After most women give birth for the first time, they figure that the hard part is over. Allyson Felix isn’t like most women. Instead, she started rigorously training.
All athletes have to balance their sport with their personal life. And one of the hardest things for female athletes to manage is pregnancy.
Most female athletes want to start a family, but they know that pregnancy can really impact their careers.
There are a number of instances of women athletes successfully competing while pregnant and shortly after giving birth.
For example, in 2017, Serena Williams won the Australian Open while pregnant.
But Allyson Felix’s pregnancy story is even more impressive than Serena Williams’s.
Allyson Felix is an American sprinter. She’s competed in the 2012 Olympics, the 2016 Olympics and the IAAF World Championships.
To date, she has won six gold medals and three silver medals at the Olympics. In 2020, she hopes to win more. And there’s every indication that she will, when you take her amazing, record-breaking achievement at 2019’s IAAF World Championships into account.
But to appreciate just how amazing Felix’s most recent achievement is, first you need to understand what she had been through.
In 2018, she became pregnant for the first time. This first pregnancy was difficult.
In November, the doctors had no other choice than to perform an emergency C-section on Felix. The baby would be premature, but it was her only chance.
Luckily, the procedure went incredibly well. The baby, a girl named Camryn, was healthy but needed lots of care. Felix herself, understandably, had to take some time out to recover.
But while Felix was trying to recover and care for her baby, her sponsor, Nike, was being incredibly heartless.
The brand was trying to force Felix to get back onto the track as soon as possible. The truth was that if Felix wasn’t back to her physical peak in just a few months, then the brand could have cut off her funding.
The brand didn’t care that Felix had just gone through an intense procedure and was looking after a premature baby.
Felix would go on to spend months in the NICU. She had given birth to Camryn in November, and they were still there at Christmas.
But when 2019 began, Felix knew that she had to start training again soon. Her financial future depended on it.
Felix was able to get back to her physical best once more. The IAAF World Championships were looming, and she was hopeful that she would perform well. In fact, if she was able to win a gold medal at this event, she would make history.
Going into 2019’s IAAF World Championships, Felix was one of two athletes who had been awarded 10 gold medals from the event. The other athlete was Usain Bolt.
Both Felix and Bolt had 11 gold medals. But she was determined to get a 12th.
She flew to Doha, Qatar, where this year’s championships were being held.
Just 10 months ago, she had been undergoing an emergency procedure to give birth to her child. And now she was trying to make history on the track.
The day of her event came. It was the 4 x 400 meter relay. She and her three other team members lined up. Felix’s team knew what she had been through and were determined to give her another gold.
Felix looked into the crowd. She saw her daughter in the arms of her dad. Today, the baby was 10 months old.
The relay team ran and ran. They won the race.
Today, she is the only human to have won 12 gold medals at the IAAF World Championships.
What an amazing role model Felix is for her daughter and all women!
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