 months," and I was lucky enough to be lent a Moby stretchy wrap (and shown how to tie it...very important skill) which was invaluable for the first months). However, I was convinced we should have a pushchair/pram available to us for a range of reasons - for outings where it was necessary to have somewhere we could safely put the baby down, and because I'd been told pushing the baby along is a great way to help the baby sleep, among others. Once I started my research, though, I very quickly got confused - there's so many to choose from, there were so many different requirements to consider, and a lot of the prices are just through the roof (especially if you do your research in John Lewis).

We live in a 2nd floor flat with no lift, so it was essential that we have something light(ish) that I could carry up to the flat on my own. (We started negotiating to buy this flat when I was about 6 weeks pregnant, so you could say we should have known better, but we were buying through Shared Ownership which means choice was relatively limited, and everything else about our flat is perfect...if anyone is interested in shared ownership we highly recommend it and you can look at flats here https://www.sharetobuy.com/). We don't have a car so we DIDN'T need a "travel system" with car seat fitting etc. We take a lot of public transport, so we needed something manouvre-ble and easy to fold. We wanted something suitable from birth that would also last a long time (into toddler years). And then, I would really like something I could run with. That was the confounding factor as special running buggies tend to have big air-filled tyres, take up a lot of space and not fold up small, thus conflicting with our other requirements.

Oh, and yet another thing - as a tall woman I was keen to find a buggy with extendable handles so I don't have to hunch over. Not that I was being fussy or anything...

So what with all of these conflicting requirements, we ended up delaying choosing a buggy until I was about 38 weeks pregnant and it started to feel more urgent (although admittedly, we did and still do use the slings so much that actually we didn't need a pram until a good few weeks in). When I started looking with more intent, I was quite quickly directed to the Maclaren Techno XLR due to my extendable-handles requirement. Additionally, I was predisposed to want a Maclaren because friends with toddlers had told me it was a good pushchair for older babies...plus it was LIGHT: 7.5 kilos, when we already knew that it was difficult to find anything under 10. It was also substantially cheaper than a lot of other prams. We got the carrycot add-on to ensure it was comfortable for a new born baby, although technically you can take a newborn in it without one...but they'd be outward, "world" facing which I think we'd have felt edgy about. We used the carrycot until about 4.5 months, and she loves being outward facing and sitting up a bit more now.

So that was how we CHOSE the Maclaren, but how did we start RUNNING with it? The discovery came about, like most great discoveries, through exigency...I was hotfooting it to a buggy fitness class sometime in March, when I realised I was going to be really late. I broke into a run and swiftly realised that it really wasn't as uncomfortable as I'd have assumed. From there it was a small step to venturing out for an official run with the buggy...and a feeling of freedom! It's hard enough to motivate yourself to get out running at the best of times, and when you have to co-ordinate with your partner to get home to take the baby and ensure that she's not going to get hungry while you're out...it raises additional barriers. Instead, if you can just take off with the buggy, a run becomes a lovely way to break up a maternity leave day.

Given that my pace is fairly slow (7-8 km/hour as measured by the Runkeeper app) and that the paths are fairly smooth (this is urban running, but then South London councils are not always known for their excellent road maintenance) running with the Maclaren works absolutely fine. Additionally, it has a couple of the features that my sister-in-law (who knows a huge amount about everything to do with babies) told me are required in a running buggy: not the big, air-filled tyres, but it has a wrist strap for safety (so pram and baby can't entirely escape from me on a downhill) and you can lock the front wheels so they don't steer all over the place. The main problem so far is that one's arms get rather cramped due to having to keep them in one position on the handle...so we tend to do quite a lot of one-armed pushing to give the other one a bit of a break.

I'm now very comfortable running with my buggy, and Angel is very comfortable dozing in it while I do so. The main challenge is getting it, along with a 7+ kilo baby, up and down the stairs before and after.

The challenge!

I'm starting this blog to write about my training for the Royal Parks Half Marathon (https://royalparkshalf.com/) which I'm running to raise money for Sense UK (https://www.sense.org.uk/) on 9th October. I will be doing this training with/around my baby who is 5 months old today and who, for the purposes of discretion and privacy on the internet, on this blog will be known as Angel. (To be fair, I call her Angel probably more often than I do by her real name, especially when we're alone together during the day).



My fundraising page is here https://www.justgiving.com/Mary-King4


This will also give me the chance to blog about things I want to write about related to my maternity leave, which is nice as I've been struggling recently with my lack of a blog on which to express myself, comment on topical issues or simply vent. Since I was 21 I've rarely been more than a few months without a blog, though some have been more thoroughly exploited than others...I've had blogs for my round the world travels, my life in Italy, my experiences as a student teacher and as a qualified teacher, and I now have blogs for different classes that I try to get my students to use for their writing (I'm a secondary English teacher and periodically find myself really inspired by the ways new media can promote teenagers' reading, writing and general cultural experience, usually following training courses at inspiring places like the IoE or BFI. However, blogging as a teacher is REALLY difficult, I have found, due to concerns about privacy and professionalism. This blog is openly linked to my real name and identity which means I will not be commenting on any specifics related to my job).


Nevertheless, I've been a bit confused about how to fit myself into what feels like quite a saturated corner of the internet (not sure about this metaphor, but I'm sticking with it; we're imagining the internet as a tea towel, bloggers as water), namely that of the parent bloggers. I feel like most of what I might want to say about parenting a small baby is already being said by Abi at http://www.likereallifeblog.com/. A lot of my thoughts on breastfeeding have probably already been explored by http://canibreastfeedinit.uk/. And then, parenting is so emotive and inspires such strong opinions (although I fully believe that the so-called "mommy wars" are invented by commercial interests to divide us and thus create a more impressionable market, and we should resist this) so I've been considering with trepidation the possibility of entering into the fray myself (argh! new metaphor! now the internet is a battleground) and inadvertently offending people and having to spend ages discussing in the comments whether or not my post was too judgemental on parenting styles...so this running/training thing seems helpful in giving my blogging a specific focus and direction.



Anyway, I suppose the main thing to explain here is what inspired the race idea and why I am so confident that I'll be capable of running a half marathon 10 months post partum! I've been running on and off since I was about 16, inspired in great part by my amazing parents who, despite being in their 60s now, both run far more consistently than I do. While I was pregnant I was determined to stay fit and found I was able to keep training right up to the end of my pregnancy, due to my considerable good luck in escaping the joint or pelvic pain that renders a lot of pregnant women less mobile. I still managed a few (slow) runs after I'd gone on maternity leave at 36 weeks (which I was pretty smug about until about 36 hours into my 48 hour labour when I realised my fitness level did not seem to be helping me to get the baby out in any way...). I started running again very slowly when Angel was 6 weeks old (slightly covertly prior to consulting the doctor but I felt up to it which seems to be the main thing) and then had a revelation a few weeks ago when I realised I could run WITH the pushchair! No more needing to wait for my husband to get home from work and tank the baby up on milk before I could get out...suddenly regular runs could be incorporated so much more easily into my routine! Better still, the three of us could go running together as a family.


So having re-started my running, I wanted a goal and asked my friend Vic (who runs a lot more than me) about ideas for a race we could do towards the end of my maternity leave as a challenge...and here we are. More on my buggy, the race, the cause, Vic and many other things in future posts!.