The Things They Carry
Stephanie Case carried the paralyzing uncertainty of round after round of IVF.
Makenna Myler carried the vitriol of strangers.
Rachel Smith carried the grief of pregnancy loss.
Steph Bruce carried the trauma of one birth into the next.
Aliphine Tuliamuk carried an oversupply of breastmilk into the Olympic Marathon.
Kellyn Taylor carried the weight of her young foster children being taxied away.
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Stephanie Case is carrying a second trimester pregnancy.
Makenna Myler carries a bedrock confidence in her choices.
Rachel Smith carries Nova, her one-year-old daughter, to most races.
Steph Bruce carries her hard-won wisdom and her talent for sharing it with others.
Aliphine Tuliamuk carries a deeper understanding of her body.
Kellyn Taylor carries thoughts of her four children through the marathon.
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Steph Rothstein Bruce arrived on the radar of the US running scene when she clocked a 4m58s mile to place second at the Arizona state high school championships in her senior year. She went on to run for the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), where she shattered the school 10,000m record and was a two-time All-American. Two children and a decade later she won her first US title and has since added two more titles to her running résumé – and one more child: a daughter, Sophia, born in September 2023.
Bruce has borne three children and earned three US titles over the course of her remarkably consistent professional career. But the record for the most consistent runner in the Bruce family goes to her husband Ben, a phenomenal competitor in his own right, who holds the impressive distinction of making 17 straight US Outdoor Championships between 2003 and 2019.
If you were to graph the trajectories of Steph’s and Ben’s running careers, Ben’s would look like the path of the truest of arrows shot straight at the sun, while Steph’s – by dint of her three pregnancies, births and returns to the run – would look like the sine curve studied by generations of calculus students: an oscillating exchange of peaks and valleys making steady progress against the axis of time.
Both careers are remarkable. Both athletes have landed themselves firmly among the USA’s most elite performers. But only one has carried a varying load along her path: the undulating weight of the choices and responsibility foisted upon her by biology.
No one holds space like a woman. Our ability to hollow ourselves out and build a life – at our very core – is a gift and a responsibility. It is all at once empowering and exhausting, intimate and public, unique and universal.
In short: it is complicated. Never more so than for those women who have chosen the path of the professional runner and for whom the two decades that span 20 to 40 years old are both their optimal reproductive window and their highest-earning years as athletes. How does one reconcile the fact that her body is a means to a powerfully ambitious and rewarding end and is also the very beginning of a long and beautiful story, the end of which she hopes never to see?
What follows is an anecdotal accounting of what the female athlete is putting in the balance – the quiet questions weighed, the choices made, the control ceded – in an effort to solve the competing realities that her healthy body is her vehicle to make a living and a life.
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CONCEPTION
People say pregnancy is a marathon, but few stop to consider the effort many make just to arrive at the start line of gestation. Stephanie Case has traveled that road and will be the first to tell you that it is an ultra event made maddening by the uncertainty of the terrain and the fact that it occurs entirely in the dark.
For a long time, the 41-year-old humanitarian aid worker and international human rights lawyer thought she might choose not to have children. Her work took her all over the world, as did her career as a successful trail runner, and life felt full of meaning and possibility without the idea of a child on the horizon.
But in July 2022, shortly after sipping a glass of champagne in celebration of having completed the Hard Rock 100, Case took a pregnancy test on a bit of a whim. It was positive. “Everything changed in that moment,” she says.
Case envisioned a completely new trajectory for her and her partner, whom she’d met during the pandemic, and the two began to assemble the building blocks for life as a trio. But her world flipped again: during a routine check-up in September, the doctor could no longer detect a fetal heartbeat.
She was told, “We see this all the time.” But it was not something Case had ever experienced, nor was it something people discussed openly. We celebrate pregnancy with cheerful announcements, parties and a cascade of glossy images on social media. But miscarriages are hushed events that happen behind closed doors.
Case became pregnant again in December of that year and miscarried the following February, all the while struggling to manage her grief, sadness and confusion. For 15 years Case had relied on the sound arithmetic of the endurance athlete: effort multiplied by time equals results. But no matter how hard she tried or how often she willed it to happen, she could not produce the outcome she most wanted: a viable pregnancy.
During the past 15 months, Case has submitted to countless tests, two rounds of egg retrievals and three rounds of IVF. She’s carried meds into Syria and Gaza and in her trail pack all through Italy’s Aosta Valley, injecting herself with hormones twice a day while crewing for a friend in Tor des Geants, trying to keep alive the double dream of being an athlete and a mother.
Of all of the burdens she’s carried, though, the heaviest, Case says, is “the shift in identity from a badass ultra runner who could push through any challenge to someone seemingly controlled by her uterus and hormones.”
“The level of vulnerability was more intense than anything I’ve ever experienced,” she shares.
It is this – the miasma of shame and guilt that accompanies some women’s efforts to conceive – that Case wants to drag into the sunlight to share.
That and the fact that she is currently in her second trimester of pregnancy.
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PREGNANCY
It started as a bet. Makenna Myler’s husband wagered that she couldn’t run a pregnant mile in under eight minutes. She thought she could. Turns out she was right. Nine months pregnant with her first child, Myler ran four laps of the track in 5m25s.
Three years later, pregnant with her second child and working with a new coach, Myler repeated the effort. She admits her training was more mile-focused during her second pregnancy, having been given the green light to attempt some event-specific workouts with the aim of besting her time from her first pregnancy. She ran 5m17s and gave birth the following week.
What’s remarkable about Myler’s miles isn’t the fact that she accomplished them, nor is it the fact that she had the courage and commitment to train at a high level throughout her pregnancies. Rather, it’s her ability to quiet the voices of the anonymous people who offered a steady stream of unbidden opinions about her activity levels during pregnancy.
The invective surfaced on social media in response to a video taken by Myler’s husband, who had posted his wife’s pregnant mile to share with friends and family, never expecting the content to go viral. The commentariat was furious at Myler for committing the crime of running while pregnant, and they told her so:
Why risk a miscarriage?
This is the most selfish thing a mother can do.
Call Child Protective Services. These people shouldn’t be allowed to have kids.
Initially the Mylers were so surprised by the vitriol of strangers that they took down the video to escape public haranguing. But it didn’t take them long to realize that simply burying the evidence didn’t eradicate the echoes of the criticisms. So they put the video back up and Myler did the harder work of reckoning with her inclination to give sway to other people’s opinions about her body, her choices and her family.
“The first pregnancy, all of the negative comments took me aback. I took it a little more personally,” Myler says. “And then my husband was like: ‘None of these people know you. They have no idea who you are. We should just be laughing at this.’ So then we just had fun with it. And by the time the second pregnancy rolled around, I couldn’t care less what anybody who didn’t know me said.”
Myler knew herself – and Myler knew herself to be a workhorse, whether pregnant or not. So as her body changed and adapted to grow a human, she did what she always did: she ran hard. It was a daily practice that allowed her to wrap her arms around a pillar of her identity at a time when everything else felt very much in flux.
Her body was changing; her responsibilities were expanding; her relationships were evolving. But this, the run – the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other until heartrate matches cadence and all that matters is the distance between where you are and where you want to be – this was familiar. This she knew.
Myler logged miles alone or with her husband cycling alongside, but she also jumped into workouts with teammates, whether that meant running in-and-out miles alternating 5m40s and 5m20s pace or tackling a set of a dozen 400s at 75 seconds.
Despite the fact that her family, teammates and medical team supported her, the social media chorus wanted to narrow the confines of her identity: to tell her she had to choose to be either an elite runner or a pregnant woman. But Myler’s sense of self dilated with each pregnancy. She knew she could be both. “I’ve never really been attached to who I was before I gave birth,” Myler says. “So I really was never trying to be like, ‘I just wish I was who I was before.’ I think I always just want the freedom to feel good.”
In February 2023, 10 months post-partum, Myler finished seventh at the US Olympic Marathon Trials, less than one minute away from making the team. Her husband and her two healthy children were there to cheer her on. It’d be a safe bet to say, that on that day, she felt good.
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LOSS
Rachel Smith hoped to give birth vaginally. But at 37 weeks, nearly full-term, her baby was breech. Smith had two choices: prepare to have a C-section, which would delay her return to professional running by several weeks, or try to turn the baby.
For two years, Smith and her husband, Mike Smith of Northern Arizona University (NAU), had been playing high-level calendar Tetris, trying to find a way to spin and drop a wedding – and eventually a family – into the complicated quadrennial Olympic cycle. They shoehorned their nuptials into the off-season between the Tokyo Olympics and the start of the 2022 outdoor season in the hopes that it would be minimally disruptive to Smith’s training schedule and her long-term plan to earn a second US Olympic Team berth. But upon return from their honeymoon in Costa Rica, the two discovered – to their surprise and delight – that she was pregnant. It wasn’t the plan, but as Smith explained, “If my husband could carry the baby we’d probably already have had a kid or two at that point.”
The Smiths adapted on the fly and prepared to welcome their first child in the latter half of 2022, leaving plenty of time to gestate, give birth, recover and return to an elite level of running prior to qualifications for the Paris Olympics. Smith downgraded her training, tucked to bed her near-term athletic aspirations and went about the business of becoming something entirely new: a mother.
Runners grapple with control: when they have it and over what factors, and when they don’t and how to accept that. The best among them learn that they can’t control the contours of the road, just the pace and direction of the car. Every so often, though, an obstacle appears on the horizon around which one cannot steer. Then, the only way forward is through.
The Smiths encountered such a moment when, in mid-March and at 15 weeks pregnant, Rachel Smith miscarried. Her husband was out of town, so she leaned on her sister, who was local, to help her navigate what she says now was the hardest thing she’s ever endured. “It was a very physically and emotionally traumatic experience,” Smith explains.
In the months that followed Smith grieved doubly: the loss of the pregnancy and the loss of an entire season of her running career. With her body being both the vehicle for her joy and the obstacle to it, she felt temporarily failed by its inability to perform the way she wanted, whether that meant gestating a baby or ripping half-mile repeats around an oval. She mourned both.
Smith and her husband debated whether to reshelve the idea of starting a family the way a librarian might slide a book, its spine uncracked, back into the stacks for some far-off rainy day. They were pretty sure they could salvage something of a late summer and fall racing season and parlay that into a strong run at the US Olympic Trials and beyond. But Smith’s heart, rent though it felt, had irreversibly expanded to accommodate the idea of a family. They rolled the pregnancy die again and, three months later, their number came up: Smith was due in April 2023.
The first few months of the pregnancy were fraught. Smith says her anxiety was palpable and she found it hard to relax and enjoy the experience. “It took a lot of courage for me to step back into being willing to try to get pregnant again and to do it pretty quickly…It was really hard to deal with the grief of that loss and then really scary to walk back into pregnancy not knowing if it would result in another loss,” she explains. "It’s the most courageous thing I've ever done. And something I would do over and over and over again.”
So while an upside-down baby at 37 weeks isn’t an easy fix, it was a bump in the road that felt manageable in comparison to the dark swerve their lives had taken a year earlier. In order to resolve the breech, the Smiths agreed to try an external cephalic version (ECV), a procedure in which an obstetrician manually manipulates the fetus by applying external pressure to the mother’s abdomen. Though it’s not an uncommon procedure, it is known to be uncomfortable for the mother – and jarring to behold.
"It was insane,” Smith explains. But it was also successful: the baby flipped and Smith had the vaginal birth she was hoping for. “It was excruciating and exhausting… It was wild and wonderful. It was really the happiest day of my life,” she says.
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BIRTH
Steph Bruce’s voice is candid and incisive. Whether you’re in direct conversation with her or picking up what she’s putting down on Instagram, you’re treated to frequent off-the-cuff nuggets of wisdom – dense, high-calorie bits of emotional understanding – that read like well-crafted verse.
Bruce talks with reverence about the birthing process and says that: “absolutely [her] greatest accomplishment was giving birth to three healthy babies.” But she’s quick to draw distinctions between her birthing experiences and to discuss how she learned and grew from each one.
Her first son, Riley, delivered when Bruce was 30, was facing the wrong way – “sunny side up” or in an “occiput posterior position,” for those more medically-inclined – and though Bruce was committed to a natural birth, the baby was hitting her sacrum with each contraction, making it difficult for the pair to make meaningful progress. She pushed for five hours before birthing her first son, who was nine pounds with a head circumference in the 90th percentile. Bruce recalls that it was “very traumatic” and says, “You know, when I look back, it was not an experience that I was like: ‘Wow, I want to do that again.’”
The saying goes that we plan and the universe laughs. To wit: six months later Bruce learned she was pregnant with her second child. Most marathoners tackle two races a year. Some say it takes that long for the body to recover; others say it’s because it takes that long to forget the pain of the prior event. When Bruce went into labor with her second son, Hudson, she recalls it was “almost like post-traumatic stress because I couldn’t get Riley’s delivery out of my head.” At 8cm dilated she asked for an epidural and though “everything was smooth and wonderful” from there, she couldn’t shake the thought that she’d left some learning on the table.
In the eight years between the births of her sons and the arrival of her daughter Sophia last autumn, Bruce – by this time 39 years old – was committed to creating a better experience for mother and child alike: “I did so much work and research on what I wanted out of this birth and what the body could do. And Sophia’s birth was so beautiful and exactly how I envisioned it.”
Athletes are iterative creatures: they make attempts, study, refine, recommit and try again, always moving in the direction not of perfection but of improvement. Bruce brought the full freight of her curiosity and the sum total of her accumulated wisdom as an athlete to bear upon understanding her body and the birthing process. She read up on hypnobirthing (no, neither mother nor baby gets hypnotized), explaining: “You learn relaxation, you learn to be fully present.” And while Sophia’s birth was, by Bruce’s telling, “The hardest because I went natural and I just remember feeling everything about pushing her out,” one understands that it was also the most rewarding, not because the road was long but rather because she’d examined every inch.
In that sense, Bruce’s birthing journey rhymes with her job as a marathoner: a process of daunting duration, built inescapably on the back of hours and hours of labor, steeped in the unrelenting management of pain, with the promise of great joy on the horizon – if you’re wise enough to grab it.
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BREASTFEEDING
On the late spring day in 2020 when Aliphine Tuliamuk heard that the Berlin Marathon was going to be cancelled because of the pandemic, she texted her husband: “We’re having a baby.”
“I did not text him ‘Let’s have a baby.’ I texted him, ‘We’re having a baby,’” she clarifies. She made an appointment to have her IUD removed the next day.
Tuliamuk had long ago reached the conclusion that she was ready to start a family. Despite the fact that she was coming off of the best year of her professional running career – a 2h26m PR in Rotterdam followed by a victory at the US Olympic Marathon Trials in Atlanta, Georgia – Tuliamuk was unconflicted about the choice.
“I really really really was ready to have a family. I wanted to have a kid,” she explains. “And it was funny because I had never had this strong feeling before. This was the first time where I was like, ‘I don't think I can wait.’ I had so much anxiety just thinking about waiting. I could not think even about waiting another month.”
Tuliamuk is known as being a joyful warrior: a competitor who will smile and chat on the start line but who, when the gun goes off, is unrelenting in her push to reach the finish line first. That affability-cum-ferocity surfaces in her conversational manner as well. She laughs easily and her voice skips across the surface of weighty topics but there’s a steeliness at its heart, never more so than when she explains the intersection of the paths of her running and parenting careers: “The New York City Marathon had just given me the biggest appearance fee of my entire life,” Tuliamuk shares. “But none of that even mattered in that moment. I just knew I was going to start a family and nothing was going to stand in my way.”
Despite her husband’s cautions that it might take her body up to six months to rebalance after having had an IUD in place for four years, Tuliamuk was confident it wouldn’t take long. She was pregnant a week later. “If I could run as fast as I can get pregnant I would probably be winning a lot of races,” she jokes. [Ed: She does run as fast as she gets pregnant, and she does win a lot of races.]
With the pregnancy clock started, Tuliamuk knew the shape of the next 15 months: if all went according to plan she’d give birth in the winter and would have six months to prepare for the Olympic Marathon the following summer. The timeframe was tight but doable, especially for an indefatigable optimist.
Most women agree that the term “snap back” should be outlawed. We are not elastics and we’re not going back to whatever is behind us. We’re moving ahead into whatever new incarnation is awaiting. Still, Aliphine Tuliamuk recovered her pre-pregnancy fitness remarkably quickly. Up until two weeks before the Olympic Marathon in Tokyo, it appeared she had pulled off the most enviable of doubles – an elite running career and a baby – without skipping a beat.
But at her last big session before heading across the Pacific – 15 miles at marathon pace – Tuliamuk felt a nagging pain in her hip. She did what all runners a couple of weeks out from a big race do: she sealed the pain up in a box and told herself it would improve with the taper. It did not.
When Tuliamuk arrived in Tokyo with her six-month infant in tow – an accomplishment in its own right as she’d had to advocate to bring her exclusively breastfed daughter to the Games – she knew she was unlikely to produce her best performance. But running a marathon, like having a child, is an act of hope. Competitor and mother both have to believe their best days are ahead.
The Olympic Organizing Committee threw the Tuliamuk family off-balance when it decided to move the marathon from Tokyo to Sapporo in the hopes of finding cooler race conditions. Tuliamuk packed up the sprawling gear and baggage that accompanies a family of three and relocated 700 miles north. The night before the race, the organizers further destabilized the routine: they announced they were moving the start time up from 7am to 6am.
Tuliamuk isn’t sure if there were any other breastfeeding mothers on the start list of that marathon – or even if there was a space made available for nursing mothers in the staging area – but the rapid changes to an already precarious sleep and feeding schedule proved to be too much to manage. “I think I failed that race before I’d even begun,” Tuliamuk concedes.
So it was that Tuliamuk arrived at the start line of the biggest race of her career – the one every athlete dreams about, but so few are able to realize – in a body better prepared to feed her baby than race a fast 26.2 miles. Running a marathon is hard. Racing it more so. Racing the Olympic Marathon with an oversupply of breastmilk on-board is nearly impossible. She dropped out at 20km.
In the months and years since that race, Tuliamuk has come to suspect that there’s a correlation between breastfeeding and stress fractures, the ultimate diagnosis of that pain she was suffering in her hip, and she’s calling for more research into the body of the female endurance athlete.
A woman’s body is a marvelous creation, complicated in its construction and multi-faceted in its application. It’s possessed of a wisdom beyond the reach of our will. Just ask anyone who has ridden the train of labor: once it leaves the station, there is no getting off.
When you are an elite athlete accustomed to exerting exquisite control – over your fitness and nutrition and shape and sleep – it can be jarring to learn that your will has limits. In a war of resources, the body will prioritize for you: breastmilk over bone density, the child’s health over the marathoner’s. No matter how organized, prepared, successful or well-trained you may be, it is the body – and not the will – that has the last word.
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CHILDREARING
Kellyn Taylor knew she needed to get the work done. She was at a critical point in her build-up to the 2022 Boston Marathon and the miles were coming fast and heavy. That morning’s assignment had been looming on the calendar for some time: a signature team effort of 15 by a mile on short recovery. So Taylor did what elite athletes do: she prepared her body to perform.
An hour earlier she had not done what most elite athletes do: she’d said goodbye to her two young foster children – a newborn and a one-year-old – who had been spirited away via taxi service in the early hours of the morning and with just 12 hours warning from the placement agency. Taylor and her husband did not know where the children were going – or to whom – and they had no way to be in touch with them. They were just gone, the family of five reduced by a count of two.
In a sport in which self-centeredness is often the currency of the realm, Taylor is working against the grain. Rather than keeping her world small and manageable with her at its hub, she’s thrown open the doors, assembled a quartet of children and willingly relegated her needs to the margins.
Taylor gave birth to her daughter Kylyn at the age of 23 and moved to Flagstaff, Arizona nine months later. She and her husband made the decision to foster because they wanted more children but didn’t want to disrupt Kellyn’s running career to do it. Over a decade they fostered seven children. When the last two were abruptly and inexplicably removed from their home, she and her husband swore they were done.
The Taylors concluded the system was broken and that it was threatening to break them, too. But they got another call – in the foster system, there’s always another call – that tabled the possibility of an adoption of siblings. The Taylors said “yes” because that’s what they do, and their trio re-inflated to a family of five. Three months later they learned they’d need space for one more – Kellyn was pregnant – and family member number six, a daughter named Keagan, arrived on New Year’s Day 2023.
Since then life has been busy, Taylor says, and she doesn’t always get it right: “When I'm in a marathon build and I've got this long, silly 24- or 26-mile run and I completely just want to go home and do nothing, it’s not the case. It's never the case. You finish the workout, you get done with the cooldown, you jump into your car and you drive straight to Phoenix to go to a soccer game,” she explains. “I'm great with my kids, you know. l pack all the snacks, give them all their little lunches. Everything will end up with us at the games and then I’m like, ‘Oh, I didn't bring myself anything.’”
While many of the world's highest-paid athletes travel with entourages, not families, Taylor is putting a different blueprint on the table: she’s expanding her family in creative ways – and she takes them everywhere.
The full half-dozen – plus Taylor’s parents – made the trip to New York City for the 2023 marathon. It took flights and taxis, several hotel rooms, lots of adjusting on the fly, and probably too much time on her feet, but they did it. Taylor says the days leading up to the race weren’t the most relaxing, but she loved having her whole crew there.
On race day, as she made her way, borough by borough, from the Verrazano Narrows Bridge to Central Park, Taylor thought deeply about each of her family members: “I decided I was going to dedicate a 5km for each of my kids and my husband,” she explains. “So there was a 5km where I thought about Kylyn, my oldest, and then Koen, my boy, and then my other two kids, Kaisley and Keagan, and then my husband, my family and then myself.”
It’s neither an accident nor a surprise that Taylor put herself last. She was the caboose in the train of thought that traveled all 26.2 miles that day in New York – and all the minutes and miles leading up to that day, too. But one understands that for Taylor, thinking of her family first is the only way to move forward.
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Steph Bruce remembers the day that Kellyn Taylor drove down to Camp Verde and ran the pinnacle workout of her Boston Marathon build-up. She remembers it not for the workout itself, but for the miles they shared afterwards.
The way Kellyn explains it, “I did the 15 by a mile. I didn't think about anything else. And then as we were cooling down I told Steph and Aliphine that the boys had left. And we ended up stopping and just crying in the middle of our cooldown.”
Sixteen months later, weighed down by grief for her mother, who was dying of breast cancer, Steph shared a similar experience with her training partners. They were tackling three by a mile – fast – down at Camp Verde and as soon as they finished, Steph recalls, “I just started gasping for air and I couldn’t talk. I stopped in the middle of the road and we all hugged.”
Both Steph and Kellyn take time recounting these parts of the story, their words punctuated by stabilizing breaths. Even though a year or two has passed since those moments took place, it’s clear they still carry a high emotional valence.
The recently deceased author Alice Munro, doyenne of the short story form, once wrote: “Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind... When a woman goes out, she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.”
It’s not that a woman can have it all or that she can be it all, it’s that she can be so many people – an IVF patient and a trail runner; a target and the arrow; heartbroken and healed; an Olympian and a nourisher; a competitor, a parent, a daughter, a teammate – and that she’s strong enough to carry all of these identities down the road.
When you leave the room of this story, take these women with you. Carry their stories for a spell. Live with them. Discuss them with friends and family, teammates and training partners. Let’s see if a collective conversation doesn’t lighten the load for all of us.
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by Amory Rowe
for Like the Wind #41
The Women’s Issue
June 1, 2024
photo credit: Kevin Dauwalter