Keane has been showered with praise and criticism online for marathoning while pregnant. Some people cheered her energy, while others cautioned it was not good for the baby.<\/p>\n
So why did Keane do this? And is it okay to run 42.1km (seven times) while expecting?<\/p>\n
Keane and her husband started trying to have a baby after they married last year.<\/p>\n
\u201cI assumed my pregnancy journey was going to be a long one,\u201d said Keane, a nurse practitioner and healthcare consultant who is also an avid runner.<\/p>\n
She signed up for eight marathons in 2026, and also planned to do a 100-mile (160km) ultramarathon and her first Ironman, thinking of it as a \u201clast hurrah\u201d before she hopefully became pregnant.<\/p>\n
After the Boston and London marathons in April, she felt off. She took a pregnancy test and learned she was six weeks pregnant.<\/p>\n
She talked to her husband and her doctor, and decided not to do the ultramarathon or Ironman. But she still wanted to complete the other marathons she had planned.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was so nervous to talk to my doctor about it,\u201d Keane said.<\/p>\n
Her doctor was supportive, she said, as long as Keane was eating enough and hydrating, and not pushing past abdominal pain or cramping.<\/p>\n
Keane running the Chicago Marathon at 31 weeks pregnant. Photo \/ Courtesy of Deirdre Keane via the Washington Post<\/p>\n
Keane said her doctor doubted she would feel up to running the New York City Marathon at 34 weeks pregnant, but she didn\u2019t object to it.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you are comfortable enough, and you don\u2019t run too hard, I\u2019m totally okay with it,\u201d Keane recalled her doctor saying.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t the first time Keane has taken her sport to an extreme. When Keane met her husband Brian Innes in 2022, she was training for the World Marathon Challenge, running seven marathons on seven continents in seven days.<\/p>\n
He thought he must have misunderstood her at first.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought, \u2018It isn\u2019t actually seven marathons in seven days,\u2019\u201d Innes said.<\/p>\n
Not only did Keane do just that, she was the fastest woman in the 2023 competition.<\/p>\n
Keane started running in college in honour of her dad, a marathoner, who died of skin cancer when she was 13.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted to run one marathon,\u201d Keane said. \u201cI could commemorate his life and all his running.\u201d<\/p>\n
Keane looking up at her father after the New York City Marathon in 1998. Photo \/ Courtesy of Deirdre Keane via the Washington Post<\/p>\n
Then she caught the running bug. She now has 74 marathons under her belt, including ultramarathons and 100-mile races. Running became important to her mental health and her identity, she said, especially during the pandemic when she was working at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was something that I did every day,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Keane said she was glad that the public\u2019s reaction to her running in her eighth month of pregnancy has been generally positive \u2013 but she knew there would be some criticism as well.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of runners get that kind of feedback,\u201d said Margie Davenport, an exercise scientist at the University of Alberta who has studied distance running and weight training during pregnancy. \u201cPeople aren\u2019t aware that the research has changed a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n
She and her colleagues have looked at distance running and intense exercise in pregnancy, including both large surveys and an individual case study of an ultramarathoner. Exercising for more than double the current guidelines of 150 minutes a week in pregnancy was found to reduce the risk of delivery complications and did not have a negative impact on the babies.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur data is demonstrating that it\u2019s quite safe, and it\u2019s beneficial for those individuals,\u201d Davenport said.<\/p>\n
Keane at the Mount Everest 70Km Ultramarathon in 2025. Photo \/ Courtesy of Deirdre Keane via the Washington Post<\/p>\n
She added that running, especially marathons, during pregnancy is not for everybody, and that pregnant women should consult their doctors about their exercise routine.<\/p>\n
Many women were once told to cut back on exercise during pregnancy or even stop moving altogether and go on bed rest if they had certain complications. While there are still cases where doctors advise women to take it easy, exercise has been found to be beneficial for both pregnant women and their babies. Recent research has found that exercising during pregnancy was associated with a 50% reduction in the risk for gestational diabetes and a 40% reduction in pre-eclampsia risk. Exercise also decreased the risk of depression in pregnancy.<\/p>\n
\u201cWomen who are pregnant are incredibly resilient,\u201d Davenport said. \u201cAnd a lot of the limits that have been placed on them have been due to a lack of research.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trent Stellingwerff, research director at the Women\u2019s Health Sports & Performance Institute, said he became interested in the topic not only as a scientist, but as a husband when his wife, Olympic runner Hilary Stellingwerff, became pregnant.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a whole in the last 10 years of research, I would say there\u2019s been a real shift in thinking that as long as women are healthy and approved by the physician, they can probably exercise a lot more than they realise,\u201d Stellingwerff said.<\/p>\n
In his research of elite athletes, even with intense training, participants gave birth to healthy babies.<\/p>\n
Denise De Los Santos, a gynaecologist and associate professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at UT Health San Antonio, said in an email that exercise is important for physical and mental health, especially during pregnancy.<\/p>\n
\u201cPregnancy doesn\u2019t automatically mean you have to stop doing the activities you love, including running,\u201d De Los Santos said. \u201cI\u2019ve had marathon runners as patients before, and they did great.\u201d<\/p>\n
De Los Santos and others emphasised that pregnant women, like all people, should listen to their bodies, and scale back if they are tired or not feeling well.<\/p>\n
\u201cEspecially for intense athletes, there is a tendency to push through what your body thinks it can do and to work harder,\u201d said Elizabeth Langen, a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology and maternal fetal medicine at the University of Michigan. \u201cBut I do encourage folks when they\u2019re pregnant to listen to their body because their body\u2019s doing a lot more than it is at baseline.\u201d<\/p>\n
Keane celebrates completing her goal of running all the major marathons. Photo \/ Courtesy of Deirdre Keane via the Washington Post<\/p>\n
Langen also said that in addition to celebrating the achievements of pregnant women, it\u2019s important to acknowledge the challenges.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor some women, the physical changes in pregnancy really do shift what one can do,\u201d Langen said.<\/p>\n
For Keane, as her belly has grown, long runs have gotten harder, she said. Sometimes while training she would alternate running and walking, or break up long runs into three shorter runs throughout the day. But on race day at the New York City Marathon last week, she finished in just over four hours, averaging about 9 minutes 30 seconds per mile.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think I\u2019ve learned and appreciated so much more what, in particular, a woman\u2019s body is capable of,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Keane has been showered with praise and criticism online for marathoning while pregnant. Some people cheered her energy,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":659094,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[1443,1558,3054,194175,26098,702,203498,322890,84486,111,139,69,1642,35115,2247,170178,312,147,20863,322889,213,6923,6123,102],"class_list":["post-659093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-about","tag-been","tag-criticism","tag-deirdre","tag-heres","tag-it","tag-keane","tag-marathoning","tag-marathons","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-online","tag-praise","tag-pregnant","tag-ran","tag-says","tag-science","tag-she","tag-showered","tag-sports","tag-what","tag-while","tag-with"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=659093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659093\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/659094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=659093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=659093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=659093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}