#140: Ironman pregnancy deferrals & other things

In defense of being hard on yourself.

Jun 19, 2025

issue #140: June 18, 2025

Well, you all, it finally happened. I missed a Wednesday. They say you should be kind to yourself, but honestly I think most people could stand to be a little harder on themselves. So, we’ll put this in the fail column and move on.

The problem, yes, is childcare but it’s also that I’m flying to Victoria (Canada) tomorrow for a big live panel on women’s sports on Friday. If you’re in Victoria, you should come by. The panel will also be the launch of our brand new women’s sports podcast — which will be live with this first episode next week, June 26. More to come on that, plus I made a podcast graphic, so of course you should subscribe.

And, next week, we’ll also be up at Western States — and putting on a FREE women’s trailrunning speed-networking lunch with the Women’s Trailrunning Fund as part of TrailCon on Wednesday, June 25 at noon.

So, uh, things have been busy.

- Kelly

Pregnancy deferrals and other questions you’ve had

A lot of people have asked me about how Ironman’s pregnancy deferral policy worked, since it seems not too many people have actually used it yet. (And 100% I knew more about it than the customer service person who responded to my request.) So figured it was a good week to talk about a few pregnancy deferral and pregnancy training details:

Ironman’s pregnancy deferral: I emailed the general race director email for IM California last fall and asked to defer. That email got passed onto a customer service person, who then asked for a doctor’s note — which I found understandable but slightly annoying, so I sent them a pic of the ultrasound because I was being mildly a bitch and because I didn’t feel like going back and forth with the doctors. Customer service person then said I had to pick to either defer to 2025 or 2026. I picked 2025.

Because I had already done a regular transfer from Placid to California last summer (when I had just found out I was pregnant and couldn’t get off the couch and was trying to decide if I was going to race), I do not now have the option to change my mind again. Which is completely understandable. So I’ll either do California this October or I’ll just DNS (or maybe I’ll just do the swim since it’s driving distance from my house). Right now, it’s looking like I will not be doing the full thing, since I can’t even run yet.

You can see all the details of their policy here. Honestly, I think it’s a fair enough policy, but it is hard to predict whether you want to defer one year or two years.

A couple of other pregnancy deferral policies I’ve found out about:

UTMB: Is two years for any UTMB brand race, if you’re already registered. But, for a lot of us, getting the stones (ie. lottery tickets) to put in the lottery is the harder part. Stones are only good for two years. Since I earned mine in the spring of last year (right before shit went down), I’m putting them in the lottery this December, before they expire, to try to enter for summer 2026.
Western States: If you’ve gotten into Western States, they actually let you defer to any year in the future, no time limit on guaranteed entry. Which I only heard about when one of the pros got pregnant this year and her spot rolled down.
A lot of smaller or medium-size races will actually let you roll your spot over if you just contact them. The Dipsea here (oldest trail race in the country) is one where you have to re-qualify every year — and it was pretty clear there was a zero percent chance I was going to be able to run 12 weeks after the C-section (much less run a technical all-out trail race), so I emailed them and they said it was cool, they’d let me back in next year. So. Just ask.

Training & recovery

I have a much longer post written about this, but again, a lot of people have asked — largely because there’s so little research on training during or after pregnancy, many of the official recommendations are stupid and inadequate for athletes, and so much of what pros are doing is based on anecdotal sharing.

My top line for pregnant athletes to know is this: 1. There is an increasing amount of evidence to support maintaining whatever level of activity you were doing before (including strength training, more volume/hours than the official ACOG recommendations, and hard efforts or speed work); 2. you’ll probably have to modify by feel and take more recovery; 3. increasingly, researchers are recognizing one of my pet peeves: that risk has to be balanced against benefit — and that includes the benefit to you as a human person! (ie. if biking is the only exercise you can do, then the benefits of health/being outside/mental stress have to at least be counted against the likelihood of and whatever risk or potential downside there is to a fall).

All that being said, I probably trained too little. Partially because life. But I was at the Female Athlete Conference two weeks ago and one of the presenters was talking about some preliminary research that suggests excessive de-training during pregnancy (ie. getting too out of shape) was correlated with increased injury rates in return to exercise. And I was like YES, this is my problem right now! And no amount of telling me to “be kind to myself” will stop that from being my problem.

July/August: I did almost nothing because I felt awful and largely did not get off the couch. By nothing I mean literally: somewhere between zero to four hours per week. Someone at the time asked how I trained while we were in Paris, and I said, ‘oh I didn’t.’

September-early December: Averaged 7-9 hours/week (counting hiking!). With some super light weeks because of travel and illness. Bonus problem: I couldn’t run more than 20-25’ unless it was uphill because the extra weight or whatever messed up my running form and caused me knee problems. So there was 1x/week of modified Crossfit or strength, 1-2x/week of shorter bike rides, 1-2x/week of medium swims (this was where I got my harder efforts until I couldn’t anymore), and then a bigger hike.

late-December-February: Rapidly decreasing amounts of anything. Followed by a solid 3-4 weeks of barely walking in March because my lower abs had been cut open. Am now back up to hour bike rides, 30-40’ swims, and 2’ jog/2’ walk.

Let’s put it this way: My CTL in TrainingPeaks was ~90 right before pregnancy. It hit a low of 9 post-birth. It’s now back up to 23, though I think that overindexes on hiking.

From the races

T100 - Vancouver: It seems like it was a success?! Re: age-groupers and general vibes. And whales. Yay to Taylor Knibb winning again — I know we act like of course she’s going to, but that’s never a given — and kudos to Jess Learmonth in third! And the Jelle Geens v. Marten Van Riel rivalry is actually really shaping up at this distance; it’s just sort of a shame that it’s not that exciting to Americans.
IM Cairns: And another yay for Jackie Hering coming back from her DNF in Hamburg to become the first American woman to win, and to Dr. Matt for bouncing back from literally having to stop in T1 due to cramps to really run down the win (and also become the first American to win here). And, yes, yes, we all want to know why Lotte Wilms waited that long in T2 for her watch.
Happy Valley 70.3: But mostly, I just want to say: Holy shit Lydia! (Lydia Russell outran Chelsea Sodaro and Jeannie Metzler for her first pro win — and, look, I’m including those names not because I’m saying anything about whether they had good days or bad days, but because it provides context.)

Results: T100 - Vancouver, IM Cairns, Happy Valley 70.3, Boulder 70.3

Mark your calendars

World Tri’s Multisport World Champs start this week — and it’s primarily an age-group festival, but there is a long-distance world championship for the pros.
IM Frankfurt: And well well well, the best long-distance start list in Germany in July isn’t in Roth this year. A first time for everything.

The -ish

Some of the things worth knowing about this week in our sports — or that I just think are interesting.

In a twist no one could have seen coming, Hyrox is now experiencing growing pains. The World Champs in Chicago this past weekend had push sled controversies (certain lanes were slow! and later taken out! Dan Plews was a victim of the slow sled scandal!) and volunteer judging discrepancies (!) and this may be why they’re considering going to a pro-only world champs model. Which, having done exactly no Hyrox(es), I think is a mistake. If you want to be more than this year’s color run, then GET IT TOGETHER. (BarBend/Instagram)
Also, Paralympic triathlete Lauren Steadman won the first adaptive Hyrox world champ title. (Women’s Health)
Speaking of growing pains. Grand Slam Track abruptly canceled its last event in L.A. I think suddenly canceling your finale that you’ve been hyping, and then claiming it’s because you met all your goals for the inaugural season, speaks for itself. (It says: Riiiiiiight.) So I don’t have a lot to add other than I saw someone saying they didn’t understand why a potential new investor would cause a strategy/location shift, and I laughed. Do you remember when the Collins Cup was going to move to Morocco? That’s why a new investor changes things abruptly, because investors have opinions about what you should do and the money to make you do it. (Inside the Games)
Olympic champ Noah Lyles and NFL star Tyreek Hill will *not* be racing now. In case you were wondering. (The Guardian)
NCAA champs was also this past weekend. And I would just like to say I once interviewed the coach who just became the first female coach to win national titles at two different schools. (Citius Mag)
I definitely do not keep a finger on the pulse of young up-and-coming runners, but I was aware of Nico Young being a big name on the message boards (and a legitimately big name in the college scene), and now his new 5,000m American record and impressive win at the Diamond League really means he’s worth knowing more about. (Youtube)
Trail running’s Kona Week (held in Tahoe) is about to start: This weekend is Broken Arrow (also a Golden Trail World Series Race and one I really had been hoping to be ready for post-C-section lol), then TrailCon is during the week, then next weekend is Western States. (iRunFar)
In how they’re training for Western States: David Roche unloaded another one of his no secrets brain dump. And Killian Jornet talked to Outside. (Twitter/Outside Run)
I do agree with Roche, though, that taking heat training to an extreme is the new frontier for athletes pushing the edges. And also: don’t do this. (Velo)
AND. We’ll be up at Western States next week — doing coverage and partnering with the Women’s Trailrunning Fund & TrailCon to host a women’s trail running speed-networking lunch. It’s FREE, it’s Wednesday at noon in Palisades resort as part of TrailCon (but anyone can come!), and it’s going to be fun with food and prizes. (TrailCon)
Did you see Courtney Dauwalter wants to do gravel now, too. (Instagram)
Nike is releasing some of the details about the gear and tech advances Faith Kipyegon will use to attempt to be the first woman to break the four-minute mile. (Instagram/Outside)
This New York Times/Athletic story about how Sam Long is a bad swimmer but a great triathlete is kinda hilarious, purely because it’s hilarious it exists as a story. Also, Sam is teaming up with Greg Harper (first out of the water at 70.3 Worlds) to get better at swimming, so that’ll be fun. (The Athletic/Instagram)
Lionel Sanders has an interesting video out about realizing he has REDs. And for those of you who don’t spend a lot of time in female athlete research, Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport isn’t just about disordered eating: It’s a imbalance of energy output and input, which basically can come about as too much stress or not enough recovery or eating fine but not fine for your training or eating enough but not enough of certain things. However, I will say, Lionel’s experience is one of the most common: Thinking you’re eating healthy or “clean” but that ultimately ends up leading to not quite eating enough for your output, which hinders your overall resiliency, and then you can’t figure out why you just keep getting hurt or sick. And I suspect there are a lot of male athletes who don’t realize this is happening to them. (Youtube/British Journal of Sports Medicine/Instagram)
We also had Paula Findlay on the Feisty Triathlon podcast and Joanne did a fantastic interview with her. (Feisty Triathlon)
Gwen Jorgensen announced a new scholarship fund. (USAT)
We now have four of the Supertri pro league venues: Toronto, Chicago, Jersey, Toulouse. And one of the teams announced. (Supertri)
Ironman also announced an ESPN deal for Latin America. (Ironman)
92-year-old Hiromu Inada is basically the answer to whenever people are like ‘there should just stricter time limits for world championships! it’s a world championship, if they can’t finish in less time then they shouldn’t be there! they’re supposed to be the best in the world!’ Like, yes, they are the best and finishing one of these things at 92 years old *is* the best in the world, so shut up. (Instagram)
I just feel like not enough people appreciated how good Summer McIntosh’s week last week was. (Instagram)
This U.S. public lands sell off is not great. (Wilderness Society)
There are a lot (a lot!) of seemingly unconnected (but actually connected!) things about the state of the world and the future that have been circling around in my brain, and the closest I’ve come to connecting them all yet is this: I think people probably need to put more friction back in their lives and understand the un-smooth edges of the actual world. (Kyla’s Newsletter)

One last thing

This is an old clip from Nice, but honestly Kat’s face makes me laugh every time.