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By Alex Hutchinson
When Elle Purrier St. Pierre, the 27-year-old Olympic miler and multiple American record-holder, announced her pregnancy a few weeks ago, fans were surprised. I was too, even though I recently wrote about a study suggesting that pregnancy doesn’t alter the career trajectory of elite runners. Old habits die hard, and the knee-jerk assumption that motherhood will derail an athlete’s career remains deeply entrenched—which makes another newly published study about the impact of pregnancy on training and performance in elite runners all the more important.
A team of researchers in Canada led by Francine Darroch of Carleton University in Ottawa and Trent Stellingwerff of the Canadian Sport Institute Pacific recruited 42 elite distance runners, more than half of whom had competed at the Olympics or World Championships at distances ranging from 1,500 meters to the marathon. Using their training logs,…
