Dear body, can I trust you again?

We get told to listen to our bodies ALL THE TIME. It’s the most frustrating pregnancy and postpartum advice someone can hear. But are you listening to your body, or are you letting your mind create the narrative you think you’re supposed to be listening to?

If you’ve ever had a sidelining injury, surgery, or pregnancy, your eagerness to get back to activity is often challenged by your inability to trust your body again.

Quick storytime for context. I had a bunionectomy my senior year in high school. I was 17, dancing and teaching dance, and had an image in my head that doing a jump or a turn would snap the screws right out of my foot. But I was 17…stubborn, and ferarless, so…on a reasonably accelerated, doctor approved timeline, I got back to what I wanted to do - dance. I was a bit tenacious in the reutrn, but testing the waters and using pain as a guide. As the pain dissolved, I eased back in.

Fast forward to 2013 - I was 30. Graphic content warning…the screw was starting to dislodge from the bone and caused a bump on my foot, making shoes prohibitive and bringing about a fair amount of pain. I went into surgery to have the screw removed. While they were in there, they removed a second screw, but left the third in. My bones were so strong that they couldnt initially get the screws out (surgery 1, in office procedure) so they had to send me to the hospital and fully put me under the next week (surgery 2). The strong bones comment was encouraging. The thought of having two holes in my bone was not. The healing process was a pain. The incision didn’t fully close for 8 weeks because it was on a joint, it was during the height of race season, I was in a job transition (and your body doesnt differentiate stress, it just projects it back on your injuries and makes it worse) and while I was only on crutches for a couple of days and encouraged to keep it mobile, it just. wouldn’t. heal. I was frustrated, would occasionally try out an activity only to have the incision start to hurt, and then couldn’t get over the idea that I had two holes in my bone that were supposedly healing fine, but once I could run again, every step I took made me think I was going to crack the bone in half or something over dramatic. I had spiraled into a place of distrust with my own body…a place many athletes can relate to.

Out of, maybe spite initially, I felt like I was healed enough to give a short triathlon a go. I had been riding more confidently (because, stable, hard shoes and minimal bending of the joint made that one thing I could do), running 2 miles or so a couple times a week, and had done a couple of swims. I signed up for a race a couple weeks out with a friend and told myself I wouldn’t think about my foot until it actually told me to stop. It never did. I placed third in my AG for the first time in my life. The healing process, from there, physically and mentally seemed to just fall into place. While the actual closure of the incision was a real concern and not something in my head, once it was closed, the rest of my pain and concern it seemed, was all in my head.

Knock on everything, THAT foot, since then, has never been a problem.

I see this with women getting back into exercise postpartum. And even in pregnancy - there is fear, very real fear, of things that end up blocking our mental or physical road to improvement or even maintenance. We’ve been told forever that running will “shake the baby in utero” or that running after birth will “make your vagina fall out” or “cause a prolapse” (by the way, prolapses come in varying degrees, not always caused by what you do, and you can become highly functional with the right care, therapy and strength with a prolapse. More on this another day.)

We’ve been coached to get so in tune with our bellies, core muscles, breath, and pelvic floor that every sensation can raise a question mark.

Did I feel that before the baby?

Was that a sensation or was that actual pain?

Is my diastasis causing this?

Is that a hernia or just the way my stomach is now?

Is this my new normal?

What is “normal” now, anyway?

It can also cause us to be dismissive of pain, “blaming” everything on pregnancy and pushing through things we shouldn’t, ignoring real signs because it’s “just a part of having a baby.” But in an effort to tone down our Type A athlete here we sometimes force overthinking, which leads to distrust. We put up too many yellow lights for ourselves and forget to sometimes give oursleves a green light, a chance to test, a chance to enjoy it again and get out of our heads.

Having any trauma to your body should put you in a position to pay more attention. But you don’t have to do slowly paced, breath and bodyweight exercises forever postpartum. Learn, Control, Load, Explode…it’s like we keep rotating through Learn and Control in a spiral, getting frustrated that we don’t progress. If you never load (weight, time) and you never explode, (running, jumping, speeding up), you’ll stall right out where you are.

Within reason, its important to give yourself those test periods, or to work with a coach that will! We all need to be pushed. We need those fearless race finishes, those mile markers, those Strava PR’s, those freeing runs or rides where we tune out our bodies until they force us to tune back in. We need the days that remind us that our bodies are machines designed to heal, even though sometimes they require more care than we want to give them to get back. Accelerating your timeline to healing only accelerates your timeline back to the bench, adding to the pattern of distrust. Give yourself the proper time to physically recover, get in the right headspace to do so, and when you’re ready to start layering in the hard stuff again, don’t let fear and overthinking hold you back.