After I had reached my 5K target, it felt like nothing could stop me. This was somewhat ironic as a gentle jog of that distance for ‘my previous me’ wouldn’t be much to talk about. But I wasn’t my previous me anymore, and I guess I had come to a point where I had started to accept this. I felt proud about coming to this point, considering that a year earlier I questioned if I would ever run at all again. It had taken time – a whole 16 months postpartum before I was comfortable enough to do it – but my body felt ok.

And I started dreaming.

It was right in the middle of the cross country season at the time and I was still on an emailing list from my athletics club and regularly got updates about the team’s progress and upcoming races. I never admitted it to anyone but at one point I actually considered to put my name down for one of the races that very season! Even if I would run very slow I would gain some points for the team and at least I would get the chance to get out there on the cross country field….. should I just go for it and don’t care about the performance too much?? The thought was intriguing for a moment.. but it didn’t last very long.

Deep inside I just knew it wouldn’t satisfy me in the way I hoped it would. Sure, I could now do a fairly comfortbable little run but somewhere in the back of my mind I knew it would be too heartbreaking to enter a race and therefore face reality. My level of fitness/running ability was still so far away from pre-pregnancy and even if I tried to think of me as a ‘new me’ I knew it would be too hard to take it.

So I never signed up for that cross country race. 

Fast-forward a few months and I had progressed my running and fitness level a bit more. I was pleased with that my body and prolapse could take a couple of runs a week without aggravating the symptoms too much. One day in May I was running through the little forest close to ours, I think I did about 6K that time. And I started dreaming again. I counted the months leading up to a half marathon that same autumn, and calculated how much I would have to increase the distance by each month to comfortably reach that target…..and my heart started pounding faster. It seemed doable! It was as if I forgot about the fact that maybe training for a half-marathon wasn’t ideal for the prolapse, because now that I had gotten back into the running again I just wanted more. And at one point I even thought that I don’t care anymore if I worsen it, if at least I get to do another half-marathon in my life….

But was it the right time ‘already’??? If I just went for it, would all the work I had put in until then have been thrown away, if the result would be that I made my problems much worse? Was that really what I wanted for the future?

So I never signed up for that half-marathon.

But what was all that dreaming about? Could I make any of these dreams come true one day, and maybe relatively soon?

Or was my problem now on a different level, could I actually do it now but I was too afraid to even try??