How to Balance Pregnancy and Outdoor Adventure



“I’m too pregnant for this shit!”

I want to shout more expletives into the icy void, but the snow I’m wiping off my face—after having fallen for what feels like the hundredth time—muffles my words. I’m only thirteen weeks pregnant after all (it shouldn’t be this hard yet…should it?). When I finally dig myself out and manage to roll myself up, I find that the skins have slipped off my rental skis again, and any hope that there is adhesive remaining on them is melting as quickly as my attempts to keep my raging hormones in check.

The day had started out fine.

The highway to Bow Lake, located along the Icefields parkway in Banff National Park, was an icy slick mass of road that deterred most tourists from venturing too far into its glacial grip. When my dad and I arrived, the parking lot was deserted. I squeezed into my pre-pregnancy ski pants and contemplated the climbing and avalanche safety gear I still needed to fit into my overstuffed backpack.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” I mutter as I slide out to the frozen tundra of the lake and attempt to slip back into the familiar kick-stride-glide of my skis in an increasingly unfamiliar body. I breathe in the frosted air to soothe my now hammering head. I try and block out my mother’s well-intentioned concern and my doctor’s warning not to ski. Doctors commonly recommend not engaging in any high-impact activity when pregnant as a fall could harm the baby. Since I don’t feel attached to my pregnancy, it’s easy for me to ignore it. I try to forget my own anxiety forming cracks against the icy border of my mind.

My too-tight pants and the weight of my pack, while fine on the flat surface of the lake, restrict my movement as I begin to clamber uphill. My limbs feel clumsy, heavy, not my own. I fall behind as my dad and I navigate a tricky convex slope, the steep terrain causing my heart to palpitate against my avalanche beacon, leaving my brain to question the hubris of going ahead with this trip. Is it too risky to be here? Do I need to be here? What if I fall? But what if I don’t?

These thoughts weigh me down, but I attempt to simply focus on continuing to slide forward: kick-stride-glide becoming the refrain of this steady, somber song of skis. The weary winter sun filters through my sweat-sodden layers and I imagine that I’m floating, lightly skimming the surface of the pillowy powder below my feet. I’m slammed back to reality when I misjudge a steep turn and tumble into the icy rebuke of a snowbank. I’m not sure if I’m crying or if the vigorously falling flakes are melting at the burning touch of my exposed cheeks. What I do know is that I’m not sure I can (or want) to get up.

Welcome to the Pregnancy Club

My dad invited me on this three-day backcountry camping, skiing and mountaineering trip four months ago, when I was fresh off of an Avalanche Skills Training course and in the throes of a prolonged, painful miscarriage of a pregnancy I wasn’t even sure I wanted. I jumped at the chance to bury my grief under three meters of powder. Two months after that AST course, I was pregnant again.

The truth is that I’m exhausted, but I don’t feel the sweet exhaustion that accompanies a long day of skiing up sharply angled snow slopes and carving tracks in pristine powder. It’s the mental exhaustion of pretending to be okay, of feigning excitement and wonder whenever someone comments on my ever-expanding body. (The first rule of pregnancy club is that you don’t talk about hating pregnancy club.)

It’s only here—out in the bleached wilderness of the Bow Glacier—that I give myself the grace to allow the quinzee of protection I’ve built over the past three months to collapse under the avalanche of anxiety that triggered the moment I peed on the stick. I don’t need to be rescued, I think as I let the snow soak through my ripped pants. All I need is to quietly curl up here until the oxygen runs out, finding comfort in the crush, half dead but also half free.

Slip and Ski

Winter sport in Finland - cross-country skiing. Pregnant woman skiing in sunny winter forest covered with snow. Active people outdoors. Scenic peaceful Finnish landscape.

Sarah Gordon (name has been changed to protect her privacy) was about halfway into her pregnancy when winter arrived in the small British Columbia town where she lived. When it became too icy for long hikes, she splurged on a pass to the Nordic Centre. She continued to ski until just a few weeks before her due date. Those quiet, rhythmic days on cross-country skis served as therapy during a period of heightened anxiety. 

Gordon’s custody battle with her ex-partner began within 12 hours after the positive test, a threat that loomed large over her as she began the fight for her and her son’s life together. Accusations that she was psychologically unfit to be a mother only added to the constant fear she was feeling. “I had to prove my fitness as a mother, and every mistake I had ever made in my life was on display at each court hearing. I couldn’t tell anyone how I was feeling—I had to maintain a persona of perfection.” 

Gordon credits surviving the anxiety of her pregnancy to the joy of outdoor movement. 

“Within the joy of solitude, of being myself in nature, I was able to tap into a reserve of joy that was not accessible to me for the rest of the time. I was so depleted, but that was just enough that I could get through another 12 hours, whatever I needed to survive until I was able to do it again. There would be a small moment, 30 seconds of absolute beauty, and I could live off of that.”

Young pregnant woman wearing warm clothes having fun on a beautiful winter snowy day. Spending pregnancy time in a winter mountain resort. Female walk in park or forest. Winter holidays.

For Gordon, outdoor exercise was a literal lifesaver. The medical community is beginning to accept that some pregnant people can benefit from outdoor exertion—but this shift in thinking has been slow, and its effects are still unknown. The image of pregnant people surfing or snowboarding or sweating at the end of a trail run bucks what society has long held: The idea that perinatal people should mask any discomfort. The idea that pregnancy is something to only be grateful for. The idea that pregnancy equals fragility, that the pregnant body is simply a vessel, a host, and the fetus is the only thing that matters. It’s not the time to hike to a backcountry campsite, ski a glacier, or climb a mountain, or so the thinking went. So what happens when people who are pregnant attempt to do these things anyways?

As someone who also battled mental health issues during pregnancy, the only time I felt truly like myself, like I was back in control of my body and my anxiety, was when I was hiking through an alpine meadow, scrambling along a ridgeline or plunging into a glacial lake. I didn’t seek support for my declining mental health until a year postpartum, so these excursions into the mountains saved me. I spent my entire pregnancy hiding how I felt, feigning joy and excitement when in actuality I had no attachment to the fetus I was carrying. The only time I was able to let go of that emptiness, to remind myself that I had something to live for, was in the mountains. 

Parental Guilt

Naked belly of pregnant woman with shadow of plant. Maternity, pregnancy and motherhood concepts

Margie H. Davenport (PhD, FACSM), a professor at the University of Alberta, Christenson Professorship in Active Healthy Living, has made studying the effects of exercise during pregnancy the focus of her academic work as the field is not one that has been widely studied, and the few studies that have been published generally focus on low-impact exercise. 

Davenport’s first study was published in 2016 and demonstrated that exercise was beneficial for mental health in the postpartum period. When she was part of developing the 2019 Canadian Guidelines for physical activity during pregnancy, she included mental health as a key outcome of those guidelines.

Exercise during pregnancy reduces the potential for developing gestational diabetes, preeclampsia and gestational hypertension, which are common pregnancy complications. Contrary to now-antiquated fears, there isn’t evidence to support a correlation between exercise and an increased risk of having a miscarriage, having a small baby or having an early delivery.

“Up until recently, there hasn’t been strong data demonstrating that staying physically active during pregnancy was healthy,” Davenport says. “Being overly active, or exceeding people’s expectations of what a pregnant woman can do in terms of exercise during pregnancy, has created a lot of fear because of the lack of information we had.”

African young adult pregnant woman in workout clothes exercising by the window and basking in the warm morning sunlight to maintain health and well-being during pregnancy

However, even though there is conclusive data to demonstrate the health benefits of being active in the perinatal period—specifically the recommendation to participate in at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity over three or more days a week—spreading the word has been slow. According to Davenport, researchers still have a long way to go in terms of understanding the potential limits of high-intensity exercise during pregnancy. 

Her recent research has been focused on what someone who is pregnant would be traditionally told not to do: heavy lifting, skiing, running, essentially anything that is considered high impact. “We know people still do it,” she says, “and we know they get a lot of negative comments about it, but we just don’t have a lot of evidence to support whether [high intensity exercise] is safe or not. More conclusive data as to how activities like climbing and skiing impact pregnancy would be welcomed by people who are desperate to continue their outdoor recreation to stem perinatal anxiety and could help alleviate the guilt and shame that can be felt when people choose to exercise in this manner.

Yet, while research on perinatal depression is more robust—Davenport tells me that studies show a 67 per cent reduction in depression when physical activity was incorporated into a daily routine—medical experts have been slow to look at how anxiety impacts pregnancy. But recognizing how pregnancy can create increased vulnerability when it comes to changes in mental health overall, as well as trusting that pregnant individuals (along with the advice of their medical practitioners) know what is best for their bodies, is a promising start.

A Joyful pregnant family. Lesbian couple and child have fun on nature outdoors at autumn park.

Davenport does caution that exercise is not a magical cure for all pregnancy ailments, and that some pregnancies are too high risk to engage in physical activity. Alternatively, she doesn’t want people to feel anxious if they can’t or don’t want to exercise. 

“We want to encourage you and we recommend it, but we don’t want to force it. We don’t want to cause parental guilt.”

Paranoia and Paralysis 

Jane Renyk

Jane Renyk couldn’t bring herself to go skiing for the first two trimesters of her second pregnancy. Her first pregnancy earlier in the year wasn’t unplanned, but the positive test felt like a panic button she wasn’t allowed to push. “I was scared of having a baby, I was scared of losing myself,” she says.

After a summer of hiking into the Kokanee Glacier Cabin, in the backcountry of Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park, and the Naiset Huts in Assiniboine Provincial Park of British Columbia, Jane suffered a traumatic miscarriage and the loss of the pregnancy consumed her.

When winter arrived and Renyk got pregnant again, she refused to engage in any sort of extreme outdoor recreation. Both she and her husband are avid skiers and spend their winters traversing the snowy slopes of the Canadian Rockies. Even though she was cleared by her doctors to ski, Renyk was paralyzed by the guilt that accompanied her miscarriage and the difficult emotions she grappled with leading up to it. She was too paranoid, she says, to do anything but walk.

After being diagnosed with gestational diabetes, Renyk hired a trainer to help with her physical health. The trainer worked with her to accommodate her anxiety about the pregnancy. The activity and diet plan, along with the supportive people in her life, provided Renyk with the confidence she needed to get moving.

Jane Renyk

Years prior, she was beginning to master her pre-pregnancy anxiety on a backcountry camping trip on Vancouver Island. Renyk had been struggling to fall asleep when something shifted. “The beach [we were camping on] went silent. Everybody else had gone to sleep and I could hear the ocean. Suddenly, I didn’t want to fall asleep. For the first time in years, it was just me—no medication, nobody saying the right thing, no validation from a relationship—and my thoughts were at peace. That beach, the sound of the water, it healed me.”  

Renyk drew from this experience to support a return to the outdoor pursuits she loves in that final trimester. Returning to the beach, to the water, allowed her to find peace within her pregnancy, just like she had found peace all those years ago. She recalls canoeing across Cameron Lake in Waterton mere weeks before she gave birth, and feeling the serenity of the lake seep into her psyche: no whitecaps, no breeze and barely managing to paddle after squeezing her belly into a lifejacket gave Renyk a glimpse of the joy that can be found in scaling back from ambitious, adventurous pursuits. 

“[It was] a reminder that it’s not about the big objectives or lists of places to see and conquer. Instead, I got excited to be the one to instill in my son a love for the outdoors.”

Jane Renyk

Fight or Flight

Kelsey Drew (BSc, MSc), a registered physiotherapist who focuses on pelvic health and pelvic floor rehabilitation, recognizes the importance of outdoor recreation for people during and after pregnancy. 

She echoes Davenport in the positive benefits of exercise during pregnancy, and notes that the American College of Sports Medicine also recommends a certain level of activity in pregnancy. The perinatal period is not necessarily the time to try for a personal best in an ultra marathon or to swim the English Channel, but it doesn’t mean that all adventurous pursuits must be put on pause.

Physical and mental health is interlinked in a way that must be acknowledged by providers in health care. As Drew puts it, pelvic floor practitioners specifically must accept this connection. 

“Before doing pelvic floor physio courses, I didn’t recognize the relationship between the central nervous system and the rest of the body. I think it’s a huge missed piece amongst health care providers and male therapists in particular.”

Vaginal tension isn’t always obvious either. States of anxiety, stress and apprehension are often associated with shoulders up around the ears or the clenching of the jaw, as protecting the head and neck is evolutionary in nature; however, Drew says that the first muscle group to turn on when an individual is in a state of fight or flight is the pelvic floor.

“It protects your organs, it protects your spine and it gives you that explosive power to either throw fists or get the hell out of dodge. The problem is that we don’t see it the same way as when our shoulders are being worn as earrings.”

Drew recognizes the importance of the mental health of her patients because she cannot help them get physically better if they do not feel safe and secure mentally, if they do not feel like they have hope. “I’m so happy that there’s been a lot more normalization and less stigmatization around mental health in general,” she says, “but I think we have a ways to go, especially when it comes to pregnancy.”

Since I’ve been rescued from urinary incontinence thanks to a strengthened pelvic floor, I queried Drew on her perspective about the safety of skiing while pregnant. “Go!” she exclaims. “Let me know how the snow is.”

Fresh Snow and Fresh Hope

I experience my own fight or flight response while skiing to the Bow Glacier, setting up camp with my dad below the Bow Hut and nestling my tent in a drift of snow formed by the wind’s architectural ambitions. We are exhausted from a day of skiing—and in my case, falling—so we spend the waning daylight hours watching avalanche after avalanche crash down off of the Onion, a popular summer scramble. My feet are cozy in down booties, and I hold a bag of rehydrated teriyaki chicken and rice, warming my hands through the heat of the food. I forget the memory of getting up to pee a dozen times in the ominous chill of the night before. For the first time in a long time, I’m not trying to escape. It’s a tiny, fleeting moment, but I am me again. And it is enough.

On the last day of the ski trip, my protruding belly attempts to flee the waistband of my ruined ski pants—that I will unsuccessfully try to repair with duct tape later—interrupting my reverie of ice and slush, reminding me that mine is not the only heartbeat thudding below this dusting of snow. My father is quietly plodding away in the distance, immune to my distress, and even though closing the gap seems insurmountable, I push myself up and ski on.

It gives me hope. Hope that I can do this. Hope that I’m not alone anymore. Hope that we can eliminate the parental guilt and stigma on pregnant or postpartum individuals who engage in high-intensity outdoor activities. Hope for the health practitioners and scientists who are laying down those first tracks for a more informed and supportive future, breaking trail and creating fresh tracks in the snow for others to follow.

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