Pregnancy is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, physically and mentally. I’ve run 2 ultramarathons, 3 marathons, competed in a powerlifting competition, skied down double black diamonds through the woods, completed a degree in chemical engineering with over a 3.7 GPA, and still, I think pregnancy was the hardest thing I’ve done.
First, that first trimester hits you like a semi truck. The nausea was brutal – every day I struggled to find the motivation to do basic things because feeling sick sucks. I could hold it at bay by nibbling on something constantly (my theory is that the tiny little embryo wanted a nice constant blood sugar and supply of nutrients). Then you layer on the fatigue with nausea, and good luck getting anything done. I was soooo grateful to not be chasing around another little baby at the same time, so good luck to my future self who will need to do that!
Sleep is no longer restful when you’re pregnant, which was really hard for me considering I got great sleep before (just struggled to fall asleep). A daily nap felt more like a necessity than a luxury. And that’s just first trimester fatigue, not even third trimester when you have the extra body weight and big belly on your frame!
Thankfully though, the second trimester did give me a break. The nausea subsided about 14 weeks, magically some days I woke up and no longer felt nauseous. Truthfully, there were some days I was wondering if I was imagining the nausea… until those beautiful mornings I woke up feeling normal again, then I knew I wasn’t imagining it. Although I was still tired, it wasn’t to the extreme of the first couple months. I was energized enough to plan an unintentional “babymoon” to Europe – we hiked the Swiss Alps and then Dolomites! The baby bump really started popping when we were on our two week vacation, and it was also a fun way to take pictures to announce the pregnancy on social media.
And then I settled into the third trimester. This is where the physiological trends really took off. My resting heart rate was climbing. My stress levels were climbing. My body battery wasn’t reaching 100 anymore.
But when you understand what’s going on in the body, it adds up. You have 50% more blood volume, so it tracks that your heart has to pump 50% more – it’s not like your heart magically gets stronger in the few months preceding your third trimester. Instead, it has to pump 50% faster instead. So instead of my normal resting heart rate of ~40 bpm, it climbed to 60 bpm by the end of my pregnancy. I conceived in May 2025 and delivered 1/23/26, and you can see my resting heartrate climb gradually starting in July. It’s a surprisingly linear trend.
My sleep decline was the hardest on me though. There was no rest, or so it felt. My stress levels were so high that my body hardly registered any recovery while “sleeping.” Granted, it wasn’t the most restful sleep anyway with the discomfort, the quickly filling bladder, the extra effort to turn over in bed, the excess heat.
But what makes pregnancy so hard? There are no rest days. When whatever you’re doing in physical training gets to be too much, you can always back off and train lighter or take a rest day or ten. Not with pregnancy. There’s no undoing it (ideally). There’s no rest day, even if you literally stay in bed all day. A silver lining to this struggle bus though – it forces you to slow down. It forces you to stop the extra work, to take more naps on the couch, to watch a little more TV instead of trying to fit in a workout or run another errand. This is great preparation for first the newborn stage, and second for becoming a mother. Your body needs the same slow pace (likely slower) to recover postpartum. Your whole world needs to slow down to make space for your sweet little baby.
And thankfully, once baby joins you, your body starts to return to normal pretty fast. I was amazed (and so so grateful) for how quickly my sleep quality returned. I hit 100% body battery within a week or two postpartum — for the first time in 5 months!! I almost cried when I saw that. And even with several sleep interruptions to feed our tiny baby boy, my body was happily resting without the added burden of funneling energy to the placenta and internal baby… just a moderate amount to breastmilk instead.
So just as everything climbed, climbed, climbed through the second and third trimesters, they fell back down even faster postpartum. And now, 6 months postpartum, I am officially back to my pre-pregnancy weight, mostly back to pre-pregnancy fitness (minus the marathon training), and still successfully exclusively breastfeeding baby boy!
These sweet babies make it so worth it! I am thankful for a healthy body that could grow my sweet baby boy, give a healthy baby, and help me recover quickly despite having an unplanned C-section. One day I’ll write another post on how glad I am that I stayed active during pregnancy as difficult as it was and how it helped my recovery.
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