Pregnant athleticism
Elite female athletes balance climbing huge mountains, raising tiny humans.
LIKE most outings with a small child, taking a 13-month-old to the rock-climbing crag requires extra preparation.
First of all, you need at least three adults in the rotation – one who’s climbing, one who’s belaying and one who’s on baby-watch duty.
And, of course, in addition to your own climbing gear and sustenance, you have to pack in toddler snacks and water, and some form of kid distraction.
One trick: Shiny carabiners and quickdraws make great baby rattles.
All of this is standard protocol for Brittany Aae (pronounced “Ah”), a dedicated ultrarunner, rock climber, backcountry skier – and mother.
Aae, 31, was living out of her Subaru in the Methow Valley, Washington, when she found out she was pregnant. That was a surprise.
But everything else leading up to the May 2016 birth of her daughter, Rumi (pronounced “roomie”), was highly scripted.
Aae kept an intense training regimen, skiing steep couloirs in the North Cascades at five months with her pants unzipped, running a 30-mile week leading up to the birth, and going into labour at the climbing gym.
All that training paid off after Rumi’s birth, Aae says.
The self-employed endurance coach, who’s writing a book about pregnant athleticism, returned to the climbing gym three days later and resumed running the day after that. Now, she’s back to climbing big alpine routes in the North Cascades and is working to establish a 50-mile running loop in the Pasayten Wilderness this summer.
Chatting over coffee and pastries at a Seattle cafe this spring, Aae is quick to acknowledge that, depending on the individual circumstances of pregnancy and birth, other mums will need more time to return to their pre-pregnancy levels of physical activity – and some might decide not to do that at all.
Aae, who describes herself as an “academic feminist”, never wanted motherhood to be the single thing that defined her, she says, and she offers zero apologies for her life choices.
“I don’t want to sit around at some mothering group and stitch ‘n’ bitch about how much I hate my boobs after having a kid. I’m not interested in talking about the contents of her diaper. Some mums are, and that’s healing and fun for them, but I’m not them,” she says, pausing to take a bite of her gluten-free bakery bar. “People finally stopped inviting me.”
Among our generation of young women, motherhood is becoming more of a choice than an expectation. And it takes many different forms: Mums can be single or partnered, breadwinner or homemaker, helicopter or free-range.
And increasingly, they can also be ultra-runners, extreme skiers and mountain guides.
But endurance sports and alpine climbing aren’t like most other hobbies: They require an intense dedication of time, mental energy and physical effort. And the outdoor industry isn’t exactly known for showcasing the experiences of female athletes, let alone mothers – although that is changing.
Earlier this year, the overabundance of “male heroes, male voices and male sensibility” in the outdoor-recreation narrative prompted REI to launch a brand campaign called Force of Nature that showcases the experiences of female athletes.
Through the rest of 2017, the Kent-based co-op has committed to using female faces and voices across all its social accounts, and to donating US$1mil (RM4.28mil) to non-profits that create opportunities for women outdoors.
Although spending time outside is a challenge for parents of all genders, Laura Swapp, a marketing director at REI, says traditional child-care roles create a double standard when it comes to how mothers spend their spare time.
“It’s not unlike the parallel of working mothers,” says Swapp, who is a mum to two teenagers. “Women, if they are assuming more of the parenting responsibility, are going to be hit by more of the double-bind.”
As a female climber who lives for weekends spent above tree line, I’ve often wondered to myself: Is my alpine life on the same timeline as my biological clock? If I have kids, will I limit myself to hiking Mount Si with a child carrier for the next decade or two?
Do the mountains come with their own glass ceiling?
In female athletes’ quest to oscillate between climbing big mountains and tending to tiny humans, Margaret Wheeler’s Instagram feed is the yin-and-yang blueprint.
In one photo, she’s leading a group of clients on a ski tour through Italy’s famous Haute Route.
A week later, she’s lounging in a sunny meadow in Chamonix with her toddler daughter. Throughout, her photos are captioned with hashtags like #ohtheplacesyoullpump and, on a particularly deep powder day last spring, “Pumping while it’s dumping.”
Wheeler, 43, is one of the top alpine guides in the US, having served as an instructor-trainer for both the American Mountain Guides Association and the American Institute for Avalanche Research and Education. She calls Snoqualmie home, but since 2010, she and husband Matt Farmer, also a fully certified AMGA guide, have spent a good chunk of each year living and working in the Alps and the Dolomites.
Wheeler returned to guiding eight weeks after her older daughter was born in 2014, alternating work and child care with Farmer.
But the birth of daughter No. 2 last December has added new challenges. For the first time since becoming parents, the couple didn’t relocate to Europe for the spring ski-guiding season, deciding instead to rent a house in Ketchum, Idaho, and enjoy the area’s Nordic trails while carrying their newborn in an Ergo and towing their two-year-old in a convertible Thule trailer.
In general, Wheeler says it has been more difficult to get back into guiding this time around. But the family is now in the Alps for the summer climbing season, with Mum and Dad alternating work trips and family time, and Wheeler focusing more on “pick-up work” that will enable her to be home with her daughters at night.
When we checked in the day before their flight, Wheeler was researching how much frozen breastmilk and dry ice she could take with her on the plane
She’s got the mobile-feeding part down (ask about the time a male guide mistook her electronic pump for an oxygen tank), but it’s the mental aspect, she says, that’s most difficult – especially with a new baby.
“So much of your brain – I swear to God, it’s just biology – is obsessed with the survival of that little human,” she says.
Wheeler and Farmer are finding fulfillment in the parallels between climbing and parenting: the new environment, the uncertainty, the challenges you can’t possibly foresee until you’re staring them in the face.
“There’s this whole volume of the universe that doesn’t exist until you have kids,” she says. — The Seattle Times/Tribune News Service