n Chamonix Stephanie Case is swaying the sway of a new mother. Pepper, her baby, is cocooned in a sling, defying sleep and gurgling politely over the video call. They became viral sensations last month when ultrarunner Stephanie won the women’s section of the Snowdonia ultra-trail, a 100km race with 21,000ft of ascent, while stopping to breastfeed Pepper en route.
It was an extraordinary achievement six months after giving birth and slots into an extraordinary life – on the one hand, a human rights lawyer, working in warzones around the world; on the other, an ultrarunner, whose charity, Free to Run, empowers young women and girls in areas of conflict.
Case is desperate the race is not held up as something to beat new mothers with. “The response has been so positive, but there has been a negative cohort,” she says. “Part of those are just misogynists, but the others are exhausted mums who look at this story and think, oh my God, I could never do that. Now there’s even more pressure on us to be able to have a baby and work and run races and now breastfeed during races.
“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. 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.”
She praises French maternal healthcare – a week in hospital and then 10 sessions with the midwife doing pelvic floor rehab “which is weird and intimate but so helpful. Luckily, people who are in the health field around Chamonix are used to dealing with athletes so I have lots of tricks to help me.”
Case was running six weeks after Pepper’s birth, but everything had changed. She now had to fit her schedule around a baby, circling back to slot in a feed. “When you exercise, lactic acid gets into your breast milk. It doesn’t change the nutritional value, but it does change the taste. I think she just got used to it and dealing with me being sweaty.
“It was more learning how to calm myself down and not come in anxious because then she’d pick up on that energy. I had to shut off that I was in the middle of a training block. I had to do the same in the race and just focus on trying to feed her.”
Despite the photos from Snowdonia of a beaming Case and a bonny Pepper, the road to conception has been hard. The 42-year-old had two miscarriages, then two egg retrievals and three rounds of IVF. The process confused her relationship with running, something she had come to rely on to cope with the stress of her job.
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