A couple of weeks went by since my second jog, and it was time to get out there again. I wanted to stick to the plan of initially doing repetitions of short jogs followed by a walk and the idea was to increase the repetitions and/or the length week by week, depending on how I felt.

This attempt was very similar to the second. It was definitely better than the very first one but I still felt like I must have looked like a novice, like someone who didn’t really know how to run. In fact, it kind of felt like I didn’t know how to do it properly. It was a weird sensation where my brain wanted to tell my legs to just go for it and never stop again, but my pelvic floor told me….. well, the opposite.

My running occasions continued. Two weeks between them became one, 60 seconds jog became 90, then 2 minutes… and I could feel that my body gradually responded well to the new impact. Sometimes the prolapse would feel worse in the evening on a ‘running day’, but I could often pin it down to that on top of it I had also walked very much that day. If I took good care and planned my running days well, it didn’t seem to generally make the prolapse worse.

Four months after my first attempt (10 months post-partum) I jogged for 5 minutes on a treadmill at the gym. Clearly, very small steps.

But at least they were steps going forward.