Running the New York City Marathon while eight months pregnant wasn’t always the plan for Deirdre Keane. She certainly didn’t expect to be in the spotlight after she crossed the finish line, smiling with her bare belly covered in glitter.
“This is my seventh marathon pregnant,” she said in a postrace interview.
When the interviewer seemed to be in disbelief, she drew a seven with her finger in the air and explained they were all during the same pregnancy.
“The human body is capable of so much,” Keane, 38, later said.
Keane has been showered with praise and criticism online for marathoning while pregnant. Some people cheered her energy, while others cautioned it was not good for the baby.
So why did Keane do this? And is it okay to run 26.2 miles (seven times) while expecting?
Keane and her husband started trying to have a baby after they married last year.
“I assumed my pregnancy journey was going to be a long one,” said Keane, a nurse practitioner and health care consultant who is also an avid runner.
She signed up for eight marathons in 2026, and also planned to do a 100-mile ultramarathon and her first Ironman, thinking of it as a “last hurrah” before she hopefully became pregnant.
After the Boston and London marathons in April, she felt off. She took a pregnancy test and learned she was six weeks pregnant.
She talked to her husband and her doctor, and decided not to do the ultramarathon or Ironman. But she still wanted to complete the other marathons she had planned.
“I was so nervous to talk to my doctor about it,” Keane said.
Her doctor was supportive, she said, as long as Keane was eating enough and hydrating, and not pushing past abdominal pain or cramping.
Keane said her doctor doubted she would feel up to running the New York City Marathon at 34 weeks pregnant, but she didn’t object to it.
“If you are comfortable enough, and you don’t run too hard, I’m totally okay with it,” Keane recalled her doctor saying.
This isn’t the first time Keane has taken her sport to an extreme. When Keane met her husband Brian Innes in 2022, she was training for the World Marathon Challenge, running seven marathons on seven continents in seven days.
He thought he must have misunderstood her at first.
“I thought, ‘It isn’t actually seven marathons in seven days,’” Innes said.
Not only did Keane do just that, she was the fastest woman in the 2023 competition.
Keane started running in college in honor of her dad, a marathoner, who died of skin cancer when she was 13.
“I wanted to run one marathon,” Keane said. “I could commemorate his life and all his running.”
Then she caught the running bug. She now has 74 marathons under her belt, including ultramarathons and 100-mile races. Running became important to her mental health and her identity, she said, especially during the pandemic when she was working at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
“It was something that I did every day,” she said.
Keane said she was glad that the public’s reaction to her running in her eighth month of pregnancy has been generally positive — but she knew there would be some criticism as well.
“A lot of runners get that kind of feedback,” said Margie Davenport, an exercise scientist at the University of Alberta who has studied distance running and weight training during pregnancy. “People aren’t aware that the research has changed a lot.”
She and her colleagues have looked at distance running and intense exercise in pregnancy, including both large surveys and an individual case study of an ultramarathoner. Exercising for more than double the current guidelines of 150 minutes a week in pregnancy was found to reduce the risk of delivery complications and did not have a negative impact on the babies.
“Our data is demonstrating that it’s quite safe, and it’s beneficial for those individuals,” Davenport said.
She added that running, especially marathons, during pregnancy is not for everybody, and that pregnant women should consult their doctors about their exercise routine.
Many women were once told to cut back on exercise during pregnancy or even stop moving altogether and go on bed rest if they had certain complications. While there are still cases where doctors advise women to take it easy, exercise has been found to be beneficial for both pregnant women and their babies. Recent research has found that exercising during pregnancy was associated with a 50 percent reduction in the risk for gestational diabetes and a 40 percent reduction in preeclampsia risk. Exercise also decreased the risk of depression in pregnancy.
“Women who are pregnant are incredibly resilient,” Davenport said. “And a lot of the limits that have been placed on them have been due to a lack of research.”
Trent Stellingwerff, research director at the Women’s Health Sports & Performance Institute, said he became interested in the topic not only as a scientist, but as a husband when his wife, Olympic runner Hilary Stellingwerff, became pregnant.
“As a whole in the last 10 years of research, I would say there’s been a real shift in thinking that as long as women are healthy and approved by the physician, they can probably exercise a lot more than they realize,” Stellingwerff said.
In his research of elite athletes, even with intense training, participants gave birth to healthy babies.
Denise De Los Santos, a gynecologist and associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UT Health San Antonio, said in an email that exercise is important for physical and mental health, especially during pregnancy.
“Pregnancy doesn’t automatically mean you have to stop doing the activities you love, including running,” De Los Santos said. “I’ve had marathon runners as patients before, and they did great.”
De Los Santos and others emphasized that pregnant women, like all people, should listen to their bodies, and scale back if they are tired or not feeling well.
“Especially for intense athletes, there is a tendency to push through what your body thinks it can do and to work harder,” said Elizabeth Langen, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology and maternal fetal medicine at the University of Michigan. “But I do encourage folks when they’re pregnant to listen to their body because their body’s doing a lot more than it is at baseline.”
Langen also said that in addition to celebrating the achievements of pregnant women, it’s important to acknowledge the challenges.
“For some women, the physical changes in pregnancy really do shift what one can do,” Langen said.
For Keane, as her belly has grown, long runs have gotten harder, she said. Sometimes while training she would alternate running and walking, or break up long runs into three shorter runs throughout the day. But on race day at the New York City Marathon last week, she finished in just over four hours, averaging about 9 minutes 30 seconds per mile.
“I think I’ve learned and appreciated so much more what, in particular, a woman’s body is capable of,” she said.
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The post She ran 7 marathons while pregnant. Here’s what science says about it. appeared first on Washington Post.
