Bump, Bike & Baby Read online

  Moire O’Sullivan is an accomplished mountain runner and adventure racer. In 2009, she became the first person to complete the Wicklow Round, a 100km circuit of Ireland’s Wicklow Mountains run within twenty-four hours. She is married to Pete and is the proud mother of their two young sons, Aran and Cahal. While busy adapting to and learning about motherhood, Moire won Ireland’s National Adventure Race Series in 2014 and 2016. Bump, Bike and Baby is about this personal journey.

  First published in Great Britain by

  Sandstone Press Ltd

  Dochcarty Road

  Dingwall

  Ross-shire

  IV15 9UG

  Scotland

  www.sandstonepress.com

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored or transmitted in any form without the express written

  permission of the publisher.

  Copyright © Moire O’Sullivan 2018

  Editor: K.A. Farrell

  The moral right of Moire O’Sullivan to be recognised as the

  author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  The publisher acknowledges subsidy from

  Creative Scotland towards publication of this volume.

  ISBN: 978-1-912240-06-7

  ISBNe: 978-1-912240-07-4

  Cover design by Mark Ecob

  Ebook compilation by Iolaire Typography Ltd, Newtonmore

  To the two crazies, Aran and Cahal

  Contents

  1 – Resistance

  2 – Denial

  3 – Acceptance

  4 – Reconciliation

  5 – Big

  6 – Birth

  7 – Trapped

  8 – Training

  9 – Race

  10 – Stress

  11 – Abroad

  12 – Change

  13 – Fight

  14 – Adventur

  15 – Pain

  16 – Killarney

  17 – Again

  18 – Exhaustion

  19 – Blood

  20 – Home

  21 – Fit

  22 – Quest

  23 – Family

  Acknowledgements

  1

  Resistance

  ‘Oh, look! Isn’t she gorgeous?’

  My friend has completely lost interest in what I am trying to say. Her attention is now solely on Niamh, who has just walked into the room.

  Niamh used to be a kick-ass mountain runner, but lately she’s been missing from the racing scene. One day she was competing, and the next, she was gone. Everyone assumed it was injury that had forced her untimely departure. We thought it must have been a serious muscle tear to make her disappear for so long. Back then, she was a formidable force. She used to bound up steep hills like a spring-loaded gazelle. She would stride down slopes no matter how treacherous the terrain. Now Niamh has barely the strength to carry the large plastic monstrosity anchored in the cradle of her arm.

  Niamh disappeared around nine months ago. Now I know exactly what happened to her.

  A fluffy pink blanket is wedged inside the industrial black crate Niamh is trying to transport. She manages to lug the contraption as far as ourselves, then drops it unceremoniously at our feet with obvious relief.

  Mountain running is thirsty work. All that huffing and puffing up and down hills can make a mountain runner crave liquid refreshment. After a particularly hard race on a warm summer’s day, we mountain runners have congregated in the local village pub in the heart of Ireland’s Wicklow Mountains. Under the auspice of prize-giving, we have descended on this fine establishment to cure our dehydration. And while we are busy knocking back our pints of beer and cups of tea, Niamh has come to pay a visit, but she has not come alone. Inside the car seat that Niamh was shouldering is the root cause of her being missing in action.

  ‘A little girl,’ my friend coos. ‘Isn’t she so lovely!’ She bends down and gently pulls the blanket back a fraction. She reveals a tiny, reddened, scrunched-up face beneath a woolly baby bonnet. Its features begin to quiver as the warm pub air and stark neon lights flood its crash test carrier.

  Oh God, it’s going to start crying.

  I look up in distress, hoping Niamh will do something to put the child at ease. But she looks far too tired to comfort her baby right now. Her eyes are bleary from lack of sleep. She has never looked this drained before, even after finishing long, arduous mountain races. Before, she stood tall and straight at starting lines, dressed head to toe in tight Lycra. Now her body hangs limp under baggy clothing.

  What has this child done to her? And why has she chosen to give birth to a baby just when she was doing so well at our sport?

  More mountain runners spot Niamh and start to congregate. They oh and ah at the little baby, who has now thankfully fallen back asleep. They hug and kiss Niamh, who has finally returned to the mountain running fold.

  The arrival of these supporters and well-wishers give me a perfect excuse to escape.

  I have no interest in babies, and I can’t understand why someone would want one of their own. They can’t talk, can’t walk, can’t feed or clothe themselves. It all seems like a lot of milk and shite to me. So the idea of standing around, congratulating Niamh and marvelling at her baby totally confounds me.

  I also fail to comprehend why Niamh would agree to subject her body to pregnancy. Not only did she miss a full season of racing while her baby grew, but she also jeopardised her own return to peak performance post-pregnancy. I have heard too many stories of dodgy hips, caved-in cores, and wonky pelvises that render mummy running impossible. How could someone agree to risk all this, just to have a baby?

  My query goes unanswered, because I dare not pose it to a soul.

  My reluctance to ask such a basic question is not without reason. I am a thirty-six-year-old female. All around me, my friends are breeding. Society dictates that this is what I should also do, what I should explicitly want. My biological clock should be ticking. But when I see babies like Niamh’s, I feel zero maternal pulse.

  I have another problem: I am married. And my husband, Pete, wants to start a family. We’ve had a few months of trying to get pregnant, without success. So when I arrive home from my mountain race, I tell him all about the course and the conditions but purposely avoid mentioning Niamh and her infant. I know where such talk of bumps and babies will inevitably lead.

  I cannot, however, avoid the subject forever. Only days later, it comes up, as if on cue.

  ‘My sister’s pregnant,’ Pete says, as he coolly puts down his mobile phone. He has just finished his weekly catch-up call with his family. I am sitting on the couch, watching TV. I have no interest in what’s on, but keep my eyes fixed firmly on the flickering screen.

  ‘That’s nice,’ I say. ‘How long’s she gone?’

  ‘Don’t know. But she is due sometime in March.’ He crosses the room and stands beside me. I freeze in anticipation of what is about to come.

  ‘You know she’s younger than me?’ Pete says.

  I nod, waiting for the tirade that has become the norm.

  ‘For God’s sake, Moire. I’m forty-three.’

  Here it comes.

  ‘I can’t wait forever to have children,’ Pete says. And just for good measure, he adds, ‘Sure, you’re not getting any younger yourself.’

  I look up to feign offence. We’ve heard that a woman’s fertility falls off a cliff after thirty-five. Mine has been free-falling for a whole year already. Our time is running out fast.

  ‘It will happen, Pete,’ I say, trying to calm the situation.

  ‘But when? You promised me before we got married
that we’d have children. You knew this was a deal breaker for me.’

  It is a promise that I have lived to regret. It is amazing what you agree to when you are in love and having tonnes of fun as a couple. Getting married, being pregnant, and having children seemed a whole lifetime away. My promise to have children was based on the hope that I would see lots of babies born around me, and start wanting them eventually. But with that possibility fading fast, my faith is now with female friends who had declared themselves distinctly un-maternal. ‘It is different when they are your own,’ is what they have all promised me.

  Now more than ever, I need them to be right.

  ‘Maybe we can’t have kids,’ I say. ‘There are plenty of people who have fertility issues these days,’ I hasten to point out.

  Pete sits down. ‘Then we’ll get tested. We need to do whatever it takes to start this family.’

  It takes all my powers of restraint to stop myself saying that we already have a family. There is Pete and I, and our dog Tom. And judging by the way Pete hugs Tom these days, the dog might as well be his little baby.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ I say. ‘We’ll work it out. I promise, we’ll try harder from now on.’

  Pete gets up from the sofa, patting my knee as he rises. We both force out a smile. He has been successfully pacified.

  Little does he know that, despite the promise I have just made, I have ulterior plans. My friend, Paul Mahon, has just asked me to be part of his four-person team for the upcoming Cooley Raid Adventure Race. The route traverses several hundred kilometres of Northern Ireland’s Sperrin Mountains and lasts for twenty-four hours. Teams need to be mixed sex in composition. Paul has already gathered together three lads: Peter Cromie, Adrian Hennessy, and himself. He needs a female member to complete his line-up.

  Paul introduced me to the world of mountain running and adventure racing six years ago. He told me which races were worth doing and invited me on training runs and spins. I quickly grew to love mountain running. However, after a few unfortunate experiences, I concluded that adventure racing was not for me. But out of sheer loyalty to Paul, this time I agreed.

  Training for an adventure race is not conducive to starting a family. It involves mountain biking for miles, mountain running for long hours, and kayaking in between. Such physical exertion leaves you with very little energy to do much else once you land back home. And as adventure racing is a team sport, you are expected to put in sufficient training and to turn up fit on race day.

  So when I tell my husband Pete about my race plan, he is obviously miffed.

  ‘When are you going to stop doing all this crazy sport,’ he asks, ‘and just settle down and have babies?’

  But Pete knew exactly what I was like before we even started dating. I was training for the Wicklow Round when we met, a one-hundred-kilometre circuit of Ireland’s Wicklow Mountains to be completed within twenty-four hours. He saw me training diligently every morning and racing every weekend. If he expects me to change now that we are married, he has another think coming.

  ‘What about you?’ I say, swivelling around to defend myself. ‘Are you going to change once we’ve got this elusive family you keep going on about?’

  Both Pete and I have day jobs as consultants for the international charity sector. It is how we originally met. Our work involves frequent overseas travel from our base in Ireland to developing countries in Africa and Asia.

  ‘I know I’m going to be left here at home, holding the baby, while you’re off on your foreign trips!’ I exclaim.

  Pete says nothing. He knows we haven’t really considered what happens after any potential birth.

  Since we got together, Pete and I have lived and worked in places as far-flung as Vietnam, Cambodia and Nepal. We enjoy eating out, drinking fine wines, and absconding on weekends away. Many of our friends and family have noted our lack of forward planning, and they know what our lifestyles are like. They are well aware how much I love my mountain running and adventure sports. They’ve heard I have just come back from running the Camino de Santiago across northern Spain in seventeen days, when most people walk it in five weeks. Very little in our current lives seems conducive to minding young children.

  ‘We’ll work it out,’ Pete says, patting the dog, who has appeared out of nowhere. Tom knows he needs to be close by when Pete and I are arguing, which seems to be increasingly frequent these days.

  Just as I set off for my adventure race, par for the course, Pete heads off to Cambodia for a week’s work. So as he jets off to the humid climes of South East Asia, I drive to the race start in drizzling, autumnal rain along narrow rural roads crisscrossing the Sperrin Mountains.

  ‘We have to go out fast,’ our team leader Paul declares. All four of us agree. Looking around the start line, there is some serious competition. Not only have some of the best Irish teams turned up, but there is a group of foreigners in our midst. They have to be good if they are sponsored by Salomon and have travelled all the way from Denmark just to participate.

  Other teams have similar plans to set a brutal pace. As soon as we start, everyone charges up the first mountain on foot towards the first checkpoint. We reach it first, but are quickly followed by the Danes.

  ‘I thought that living in a flat country, they’d be useless on the hills,’ Paul says. I pant back in agreement. The lads are all running so fast, I can barely match their speed.

  I’ll never keep up with this pace.

  ‘Here, give us your bag,’ Cromie says to me as we pelt back down the hill. Cromie may be long and lanky, but he is as strong as a pack mule. My rucksack contains all the food and water I need for the next couple of hours. Its heavy load is surely the reason I’m struggling.

  With the Danes now ahead of us, our race strategy has to change. ‘Going out fast’ changes to ‘Follow those Danes’. It is a cunning plan: it means we can stop poring over maps and religiously following compasses, activities that expend endless amounts of mental energy, and let the Danes do all this hard cerebral work for us instead. We stay behind them for the next few hours while we trek up and over the trackless, barren mountains, watching and waiting for the Danes to make their move.

  It is dark, cold and raining when our teams arrive at the bike transition. We are vying for the lead. My hands are too swollen to fit into my bike gloves. My shoes and socks are wringing wet from being immersed in cold bog water and mountain streams. But despite all these minor discomforts, our team manages to edge away from the elusive Danes.

  Our lead is not to last. First, we take a wrong turn, then Paul’s bike gets a puncture that needs repairing. Within a few hours, we have lost all sight of the Danes.

  We cycle on through the night, along mountain tracks and country roads. After six hours in the saddle, we are all pretty tired and scruffy. Finally, we arrive at a checkpoint based at the Shepherd’s Rest Inn near Draperstown. This checkpoint also contains a mystery task as part of the race: a spot of rifle shooting.

  I have no idea how to fire a rifle, so I ask the owner of the shooting gallery to give me a quick lesson. It soon becomes apparent that my fellow teammates also have no clue. But being male, they dare not ask the man in charge. They fire pellets randomly at the discs in front of us. A potent mix of exhaustion and ignorance mean they register poor scores.

  I, on the other hand, score five out of five. ‘Sure what do ye expect?’ says my teammate Cromie. ‘She’s from Northern Ireland.’ Apparently growing up in the Troubles somehow imbued me with superior shooting skills.

  I take the opportunity to nip to the Inn’s loo once we are done with the rifles. Peeing on trails and behind trees is the norm in adventure racing, but I can’t resist the allure of a proper indoor toilet while the guys work out where we’re headed next. The pub is wonderfully cosy and dry compared to the wet, wintery weather I have left outside.

  I find the Ladies, and scoot inside for a wee. It should just be a quick stop, but I hesitate, as I notice a smudge of blood on the toilet paper. It is no
t my time of the month. I shouldn’t be bleeding like this.

  I am visibly distracted when I return to my teammates, trying to work out what’s wrong with me. Everyone is always out of sorts in the dead of night when adventure racing, so I totally blend back in.

  We continue on, running and biking through the dark, arriving at Lough Neagh for the kayak section just as dawn appears. The Danes arrived at the kayaks an hour earlier and are the firm favourites to win. Our aim now is to claim the runner-up prize.

  I sit in the boat and paddle away without speaking, summoning up all my energy to work out what’s up with me. The boat floats on, but my stomach sinks when I recall reading recently about spotting between periods. It was on a pregnancy website. Something about when a fertilised egg fixes itself in the uterus, it can cause implantation bleeding.

  The lake waters churn beneath me.

  We get out of our boats and on to our bikes, and cycle to a mucky mountain. The driving rain and howling winds batter us as we climb towards its summit. From there we battle our way home and cross the finish line before twenty-four hours is up. We secure second place behind the dynamic Danes.

  Though the race is over, I sprint back home to work out what’s happening to my body.

  A few days later, I call Pete. He is still on assignment in Cambodia.

  ‘I think I’m pregnant,’ I say to him across the crackling phone line.

  ‘What? What did you say?’ Pete shouts at me from the other side of the world. ‘Wait a minute. Wait until I step outside and get a better signal.’

  I wait for what seems like an eternity until I hear Pete’s voice on the line again.

  ‘I think I’m pregnant.’ I try again, hating to have to repeat these horrid words.

  ‘You think, or you know?’

  ‘I know. I did a test.’

  ‘Oh, that’s great!’ Pete says. He laughs to himself. ‘That’s so great.’