Mary Wells is no longer a brand-new mother, but she’s still caught off guard by strangers’ praise when she takes her 13-month-old daughter out for a run with the jogging stroller.

“People will pass me and say, ‘Good job, Mom.’ A lady passed me on her bike the other day, and she was talking to her co-riders. She said, ‘That’s some hard work.’ I was running probably like a 9-minute pace,” Wells says, almost snorting because, to her, 9 minutes per mile is nothing special.

“If I’d been running a 9-minute pace by myself, nobody would have said, ‘Good job’ or ‘That’s some hard work.’”

Even before the baby is born, go for a run with the swell in your belly showing, and people speak up. Most offer encouragement, Wells says, but a few want to make a woman sit down, at once. Prop her feet up.

Sure, she says, there are conditions that make brisk exercise risky for some pregnancies, and all women should listen to their doctors. But moderate exercise helps healthy women have healthy babies.

“And I don’t know that everyone understands that yet,” she says.

Wells, who is president of the Little Rock Roadrunners Club, has thought about the public aspects of motherhood a lot over the past year as her club has been transformed by childbearing and birthing. Four of its most active members have become mothers, including Wells and past president Ginea Qualls, and at least three others are pregnant, including Andrea Sieczkowski, director of the Arkansas Grand Prix series of footraces.

“I think it’s neat that in all these cases, it’s the first baby,” says Wells, who works for the Arkansas Department of Health as Children in Schools section chief in the Center for Health Advancement.

Arkansa Democrat Gazette

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