Journey of an Olympian. Chapter 31

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Chapter Thirty-One: Taking an extended break

Once I arrived back home from Tonga and discovered I was pregnant, everything changed. Steve and I were ecstatic, of course, but we wanted to keep it quiet for the first 3 months, to get through that risky period. The only person we told was my coach, Luke (sorry mum). He had to know because we had to drastically modify my training. We took Luke aside and quietly told him our news and he congratulated us. I think he already knew somehow… He seemed happy for us, but maybe a little sad as he thought I would retire now.

My back strain suffered in Tonga was the perfect excuse to explain to others why I wasn’t training properly. I felt bad lying but it had to be done.

Frustratingly, I tried to research weight training during pregnancy and found conflicting information. My doctor advised me to keep exercising but then said “no weight-lifting”. All the books tell you to keep doing what you were doing before and they say exercising is good for you and baby, but surely they didn’t have heavy Olympic weightlifting in mind! I came across a couple of articles advising not to lift heavy weights and not to do anything lying down (like bench pressing), so in the end I decided to play it safe. In any case, for the first three months I was terrified of doing anything that could cause me to lose the baby, so I trained only 3 times a week, with very light weights, mainly power cleans, power snatches  and a little bit of light overhead work.

Once we got past 11 weeks and had our first ultrasound confirming all was well, we told everyone, (thank goodness).  I couldn’t hide it any longer. People in the gym were asking about my back and wondering when I was going to train heavy again! I started to develop a bump so soon after I had to stop the power cleans and power snatches as my bump got in the way.

I kept training light, even if it was just half an hour – I felt really stupid like I wasn’t doing anything but I guess it was better than sitting at home. Although I suffered quite badly with morning sickness (why it is called that I will never know – I felt sick all day from morning to night) plus was extremely tired all the time. I ended up going into the gym less frequently.

When I was five and a half months pregnant, I was visiting the gym and the drug testers arrived. As I hadn’t officially retired yet, I was still on the list for testing. I looked at them and pointed out my growing and obviously pregnant belly as if to say “come on, really?” but rules are rules and so I had to go along and give a sample, pregnant and all.

For the rest of my extended break I continued visiting the gym occasionally, doing a little light overhead training and machines (leg extensions) and watching my team-mates train for the nationals.

I also moved more into the official side of weightlifting, as I was keen to give something back to the sport I loved, a sport that had given me so much. I went to the 2003 nationals as the NSW team manager. I loved being part of the team as an official, driving everyone around and offering whatever assistance I could to help the team. I also refereed at some local competitions and helped out with some coaching as well.

At a national level, I was selected on the AWF Athletes Committee, then was voted as the chairperson of this committee. I organised and ran meetings regularly with the other representatives from each state. Also, being the Chairperson meant I became an AWF Board member to provide input from the athletes’ perspective. I was very proud to be the first female board member of the AWF.

It’s fair to say, I was still very much committed to Weightlifting. I still couldn’t bring myself to retire and was already thinking about coming back to training again after our baby arrived.

Coming up next – Chapter 32: The come-back trail