Who runs the world? Moms.
A new mom won an ultramarathon — even with stopping to breastfeed her newborn three times.
Stephanie Case, 42, came in first place at a 100-kilometer race in Wales on May 17.
The Canadian woman who lives in Chamonix, France, sat down at three different points during the Ultra-Trail Snowdonia in Eryri National Park to breastfeed her six-month-old daughter. It was her first race post-partum, according to NPR.
After a three-year break from competing, three rounds of IVF and two miscarriages, she was excited to be back in the race with her baby by her side.
And all that excitement must have hyped her up because she powered through faster than any of the other women on the course.
“Well that was a surprise,” Case wrote on Instagram. “I WON?!?”
The runner didn’t know she’d placed first until after she’d crossed the finish line because she’d started the race 30 minutes after the first group of competitors.
She got special permission to pause to breastfeed, on the one condition that she couldn’t accept aid during the stops, so she did.
Case’s partner carried their baby to the 20-, 50- and 80-kilometer checkpoints and handed the little one over for a few minutes to feed. Mom would then kick it back into gear and continue running after her baby was fed. She paid more attention to her fuel intake and feeding schedule than to her time.
“During the race, I was taking in about 80 to 100 grams of carbohydrates an hour,” she told NPR. “And I kept that up until about 65K, and then I had to pull back a bit because I was getting quite nauseous. And then I ramped it back up again and was kind of done at 95K.”
“That’s when I started getting really nauseous.”
And this Welsh course isn’t a flat plain.
“It’s not what you would think of as a typical running race,” Case noted. Snowdonia has 21,325 feet of elevation gain as runners have to traverse the highest mountain in Wales — Snowdon — known in Welsh as Yr Wyddfa.
“Really it’s almost like scrambling or climbing, where you’re going up kind of a vertical wall of rock,” Case said.
Yet, she finished the race in just over 16 hours and 53 minutes — beating the other 60-something females. Her time was four minutes faster than the runner-up’s.
“It was meant to be my warmup to Hardrock,” Case posted on Instagram, referencing the July 11 Hardrock Hundred Mile Endurance Run in Colorado.
That course is 102.5 miles in length, with 33,000 feet of climb.
Warm up or not, Case acknowledges how difficult the race she won was.
“I don’t want anyone to feel badly about themselves out of a story like this. I’m quite open about how hard it is and how much support I have, and the messy parts of it,” Case told the Guardian.
“At 95k, I was done, dry heaving and peeing all over myself. I ran with devices internally. It’s not all rainbows and bunnies and a lot of things have to come together for something like that to happen.”
Based on the response she’s received from people, Case’s accomplishment is inspiring people.
“I think the response has been overwhelmingly positive,” Case told NPR, adding that the reaction “has shown me that we still have these ideas in our head culturally about what a new mom should look like.”
“We don’t have to lose ourselves in becoming a mom and we can keep setting big goals for ourselves.”
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