Not many athletes will openly admit to a sudden or even mildly surprising improvement in performance. Especially late in their career, when they’re expected to be slowing down and not speeding up. Not without a good reason anyway.
Because these days that often points towards something more unreasonable. Any athlete that is defying their age or expected level of performance invariably arouses some suspicion, and if it breaks some trend and looks too good to be true then sadly it sometimes is. And not something that is normally celebrated.
There is, however, one perfectly natural exception: this suddenly increasing trend of female distance runners producing mildly surprising performances, late in their career, with no sign whatsoever of slowing down. For many years the reason wasn’t openly admitted, or even understood, because the female distance runner and her demanding training schedule wasn’t always seen as perfectly compatible with a recent pregnancy and motherhood and the sound of a crying baby.
Of course there is no more reasonable reason than reproduction itself, and an increasing number of female distance runners aren’t only more accepting of motherhood but actually embracing it, and preferably sooner rather than later. It’s another sign too of the ever-changing perceptions of women in sport, and the breaking down of whatever lasting barriers of society were somehow placed in their way.
Closing fast
Although don’t just take my word for it (for obvious reasons). Not long after crossing the finish line of the Dublin Marathon last Monday, Maria McCambridge was embraced by her husband Gary and their three-year-old son Dylan, and they certainly had lots to celebrate. At age 39, and five years after running her first marathon, McCambridge improved her lifetime best by over a minute, her 2:34:19 just four seconds short of outright victory, as she was also closing fast on Kenya’s Esther Macharia.
Given the windy conditions her effort was worth something faster, and there’s little doubt McCambridge can improve again, the 2016 Rio Olympics now well within her reach, even if she’ll be 41 by then. What is certain is that taking a season out in 2011 to give birth to her first child in no way slowed her down, and may actually have helped speed her up.
Indeed the second best Irish woman last Monday, Pauline Curley, would agree. Six years ago, also aged 39, she improved her marathon best to qualify for the Beijing Olympics, her young son Emmet often riding his bicycle alongside her during training runs. Curley ran 2:48:02 last Monday and, at age 45, that’s hardly slowing down.
One of the biggest prizes on the track this summer was also won by a woman in her 40s, and mother of two, when Britain’s Jo Pavey ran arguably the race of her life to win the 10,000 metres at the European Championships in Zurich. She’d given birth to daughter Emily only 11 months earlier, and Rio also looks well within Pavey’s reach, even if she’ll be 42 by then.
Not that this is a recent phenomenon. For many years now women distance runners have been coming back from childbirth faster or stronger than before, including Sonia O’Sullivan, who won her Olympic silver medal in Sydney a year after giving birth to her first daughter, Ciara, and continued to run some lifetime bests after the birth of her second daughter, Sophie, in 2001. Paula Radcliffe also won the 2007 New York Marathon just nine months after giving birth to her first daughter, Isla, and that was seen as a ground-breaking run for distance running mothers of any ability.
There is still some debate – or rather lack of proper research – as to how pregnancy may help female distance runners in the long run. Red blood cell count does increase, improving endurance and oxygen capacity, as do levels of growth hormone, and muscle ligaments can also be relaxed, perhaps allowing for a longer stride. Yet these usually wear off within a few weeks of giving birth, so any lasting benefits may actually be purely psychological.
Gruesome process
That didn’t stop some of the old Eastern Bloc countries, back in the 1980s, from experimenting with what was termed “abortion doping”. In 1988, the IOC actually staged a conference on the subject, fearful that some countries were inducing pregnancy in female distance runners and then had them abort the foetuses, in the hope of boosting performance. Part of the reasoning behind that gruesome process was that female distance runners couldn’t possibly train full-time while also looking after a baby.
Thankfully for all involved things have changed. Much of the publicity surrounding tomorrow’s New York Marathon is the fact 10 of the women’s elite field are mothers, including the race favourite, Mary Keitany from Kenya.
Last month, Keitany won the Great North Run half-marathon in a lifetime best of 65:39, breaking Radcliffe’s course record, just over a year since giving birth to her first daughter, Samantha. One of the athletes she’ll need to beat tomorrow is fellow Kenyan Edna Kiplagat, the two-time World Champion, who not only has two children of her own but has also adopted three more.
For McCambridge, meanwhile, it probably wasn’t unreasonable to expect more than just nine Irish men to finish ahead of her in Dublin last Monday, none of whom could break 2:20. She was actually closing on them, too, all the more surprising as men of that age, in their early 30s, and even without any potential benefits of childbirth, should definitely be speeding up and not slowing down.
