FAB (Fitness After Birth) Stories - Sam Grant

This week's FAB mum is Sam Grant.  She is featured here as the first in our series of FAB (Fitness After Birth) Mum stories, where we celebrate mums who are actively embracing motherhood with Ready Steady Mums.
http://readysteadymums.blogspot.com/2011/08/fab-fitness-after-birth-stories.html

Sam is mum to Isla, 10 months, and loves running. She’s diligent and determined to reach her goal of running road-races again. Here is her story.

Sam Grant with Isla http://goo.gl/JFSmo

Sam: I've only been through childbirth once but I think I had a very good experience - 4 hours or so from start to finish. Afterwards I was proud of myself; it's one of the biggest things you can do in life. For 6 weeks I was pretty wiped out. I didn’t expect my body to feel so ‘done in’ - my pelvic floor and abs had completely disappeared. I needed time to rest and properly recover from pregnancy and birth.

Finding the time and energy to exercise was difficult but to give myself a reason to get out there and train, I put my name down for a 10k race. I focussed on my abs and core too – one of the things I and love about the Ready Steady Mums programme is that it has lots of abs exercises which aren’t sit-ups.

I’m finding it great to exercise with other mums. It’s also good for my baby to sit and play with other babies when we’re training in the park. I tune out from focussing on my baby 100% and just let my brain refresh. Of course I tune back in when I get home, but it does you good to switch off for a little while.

I think I feared that having a baby would be the end of my own active physical life. I did lose confidence but gradually I’ve got my body back and now I'm pretty fit again. For me, the best thing about getting active again has been proving that I can. Thanks to Ready Steady Mums I’ve now entered my first marathon. It will be a month after my baby's first birthday :-)