When it all Changes

When I'm in a good routine runs happen like clockwork. Sessions planned, kilometres ticked off and splits well executed. Five or six runs a week depending on the stage of the plan and one or two strength sessions. I'm most definitely a creature of habit when it comes to training.

If we rewind seven weeks that completely changed. My wife and I were lucky enough to welcome our first child, Fionn, into the world. Everyone is healthy and we're over the moon to have him. Of course, having a child is a seismic change to your life and the influence it has on training is well down the pecking order but I'm confident anyone reading here is interested in how I've tackled running rather than hearing about how my nappy changing technique has evolved.

In no way am I attempting to write a guide as to how you should train when you have a newborn, that would be ridiculous. I wholeheartedly encourage anyone about to go through the experience to savour it and be as present as possible. Figuring out what works in your scenario is the only way to approach it. This is more of a reflection, I do think there are some transferable learnings to other phases of your "running life" too.

Sleep

Let's start with the big one. There's no sugar coating it, reduced sleep quality and duration is rough. It's absolutely necessary to look after a child and in the early stages we were laughing about how alert you'd be at 3am doing whatever was needed. The problem was how you felt at 3pm! I don't have a comparison but I think we got off lightly, Fionn seems to wake when something is up but is fairly settled otherwise. The mindset shift is most interesting, I'm so used to going to bed and that being that. Now that you know you're going to be up it's like you're preparing for a series of naps. The odd night I thought what's the point of going to bed at 9.30pm if I'll only be up at 11pm anyway.....what a huge mistake. Taking whatever sleep you can, when you can is critical. My wife is definitely doing the heavy lifting here, I'm helping out as best I can but at the moment I'm redundant when it comes to feeding. I'd like to think I'm doing a good job feeding Laura though!

One related change I've made here is to stop measuring heart rate variability. This used be part of my morning routine but as I no longer have a predictable morning and I'm not doing any hard training I don't see the point. I don't make any effort to track how many hours of sleep I get on a nightly basis either, I don't think it's helpful. I know things will change at some point and I'll tune back into HRV but I'm happy parking it for now. The same goes for resting heart rate, I know it's going to be higher than when I'm at my fittest. I'll start measuring it regularly again if I start a decent training block.

Nutrition

This is something I had thought about quite a bit beforehand. Changes to body composition and body weight around the birth of a newborn are common, there are a range of factors at play that contribute to this. Increased cortisol, decreased testosterone, reduced sleep, reduced time for exercise and increased access to energy dense foods all come into play. I wasn't worried about slight changes but I was conscious that without some action things could get to a point I wasn't happy with. I'm probably 2kg heavier than what I'd usually try and be for races and that's within what I'd deem acceptable. Again, this is absolutely not what I think is right or wrong for other people but it's an honest verdict on what would annoy me versus what I'm okay with.

There's no rocket science to navigating this but one move we made that did help was to politely ask people calling not to bring cakes, chocolates and that kind of thing. We had plenty of occasions where we enjoyed these during the day with people but the issue is when it's 2am, you're wrecked and you're reaching for the half eaten apple tart.

As my role is making sure Laura is well fed that includes sorting snacks during the night when necessary. As tasty as it is I definitely don't need to be eating slices of toast or yoghurts in the middle of the night. I feel like this side of things is coming back to normal now. Regular food shops, bringing a lunch to work and cooking a decent dinner are the cornerstones.

Running

Naturally, this was something I was thinking about before Fionn arrived. I was being wound up by friends and family joking that "your running days are over" but I knew that wouldn't be the case. I also knew I'd need some guidelines for how I approached running. This started a few months beforehand when I picked mid September races as my last targets of 2025. Dublin marathon interested me after Rotterdam not going to plan but it would have been a horrendous call! I made my peace with forgetting about races until 2026.

In times of increased stress I've always valued running as a way to clear my head and feel better physically. I anticipated this is what I'd need from running with a new arrival. This took a lot of pressure off, I viewed running more as something that was good for my health rather than something that needed to be performance focused. When there's a natural change to training loads it's tempting to try and plug in high intensity work to "hang onto fitness". I took a different approach as my main goal was to be able to keep running in my routine consistently. I was conscious of the potent cocktail that reduced load, poor sleep, hormonal changes (reduced testosterone) could have on injury risk. Trying to squeeze in a session with that going on in the background felt like it would be high risk.

In saying that, I ignored my plans at a couple of points and regretted it. I remember two occasions where what I planned was a poor call. I stopped one mini session after a couple of reps of 5 minutes at threshold as it just felt miserable and last week I had a 5 x 1 mile session planned which I decided against while warming up. My heart rate was about 10 beats higher than it had been warming up earlier that week and I felt half asleep. The fact these sessions were not part of preparing for a race made it far easier to drop them. I did go back to the 5 x 1 mile session this week and I felt much better.

One practical change I've made for these early sessions is to let heart rate dictate intensity rather than pace. You're always going to be tempted to aim for previous paces for threshold sessions for exmaple but if I tried that at the moment I'd be over LT2 fairly quickly. For my reps I'm going to have duration and HR visible. Ideally, the pace will gradually improve over time.

Seven weeks in and I think one decent mid week session and something slightly longer on the weekend is a reasonable spot to be. I do have one run booked for early January but it's more about enjoying the event than racing. I'll have the headtorch on for a 28k run around the Ballyhouras for IMRA's annual moonlight challenge. This is giving me just enough of an incentive to start lengthening a weekend run.

The key takeaway here is that keeping some running going is helpful. Sticking to short and easy runs is probably the best fit and in the early stages it doesn't make sense to try and force higher intensity running. This principle transfers well to periods like exam season, tight work deadlines or other increased external demands on your time and energy.

Week 1 to 6 - Steady Progression

Strength Work

Not good. This was definitely where my training took the biggest hit. The gym I use is closer to work than home so my usual routine is to tag it onto a work day. Naturally, I reduced my working hours in the first few weeks and time I'm not working I'm keen to be at home.

I was conscious this would be more challenging than getting out for a run and my mitigating strategy was to try and do mini strength sessions at home. I don't have a home gym or anything like it so I was using a 16kg kettlebell, a TRX, disc sliders and a resistance band. I focused on one good dose of loading for my plantar flexors (calves / achilles), quads and hamstrings once a week. It wasn't until four weeks in I got back to the gym.

The home set up worked well for something like a calf raise off a step but realistically I didn't have enough weight for meaningful squat, hinge or lunge style movements. In the general scheme of things it's not a big deal but if I kept this going longer term I would lose force production capacity which would have a negative impact on my running and bump up the likelihood of picking up a soft tissue injury. The important note here is that my typical strength work is done with relatively high loads, if your usual strength work is home based you won't see such a marked drop off.

When I did get back into the gym I was conservative with the loads I used and I expect to be back to where I was within the next couple of weeks. I'm aiming for one solid strength session in the gym and one top up at home.

Easing back into heavier loads

Racing

I've touched on this already but at the moment I don't feel any desire to be heading to races. I'm sure this will change as I start to string higher quality training together but I don't get much satisfaction from races unless I feel well prepared going into them. I might pick the odd short one in January but I don't see myself feeling competitive (relative to myself!) until March or April. I do enjoy training and I appreciate the flexibility at the moment. I'll save my main 2026 goals for the second half of the year!

Summary

Overall I'm happy with the balance I've struck. It's always hard to accept you're going to lose fitness that you've worked hard to gain but there are times when it's the right thing to do. I regularly meet people in the physio clinic who try to keep a training programme going while there are significant changes to the rest of their life and it rarely works out well.

Laura recognising it's better for everyone in the house if I get out is something I'm very appreciative of. I'm conscious not to push this so I don't see any two hour runs in the near future which I'm fine with. Most importantly, I feel like my priorities are in the right place. I've never been happier to see my running taking a backseat!

Thanks for reading,

Patrick

Running Buddy