February 3, 2020 • 36 mins
When sprinter Natasha Hastings discovered she was pregnant in the midst of training for the 2020 Olympics, she had to refocus her mind and body to prepare for the birth of her son, all while continuing to compete at the highest level. Determined to leave her mark at the upcoming Olympics, Natasha trained through her pregnancy with the guidance of Under Armour’s human performance team. Hear this journey from postpartum to podium as told by Natasha, her mother, and her athletic trainers.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
I ran the day before I had him training for
the Olympics. I know a lot of people listening to
me listening to this are like, girl, you're crazy, that's impossible.
I brought my kid into this world, so I can't
(00:24):
think of anything harder, anything more amazing. So if I
can do that, there's there's nothing else that I can't do. Now.
It'll be hard, it won't be easy. Anything is possible.
(00:47):
Momentum is everything through the word hard work, through training, work,
through competing, through recovery. It's building momentum. Momentum helps athletes
(01:08):
push themselves, push them to be better. It's a journey
of improvement, a journey to push through. Welcome to the
(01:29):
Only Ways. Through a collaboration between under Armour and I
Heart Radio, Episode two, Latasha Hastings postpartum to Podium. For
an athlete at the highest level, cutting out the noise
is essential to focus your mind on your training. Throughout
her career, Latasha Hastings has proven a fair shaft doubt
(01:52):
is wrong. It's habitual. It's what drives her through her
twelve year Olympic career. The Tasha knows what it takes
to commit yourself to the process when she found out
she was pregnant, the process changed. With her sight set
on her third Olympic Games, she was determined to train
through the pregnancy. She'd be out there every day, adjusting
(02:16):
her training regimen, working with her constantly changing body, so
when her son arrived, she could hit the ground running
toward the Olympics in Tokyo. At the end of the day,
Aatasha is a competitor and this is a challenge, one
that she's determined to push through. She's Natasha Hastings. It's
what she does well. My body is definitely a lot
(02:44):
different than it was a year ago. I'm tired now,
but it's a different kind it's tired. I have a
five month old that's not quite sleeping through the night yet,
so that doesn't help. Coupled with the type of training
that I'm doing, I would say I'm definitely not as
powerful as I was, but I've been making new prs.
(03:06):
Seeing those games in the gym is definitely a confidence
booster and kind of the thing where it's like now,
I'm just waiting for that to transfer over to the track,
Like I don't feel great Like tomorrow, I'm gonna go
out and I feel great from the perspective of I
have a five month old. It's January, I'm preparing for
June and August. I'm on the right track. Feel great.
(03:34):
Our partner Cal Fussman sat down with Natasha under Armos
headquarters in Baltimore to talk about her journey. I was
watching the video you on Instagram where you put it
up and under Nathan the post said, I debated before
I put this out when I was running as I
was pregnant. Yeah, why did you debate putting it up?
(03:55):
There a number of reasons. We can see the belly. Yes, um, well,
first and foremost, I'm very conscious of the things that
I put on social media because I am aware of
my reach and I'm aware of my voice as a
pregnant woman running up and down the track. That post,
(04:16):
in particular, there were a few things. Number one, it
was slow as heck, so as the competitor in me,
I was like, Man, do I put this out there?
Like this is vulnerable? This is like I am probably
about eight eight almost nine months pregnant at that time,
fully pregnant, fully slow. But I was like I was
(04:39):
running hard, I was trying. My form was perfect. I
mean everything that I could possibly do to make it
look good. I tried. It did look good, but it
just looked like you weren't going. I wasn't going anywhere.
I was running in place for sure. Then there was
the bit that you know, here I am this eight
and a half, nine months pregnant woman on the track
(05:01):
running and there are a lot of people that have
opinions about that that you should go sit down, you
shouldn't be doing this. But then there was also the
message that I've been doing this long before I got pregnant,
and so long as it's healthy and my doctor says
it's okay, why should I stop. So there was that
message that I wanted to um portray it. But then
(05:23):
I'm also sometimes conscious of the people who don't have
a choice. So there are some women who want to continue,
but maybe they're high risk and they can't. And sometimes
I feel like it's almost insensitive to celebrate that I can.
So I have that battle. Yeah, there there are so
(05:45):
many battles within that I have when there are certain
things that I post, and particularly you know, coming into
this motherhood space. You know, I jokingly said that last
year was a baby boom. I know so many people
that had a baby last year, and I also know
two people that um miscarried, and so you know, to
(06:06):
to reach out to those women while I'm currently carrying
or just had my newborn, and I was struggling with
the words for them. Now I'm thinking, Okay, if somebody
had miscarried and they're emotional about it, and now they
see you running eight months pregnant, Yeah, you're putting out
(06:27):
a message that you don't even know how it's going
to be interpret exactly different people. So I debated, putting
up that post makes sense? How do you take that
forward to to the birth because you were training pretty
close up your birth? How close up to the birth?
I ran the day before I had him. The day
(06:49):
before the day before I had him, and I went
into labor and I did not know I was in labor.
I almost had him on my couch. So we go
to the hospital. I still think they're going to stop
my contraction, send me home. I had my son within
two hours of getting to the hospital, and there was
a split second that I like when I realized when
(07:11):
the doctor told me, how you're eight centimeters dilated, this
baby is coming, that I lost it. But I remember
having a moment where I was like, Okay, you gotta
pull it together. You've been to the Olympics, you can
do this. This is just like running a race. Breathe
pushed through. I did get the epidirl. I wasn't one
(07:31):
of those superwomen and what did it? I'm a guy.
I don't know, like what like when your son entered
the world? Oh man, it was awesome. I got to
catch him. I think the doctor probably made sure he
was okay and made me think that I caught him
coming out. I was wondering, how are you doing that?
But I caught him brought him up. I also didn't
(07:53):
know what I was having. I wanted to wait until
birth to find out what he or she was. And
I remember my mom telling me, like, they come out screaming,
and then as soon as they put you to put
the baby down on your chest, they stopped crying. He
did that, and then I remember him going over and
taking them taking him over to the little table and
he's there weighing him, and it was like, instantly like okay,
(08:15):
what are y'all doing? I can't take my eyes off him.
It happened instantly. Remember Paul Whisper from episode one, he's
under arms director of Athlete Performance. Being able to study
an elite athlete during pregnancy is a rarity, So for Paul,
this was an opportunity to see the changes in the
(08:37):
female body firsthand and provide Natasha with modifications to her training.
When a female is pregnant, they're almost like superwoman. What's
going on in their bodies home only and strength wise
and the connective tissue, and they're all windows of train
ability that you really shouldn't miss as an athlete. This
(08:58):
concept of post partum to podium is really understanding. There
are stages that you need to go through to get
back that are really really positive. It's not a case
of I've had a baby and I've got a start
from scratch. You've had a baby and there are changes
in the body now that are really advantageous to athletes.
Home only, connective tissue. How do we reassess the body,
(09:22):
reassess the movement, and then how do we take advantage
of those changes? How do we take advantages of the
increase in blood volume for example? So we called it
the science of she There's the science and then there's
the things that make us human that you can never quantify,
and it just gives the female athlete just such a
(09:44):
this emotional armor, this belief this like I'm going to
do it if I can do that, like this is
a walk in the park. So if we could overlay
all of that objective, condinitive scientific data with this beautiful,
emotional and spiritual side of things of given birth and
then understand how it can come together and how we
(10:06):
can use that new motivation to take training to a
whole new level, it's it really is an advantage for
the female athlete. Let's go back to the beginning, all right.
When was the first moment you knew you were fast?
(10:28):
I was probably about eight seven or eight years old
gym class field day. You know, they have the girls
go against the girls, boys go against the boys, and
then at the end of it, there was a race
off and I beat the boy. And what was the
(10:54):
reaction of everybody when you beat the boy? I remember
later on my mom told me that I think it
was maybe a teacher or maybe it was another parent
that was like, man, she's pretty fast, and my mom
kind of like giggled because at that point, no one
knew that both of my parents actually ran and my
mom actually made the eighty four Olympics. My dad came
up here to the States on an athletic scholarship, so
(11:16):
did my mom, so it was they kind of knew that,
you know, this might happen. But my mom used to
take me to attract me to New York called the
Coogate Women's Games. I went one year. It was I
was a hot mess. I had no form, no nothing.
I I that day, I did not win and introduced
(11:41):
my mom to this guy. His name was Shawn London.
He says to my mom, oh, wow, I know you
from when you ran in Trinidad, and I actually saw
your daughter earlier, but I had no idea that that
was your daughter. Um. And so I started training with
him that week and I think my first track meet
(12:02):
was maybe within a month from that. That was interesting too,
because when I started training, I was not the girl
everybody else was beating me. I wasn't really doing that
great in training, and then somehow we went to the
first track meet and I won, and in a month
I won my first two racest you win your first
two races when it counts, what's going on in your head? Then?
(12:23):
Are you thinking a nine? I just enjoyed winning honestly,
like I knew I was fast. Um, I did sort
of start to set the expectation of winning all the time. UM.
At that point, I and I remember watching the Olympic Games,
and I remember watching Gail divers Michael Johnson, and then
(12:46):
that was what was realized atlantic right, And that's when
I realized that I want to be an Olympian one day.
(13:08):
This is a story about motherhood. Latasha's mother, Joanne, has
been a constant fixture in her life as an athlete,
supporting her, challenging her, sharing her on Here's Joanne Hasty
from a mother's point of view. She was always um.
She just worked hard. No matter what workout you give her,
(13:31):
she'll say I can't do that, but she'll always do it.
It wasn't just track and field. It was in her schoolwork.
I've never really have to have to say, let me
see your homework. Did you do your homework? She knew
at that point that, you know, this is what she
wanted to do in track and field, and in order
for her to do that, she had to have the
grades to go with it. So she just worked hard,
(13:54):
still works hard. I look at her now and I'm like,
oh my gosh, you just had a baby, and she
trained literally lay up until the day before she had him.
I never felt pressure from my mom. My mom was
always very adamant about me enjoying what I do. Even
(14:15):
to this day, you know, after having a kid, it's
still you know, but is this what you want to do?
And it's interesting because you know, I mentioned that she
made the eighty four Olympics. She also had the nerve
to name me after her, and Natasha's my mother's middle name.
So there was a moment when I was probably like
thirteen or fourteen, where I felt like, oh, I'm getting
(14:36):
to finish what my mom didn't finish. How did that
moment come to you figuring out, oh, you made the
eighty four team, you didn't go. You had me in
eighty six. Things were a lot different back then, where
you know, the opportunities in the sport period much less
for a woman to make a living and a career
out of it was a lot different than it is now.
(14:56):
What stopped her at the time she had to provide
for her a kid, oh man a circle of this story.
It was a struggle, but it was a good struggle.
Once again, Joanne Hastings. It was hard that was a
single parent. I mean, I honestly believe everything happens for
a reason. So it made me a better person, It
(15:19):
made me stronger. It made me figure out how I
had to just go from day to day today and
make sure she had everything she needed and I had
a good team around me. I never had that feeling
of like my mom trying to live through me. My
mom is trying to achieve what she didn't achieve through me.
She has just been incredibly supportive. Just whatever you want
(15:40):
to do, I'm here for you. Did she do you
ever have a conversation with her about this? Not that part.
I think the toughest conversation that we had, though, was
when she asked me, so, is this really what you
want to do? Because if you don't, I mean, this
(16:01):
guy's a limit. You can do whatever you want to do.
She didn't make the team in two thousand twelve. Just
the way she ran the race was like when she
realized that she wasn't necessarily in the top three, she
shut down, like mentally she was just like, it's just done.
And so when she came off the track, she didn't
talk to anybody she walked back to the hotel. She cried.
(16:24):
We argued, and um I said, Okay, you gotta get
it out, so get it out on me. Then we
move on from there. And so she cried and she cried,
and then as I said, you just don't look like
you want to be there, and I lied to her
and I was like, no, I'm good, I got it.
But she she read that it was year after year
(16:46):
of just kind of slowly going down and going backwards,
and then was like the epitome of like, okay, I
didn't make the team at all. And that was when
I had a real conversation with myself, like okay, girl,
we're going back to school to be a chiropractor. What
are we doing? My mom had that conversation with me.
(17:09):
The part of that conversation that I left out while
she was in the stands at the trial, she was
actually sitting next to a guy who happened to be
a sports psychologist. An athlete has to consider so many
aspects of training, nutrition, recovery, sleep, mental strength often gets overlooked,
(17:32):
but this what keeps everything else together. Without a strong foundation,
it all falls apart. Whether it's working through a demanding
training cycle or an event as life changing as a pregnancy,
having the mental strength can make all the difference. Here's
Joanne Hastings once more. He gave me his card and
(17:56):
I was like, okay, you think she needs that? And
he said, you know, I've been wanting your daughter run
since she was a little kid, and she's better than this.
When I told her that you look like you don't
believe you belong there, I said, look, I don't know
who this person is. I haven't done any research, and
I don't typically do stuff like that, but I just said,
(18:16):
there's a reason why this guy just out of the
blue gave me his card. What was it that flipped it?
It was your mind that it was my mind. I
remember the first conversation that we had and he asked me,
you know, so when you're out there on the track,
what are you thinking about? And literally everything that I
told him was negative, like, man, the last hundred is
(18:38):
going to hurt. I can't wait for this to be over.
And he was like, okay, So the first thing we're
gonna do is change how you talk to yourself, and
the second that you have a negative thought, I want
you to change it to something positive and when I
tell this story, I'm like, man, that just sounds so oversimplified.
(19:00):
What it was the thing that changed everything? And so
I remember there was a Dimon League meet in New
York City. It was cold, it was raining, and I
was in lane seven. That's a pretty good opening. It
(19:22):
was raining, rainy day, and I remember in the warm up,
I literally told myself, it's warm, it's not raining. The
sun is shining in lane seven. That was what I
literally repeated to myself the entire warm up. The gun
went off. If I ran safety three, that was the
(19:45):
fastest I'd run since leaving college in two thousand seven.
Just by flipping the switch in your mind, that's wild.
Could your mom pick up at something to change? Yeah,
my mom was there. Of course, she's always there, huh,
(20:09):
she said. When the gun went off, I took out
really fast, which is that's just my thing. I run
my first two hundred fast. When I got to maybe
about two fifty, she was like, she's still going, She's
still going. And then when we came off the turn,
that's when she was like, come on, and she lost it.
What happens when you go on the track for performance
(20:32):
like that? You do you always see like the moments
before everybody gets in the block, and then that time
seems to be elongated. Yeah, that's interesting because when I
watch other sports and watch other track events, that's the
moment that I actually like to watch because I think
you can almost tell when someone's getting ready to kill
(20:53):
it or a bomb. It's like a fighter entering the
ring exactly exactly for me, I guess I call it
a hunting space. That last three minutes before the race
is the longest three minutes ever. The air is so
thick you could cut it with a knife. Every emotion
that you could possibly feel all bottled up into one moment,
and then the gun goes off and it's like just
(21:14):
this release. So you got to go up on the
podium I got to go up on the podium this time.
What did that feel like? Man? It was it was exciting.
But the four by four, I mean it was it
(21:36):
was redemption in itself. I had the fastest split of
the Olympics. My family was there. I got to stand
on the podium, I got to hear the national anthem
played in my honor. I think all Olympic sports across
the board to just hear the national anthem played in
your honor is like the greatest achievement. So here's the point.
(22:05):
You could have at that point said, you know, it's
been nice. No, I was running too good. Okay, you're
running too good? What does that mean? Initially I did
think that I would retire at thirty, and then I
got to thirty and I was like, well, why did
I put that limit on myself? You know, I felt good,
I'm healthy. There was no reason not to, you know,
(22:28):
so I kept going, and um, two thousand and seventeen
was a good year. And then I went to Nationals
and three people ran faster than me. To me, I
was like, okay, Natasha, you didn't run bad. You got
beat today. And that happens, you know. And then there's
(22:50):
also now a different appreciation of you know, I have.
I have a bunch of medals, and I'm like, uh,
that stuff, I'm not going to let that define me
that We're just going to have a blast. We're gonna
we're gonna just drive this forward. And then you went
and got pregnant. Then I went and got pregnant, and
that was definitely not planned. I mean, we all know
how you make babies, but you know, and it was
(23:12):
it was a moment that it was hard for me
to reconcile because I I can say that I wanted
to be a mother just as much as I wanted
Olympic gold. Um, it was just the timing of it
that I had always seen myself retiring and then starting
a family. Right, You're always in conflict, I you know,
(23:37):
thanks for pointing that out. I didn't really realize that,
but but it's true. I mean I I always thought
that I would retire and then start a family, and
then when it didn't happen in that order, it took
a while for me to come around too. So what's
going through you now when you're finding out I'm pregnant
(23:58):
but I want to have a a and take this
as far as I can go. I literally fell to
the floor. You fell to the floor, And I was
conflicted because again I want a family, I want a baby,
but I also want to walk away from this on
my own terms. You know, today I can tell you
(24:24):
I want my son to respect me, and I want
my son to look at me and say, man, my
mom had me at a time that she I desperately
wanted him. There was never a thought of not having him,
but I was unsure if now was the right time.
(24:44):
And no matter how this plays out, I can walk
away knowing that I've given it. And so I want
my son to respect me. I want my son to
respect women and understand that. You know what I said
early here women we are badasses. And so today that's
the answer. When I get to the trials, it might
(25:07):
be something totally different. I don't know what I'll face
between now and then. The big picture is definitely like
I'm looking at it, I'm I'm feeling it, I'm dreaming it.
I wanted to be so badly, but I also know
that to get there, I have to stay in the
moment and I have to focus on the piece by piece.
(25:27):
I have to focus on the Cago exercises that are
so annoying, but I have to do them. I gotta
focus on my hamstring is swore today, but I gotta
get treatment on my head. You know. So I don't know.
Now I'm concerned what does this look like for my sponsorship,
(25:50):
my support. You know, people think that I'm not taking
my job seriously because I decided to start a family.
What people would say that to you? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I hit my pregnancy for about five months. Of course,
I told my close friends and family, but I didn't
(26:10):
tell under armour until I was about five months. And
at that point you had no choice. I had no
choice because I had already made the decision that I'm
gonna train through this, I'm gonna come back for Tokyo.
After a while, you can't really hide a baby bump,
So now it's like, all right, Natasha, you gotta do
(26:31):
something here. So I finally pick up the phone and
make the phone call. They were like, okay, congratulations, we're
going to support you through this. About a month later,
you know, all of the things started hitting the media
about what other female runners were going through, dealing with
being cut, being reduced healthcare, all of this stuff, And
(26:55):
they actually called me back and said, you know, you
told us that you were nervous to share this news,
but I wasn't aware of the pressure that you were under,
and if that's what you were sitting there feeling, I'm sorry.
I apologize. This is something that even before I got pregnant,
that when I talked about being a part of a brand,
(27:19):
that makes me proud to be a part of the
brand is seeing women in positions that I'm making decisions
for women, and the fact that when I made the
phone call it was to a woman that she understood
what I was going through, and that was her comment
to me that you know, I'm not a professional athlete,
(27:41):
but I remember having to tell my employer that I'm
pregnant and I was definitely afraid, and my husband didn't understand.
And and that's the thing that I'm even realizing in
this journey that beyond the female athlete, it is a
woman's problem. It is the American woman's problem of when
do I start a family, How do I start a family?
(28:03):
How is starting a family going to impact me if
I have a career. I'm grateful that my experience was
one that I still have the support of my sponsors,
and I didn't, you know, the torture that I went
through was self inflicted or not because of them. And
it actually seems like on the other side of that,
(28:23):
not only were they supportive, but Paul Mikey they wanted
to really understand what you were going through to learn
from it. Mike Watts's Paul whispers right here man. Before
Natasha got pregnant, she came to the Portland facility and
met with him to discuss ways she could improve her performance.
(28:46):
Here's Paul and Mike s. Natasha was actually one of
the first athletes we had at the performance center in
under Rama. She came through initially and we screened her
and assessed her, and at point we were really thinking
more about some of the minus of the detail of
how something could be tweaked in order to get a
(29:07):
faster time off the blocks. And she was amazing, I
mean amazing. She There's a reason she's an Olympic gold medalist.
She does again, sweat the details, tell me more, how
is that going to pack? What do I do? How
do I do this? She then said, okay, this is awesome,
but I'm now going to bring my culture along. She
came back, you know, a few weeks later with her
(29:28):
physical coat and her track coat. She's very much about
the process and understanding what she needs to do to
be the best, and she makes sure that everybody and
her team understands their role and how she's going to
become better. And that was the conversation back then, and
then all of a sudden we were asked to engage
and help her with this postpartum and through pregnancy. I
(29:50):
didn't know what I was up against. But Mike's wife
had I think, two kids, and so he kind of
walked me through, Okay, these are some of the exercises
that my life did, and this will help you with this.
We've got to strengthen your public floor. We've gotta so
they I mean, there were guys, but they definitely helped
with their protocol because I mean, I started peeing myself.
(30:11):
Nobody told me I was going to pee myself. I
didn't know that the muscles change after childbirth. I just said,
I just want to be here to try and inform you.
There's not a lot of information out there, and it's
really difficult for for a female to know what to
do from what we class as an evidence based approach.
(30:34):
We talked very much about self care, like how can
I stretch these areas? How can I phone roll these areas?
The tilting of the hips is going to start to
elongate that area of the abdomen. Do some activation exercises,
Do them in a in a manner that is controlled,
relevant and correct for that stage of pregnancy, because it's
a It's a beautiful part of being pregnant is seeing
(30:56):
these changes occur, but just making sure that from a
nutrition point of view, from a sleep point of view,
from a movement point of view, from a training point
of view, you stay as healthy as you can in
order to sort of mitigate some of these circumstances, so
that once postpartum comes and once mother wants to get
back into training, you start from a better position. You
(31:18):
can almost hit the ground running, so to speak. I
guess that new things would be different, but I'd never
put my finger on what that different would be. I'm
now a nursing mom, so that makes a difference in
terms of my nutrition. There have been some days where
I've literally gone through the workout and by the end
of it, I was like, man, I didn't need enough.
(31:40):
I didn't have enough fuel today. So I mean, they
were helpful in that, you know, beyond we're going to
support you, we're gonna also support you by helping you
get through what this new journey is going to be. Now,
at that point, you could have said, well, I'm look,
I'm just gonna have my baby, and no, you couldn't
(32:01):
do that because why would I make it that easy? Okay,
so it's five months before you tell anybody. Then you go.
I guess about eight months. You go out on the
track and you do that video that's on Instagram that
you debated putting up, and it's it's wild because you
(32:22):
can see your arms just churning like anyway, and it's
like you're what's the hockey expression, skating and sand. It
is the very definition of conflict. I asked um, my
mental coach, to come to training one day because I
(32:44):
felt like I wasn't grounded enough in my training. I
need to make sure that I'm actually out here doing
the work because I find myself I can't stop thinking
about him. And so how do you see the path
towards Olympics in they're coming up soon. Um, I'm no fool.
(33:08):
I know I'm up against a very very hard road.
My thing is, I haven't given myself a choice. I
decided this is what I'm gonna do, and I'm going
to see it through to the end. If that means
I don't make it, I can walk away from this
knowing that I gave it. But if I do make it,
(33:32):
I plan on being on the podium. So I just
sounds like a great conflict to me. There we go.
I didn't even do that attentionally. That just is what
it is, I guess, but you you actually seemed at
peace with it. It's a peaceful conflict. Yeah. Yeah, And
(33:54):
that's the emotional maturity of just you know, there's focus
on I have control over, and what I have control
over is the effort that I give this. I think
back to giving birth and I compared it earlier to
being at the Olympics. Just you know. In preparation for birth,
(34:18):
I hired a dula and my main reason for hiring
a dula was, you know, being a black woman, we
face um mortality around childbirth at higher rates than any
other race. And in fact, I had a training partner
that broke it down in a way that I was like,
She said, you know, I'm unsure of having kids because
(34:44):
pain is a sign is your body telling you to
stop doing what you're doing, because what you're doing is
killing you. Pain is a sign of your dying literally
to bring life into this world. We are on the
brink death. If you damn near laid your life on
(35:04):
the line to bring life into this world. What is
scarier than that. I lost it for a split second
when I found out that I was in labor, and
I had to bring my thoughts back to remember who
you are. You can do this. Everything is going to
be okay. You've been to the This is just like
(35:26):
running another race. But it was all in how I
was speaking to myself. There's so much pressure to get
back to your old self, and there's so much pressure
to can I do these things training for the Olympics.
I know a lot of people listening to me listening
to this are like, girl here crazy, that's impossible. I
(35:51):
brought my kid into this world, so I can't think
of anything harder, anything more amazing, anything. You're stronger than
you even know. This has been The only way is
(36:17):
through a podcast collaboration between under Armour and I Heart Radio.
Join us next time to hear more stories of athletic
performance and what it means to push yourself through
I ran the day before I had him training for
the Olympics. I know a lot of people listening to
me listening to this are like, girl, you're crazy, that's impossible.
I brought my kid into this world, so I can't
(00:24):
think of anything harder, anything more amazing. So if I
can do that, there's there's nothing else that I can't do. Now.
It'll be hard, it won't be easy. Anything is possible.
(00:47):
Momentum is everything through the word hard work, through training, work,
through competing, through recovery. It's building momentum. Momentum helps athletes
(01:08):
push themselves, push them to be better. It's a journey
of improvement, a journey to push through. Welcome to the
(01:29):
Only Ways. Through a collaboration between under Armour and I
Heart Radio, Episode two, Latasha Hastings postpartum to Podium. For
an athlete at the highest level, cutting out the noise
is essential to focus your mind on your training. Throughout
her career, Latasha Hastings has proven a fair shaft doubt
(01:52):
is wrong. It's habitual. It's what drives her through her
twelve year Olympic career. The Tasha knows what it takes
to commit yourself to the process when she found out
she was pregnant, the process changed. With her sight set
on her third Olympic Games, she was determined to train
through the pregnancy. She'd be out there every day, adjusting
(02:16):
her training regimen, working with her constantly changing body, so
when her son arrived, she could hit the ground running
toward the Olympics in Tokyo. At the end of the day,
Aatasha is a competitor and this is a challenge, one
that she's determined to push through. She's Natasha Hastings. It's
what she does well. My body is definitely a lot
(02:44):
different than it was a year ago. I'm tired now,
but it's a different kind it's tired. I have a
five month old that's not quite sleeping through the night yet,
so that doesn't help. Coupled with the type of training
that I'm doing, I would say I'm definitely not as
powerful as I was, but I've been making new prs.
(03:06):
Seeing those games in the gym is definitely a confidence
booster and kind of the thing where it's like now,
I'm just waiting for that to transfer over to the track,
Like I don't feel great Like tomorrow, I'm gonna go
out and I feel great from the perspective of I
have a five month old. It's January, I'm preparing for
June and August. I'm on the right track. Feel great.
(03:34):
Our partner Cal Fussman sat down with Natasha under Armos
headquarters in Baltimore to talk about her journey. I was
watching the video you on Instagram where you put it
up and under Nathan the post said, I debated before
I put this out when I was running as I
was pregnant. Yeah, why did you debate putting it up?
(03:55):
There a number of reasons. We can see the belly. Yes, um, well,
first and foremost, I'm very conscious of the things that
I put on social media because I am aware of
my reach and I'm aware of my voice as a
pregnant woman running up and down the track. That post,
(04:16):
in particular, there were a few things. Number one, it
was slow as heck, so as the competitor in me,
I was like, Man, do I put this out there?
Like this is vulnerable? This is like I am probably
about eight eight almost nine months pregnant at that time,
fully pregnant, fully slow. But I was like I was
(04:39):
running hard, I was trying. My form was perfect. I
mean everything that I could possibly do to make it
look good. I tried. It did look good, but it
just looked like you weren't going. I wasn't going anywhere.
I was running in place for sure. Then there was
the bit that you know, here I am this eight
and a half, nine months pregnant woman on the track
(05:01):
running and there are a lot of people that have
opinions about that that you should go sit down, you
shouldn't be doing this. But then there was also the
message that I've been doing this long before I got pregnant,
and so long as it's healthy and my doctor says
it's okay, why should I stop. So there was that
message that I wanted to um portray it. But then
(05:23):
I'm also sometimes conscious of the people who don't have
a choice. So there are some women who want to continue,
but maybe they're high risk and they can't. And sometimes
I feel like it's almost insensitive to celebrate that I can.
So I have that battle. Yeah, there there are so
(05:45):
many battles within that I have when there are certain
things that I post, and particularly you know, coming into
this motherhood space. You know, I jokingly said that last
year was a baby boom. I know so many people
that had a baby last year, and I also know
two people that um miscarried, and so you know, to
(06:06):
to reach out to those women while I'm currently carrying
or just had my newborn, and I was struggling with
the words for them. Now I'm thinking, Okay, if somebody
had miscarried and they're emotional about it, and now they
see you running eight months pregnant, Yeah, you're putting out
(06:27):
a message that you don't even know how it's going
to be interpret exactly different people. So I debated, putting
up that post makes sense? How do you take that
forward to to the birth because you were training pretty
close up your birth? How close up to the birth?
I ran the day before I had him. The day
(06:49):
before the day before I had him, and I went
into labor and I did not know I was in labor.
I almost had him on my couch. So we go
to the hospital. I still think they're going to stop
my contraction, send me home. I had my son within
two hours of getting to the hospital, and there was
a split second that I like when I realized when
(07:11):
the doctor told me, how you're eight centimeters dilated, this
baby is coming, that I lost it. But I remember
having a moment where I was like, Okay, you gotta
pull it together. You've been to the Olympics, you can
do this. This is just like running a race. Breathe
pushed through. I did get the epidirl. I wasn't one
(07:31):
of those superwomen and what did it? I'm a guy.
I don't know, like what like when your son entered
the world? Oh man, it was awesome. I got to
catch him. I think the doctor probably made sure he
was okay and made me think that I caught him
coming out. I was wondering, how are you doing that?
But I caught him brought him up. I also didn't
(07:53):
know what I was having. I wanted to wait until
birth to find out what he or she was. And
I remember my mom telling me, like, they come out screaming,
and then as soon as they put you to put
the baby down on your chest, they stopped crying. He
did that, and then I remember him going over and
taking them taking him over to the little table and
he's there weighing him, and it was like, instantly like okay,
(08:15):
what are y'all doing? I can't take my eyes off him.
It happened instantly. Remember Paul Whisper from episode one, he's
under arms director of Athlete Performance. Being able to study
an elite athlete during pregnancy is a rarity, So for Paul,
this was an opportunity to see the changes in the
(08:37):
female body firsthand and provide Natasha with modifications to her training.
When a female is pregnant, they're almost like superwoman. What's
going on in their bodies home only and strength wise
and the connective tissue, and they're all windows of train
ability that you really shouldn't miss as an athlete. This
(08:58):
concept of post partum to podium is really understanding. There
are stages that you need to go through to get
back that are really really positive. It's not a case
of I've had a baby and I've got a start
from scratch. You've had a baby and there are changes
in the body now that are really advantageous to athletes.
Home only, connective tissue. How do we reassess the body,
(09:22):
reassess the movement, and then how do we take advantage
of those changes? How do we take advantages of the
increase in blood volume for example? So we called it
the science of she There's the science and then there's
the things that make us human that you can never quantify,
and it just gives the female athlete just such a
(09:44):
this emotional armor, this belief this like I'm going to
do it if I can do that, like this is
a walk in the park. So if we could overlay
all of that objective, condinitive scientific data with this beautiful,
emotional and spiritual side of things of given birth and
then understand how it can come together and how we
(10:06):
can use that new motivation to take training to a
whole new level, it's it really is an advantage for
the female athlete. Let's go back to the beginning, all right.
When was the first moment you knew you were fast?
(10:28):
I was probably about eight seven or eight years old
gym class field day. You know, they have the girls
go against the girls, boys go against the boys, and
then at the end of it, there was a race
off and I beat the boy. And what was the
(10:54):
reaction of everybody when you beat the boy? I remember
later on my mom told me that I think it
was maybe a teacher or maybe it was another parent
that was like, man, she's pretty fast, and my mom
kind of like giggled because at that point, no one
knew that both of my parents actually ran and my
mom actually made the eighty four Olympics. My dad came
up here to the States on an athletic scholarship, so
(11:16):
did my mom, so it was they kind of knew that,
you know, this might happen. But my mom used to
take me to attract me to New York called the
Coogate Women's Games. I went one year. It was I
was a hot mess. I had no form, no nothing.
I I that day, I did not win and introduced
(11:41):
my mom to this guy. His name was Shawn London.
He says to my mom, oh, wow, I know you
from when you ran in Trinidad, and I actually saw
your daughter earlier, but I had no idea that that
was your daughter. Um. And so I started training with
him that week and I think my first track meet
(12:02):
was maybe within a month from that. That was interesting too,
because when I started training, I was not the girl
everybody else was beating me. I wasn't really doing that
great in training, and then somehow we went to the
first track meet and I won, and in a month
I won my first two racest you win your first
two races when it counts, what's going on in your head? Then?
(12:23):
Are you thinking a nine? I just enjoyed winning honestly,
like I knew I was fast. Um, I did sort
of start to set the expectation of winning all the time. UM.
At that point, I and I remember watching the Olympic Games,
and I remember watching Gail divers Michael Johnson, and then
(12:46):
that was what was realized atlantic right, And that's when
I realized that I want to be an Olympian one day.
(13:08):
This is a story about motherhood. Latasha's mother, Joanne, has
been a constant fixture in her life as an athlete,
supporting her, challenging her, sharing her on Here's Joanne Hasty
from a mother's point of view. She was always um.
She just worked hard. No matter what workout you give her,
(13:31):
she'll say I can't do that, but she'll always do it.
It wasn't just track and field. It was in her schoolwork.
I've never really have to have to say, let me
see your homework. Did you do your homework? She knew
at that point that, you know, this is what she
wanted to do in track and field, and in order
for her to do that, she had to have the
grades to go with it. So she just worked hard,
(13:54):
still works hard. I look at her now and I'm like,
oh my gosh, you just had a baby, and she
trained literally lay up until the day before she had him.
I never felt pressure from my mom. My mom was
always very adamant about me enjoying what I do. Even
(14:15):
to this day, you know, after having a kid, it's
still you know, but is this what you want to do?
And it's interesting because you know, I mentioned that she
made the eighty four Olympics. She also had the nerve
to name me after her, and Natasha's my mother's middle name.
So there was a moment when I was probably like
thirteen or fourteen, where I felt like, oh, I'm getting
(14:36):
to finish what my mom didn't finish. How did that
moment come to you figuring out, oh, you made the
eighty four team, you didn't go. You had me in
eighty six. Things were a lot different back then, where
you know, the opportunities in the sport period much less
for a woman to make a living and a career
out of it was a lot different than it is now.
(14:56):
What stopped her at the time she had to provide
for her a kid, oh man a circle of this story.
It was a struggle, but it was a good struggle.
Once again, Joanne Hastings. It was hard that was a
single parent. I mean, I honestly believe everything happens for
a reason. So it made me a better person, It
(15:19):
made me stronger. It made me figure out how I
had to just go from day to day today and
make sure she had everything she needed and I had
a good team around me. I never had that feeling
of like my mom trying to live through me. My
mom is trying to achieve what she didn't achieve through me.
She has just been incredibly supportive. Just whatever you want
(15:40):
to do, I'm here for you. Did she do you
ever have a conversation with her about this? Not that part.
I think the toughest conversation that we had, though, was
when she asked me, so, is this really what you
want to do? Because if you don't, I mean, this
(16:01):
guy's a limit. You can do whatever you want to do.
She didn't make the team in two thousand twelve. Just
the way she ran the race was like when she
realized that she wasn't necessarily in the top three, she
shut down, like mentally she was just like, it's just done.
And so when she came off the track, she didn't
talk to anybody she walked back to the hotel. She cried.
(16:24):
We argued, and um I said, Okay, you gotta get
it out, so get it out on me. Then we
move on from there. And so she cried and she cried,
and then as I said, you just don't look like
you want to be there, and I lied to her
and I was like, no, I'm good, I got it.
But she she read that it was year after year
(16:46):
of just kind of slowly going down and going backwards,
and then was like the epitome of like, okay, I
didn't make the team at all. And that was when
I had a real conversation with myself, like okay, girl,
we're going back to school to be a chiropractor. What
are we doing? My mom had that conversation with me.
(17:09):
The part of that conversation that I left out while
she was in the stands at the trial, she was
actually sitting next to a guy who happened to be
a sports psychologist. An athlete has to consider so many
aspects of training, nutrition, recovery, sleep, mental strength often gets overlooked,
(17:32):
but this what keeps everything else together. Without a strong foundation,
it all falls apart. Whether it's working through a demanding
training cycle or an event as life changing as a pregnancy,
having the mental strength can make all the difference. Here's
Joanne Hastings once more. He gave me his card and
(17:56):
I was like, okay, you think she needs that? And
he said, you know, I've been wanting your daughter run
since she was a little kid, and she's better than this.
When I told her that you look like you don't
believe you belong there, I said, look, I don't know
who this person is. I haven't done any research, and
I don't typically do stuff like that, but I just said,
(18:16):
there's a reason why this guy just out of the
blue gave me his card. What was it that flipped it?
It was your mind that it was my mind. I
remember the first conversation that we had and he asked me,
you know, so when you're out there on the track,
what are you thinking about? And literally everything that I
told him was negative, like, man, the last hundred is
(18:38):
going to hurt. I can't wait for this to be over.
And he was like, okay, So the first thing we're
gonna do is change how you talk to yourself, and
the second that you have a negative thought, I want
you to change it to something positive and when I
tell this story, I'm like, man, that just sounds so oversimplified.
(19:00):
What it was the thing that changed everything? And so
I remember there was a Dimon League meet in New
York City. It was cold, it was raining, and I
was in lane seven. That's a pretty good opening. It
(19:22):
was raining, rainy day, and I remember in the warm up,
I literally told myself, it's warm, it's not raining. The
sun is shining in lane seven. That was what I
literally repeated to myself the entire warm up. The gun
went off. If I ran safety three, that was the
(19:45):
fastest I'd run since leaving college in two thousand seven.
Just by flipping the switch in your mind, that's wild.
Could your mom pick up at something to change? Yeah,
my mom was there. Of course, she's always there, huh,
(20:09):
she said. When the gun went off, I took out
really fast, which is that's just my thing. I run
my first two hundred fast. When I got to maybe
about two fifty, she was like, she's still going, She's
still going. And then when we came off the turn,
that's when she was like, come on, and she lost it.
What happens when you go on the track for performance
(20:32):
like that? You do you always see like the moments
before everybody gets in the block, and then that time
seems to be elongated. Yeah, that's interesting because when I
watch other sports and watch other track events, that's the
moment that I actually like to watch because I think
you can almost tell when someone's getting ready to kill
(20:53):
it or a bomb. It's like a fighter entering the
ring exactly exactly for me, I guess I call it
a hunting space. That last three minutes before the race
is the longest three minutes ever. The air is so
thick you could cut it with a knife. Every emotion
that you could possibly feel all bottled up into one moment,
and then the gun goes off and it's like just
(21:14):
this release. So you got to go up on the
podium I got to go up on the podium this time.
What did that feel like? Man? It was it was exciting.
But the four by four, I mean it was it
(21:36):
was redemption in itself. I had the fastest split of
the Olympics. My family was there. I got to stand
on the podium, I got to hear the national anthem
played in my honor. I think all Olympic sports across
the board to just hear the national anthem played in
your honor is like the greatest achievement. So here's the point.
(22:05):
You could have at that point said, you know, it's
been nice. No, I was running too good. Okay, you're
running too good? What does that mean? Initially I did
think that I would retire at thirty, and then I
got to thirty and I was like, well, why did
I put that limit on myself? You know, I felt good,
I'm healthy. There was no reason not to, you know,
(22:28):
so I kept going, and um, two thousand and seventeen
was a good year. And then I went to Nationals
and three people ran faster than me. To me, I
was like, okay, Natasha, you didn't run bad. You got
beat today. And that happens, you know. And then there's
(22:50):
also now a different appreciation of you know, I have.
I have a bunch of medals, and I'm like, uh,
that stuff, I'm not going to let that define me
that We're just going to have a blast. We're gonna
we're gonna just drive this forward. And then you went
and got pregnant. Then I went and got pregnant, and
that was definitely not planned. I mean, we all know
how you make babies, but you know, and it was
(23:12):
it was a moment that it was hard for me
to reconcile because I I can say that I wanted
to be a mother just as much as I wanted
Olympic gold. Um, it was just the timing of it
that I had always seen myself retiring and then starting
a family. Right, You're always in conflict, I you know,
(23:37):
thanks for pointing that out. I didn't really realize that,
but but it's true. I mean I I always thought
that I would retire and then start a family, and
then when it didn't happen in that order, it took
a while for me to come around too. So what's
going through you now when you're finding out I'm pregnant
(23:58):
but I want to have a a and take this
as far as I can go. I literally fell to
the floor. You fell to the floor, And I was
conflicted because again I want a family, I want a baby,
but I also want to walk away from this on
my own terms. You know, today I can tell you
(24:24):
I want my son to respect me, and I want
my son to look at me and say, man, my
mom had me at a time that she I desperately
wanted him. There was never a thought of not having him,
but I was unsure if now was the right time.
(24:44):
And no matter how this plays out, I can walk
away knowing that I've given it. And so I want
my son to respect me. I want my son to
respect women and understand that. You know what I said
early here women we are badasses. And so today that's
the answer. When I get to the trials, it might
(25:07):
be something totally different. I don't know what I'll face
between now and then. The big picture is definitely like
I'm looking at it, I'm I'm feeling it, I'm dreaming it.
I wanted to be so badly, but I also know
that to get there, I have to stay in the
moment and I have to focus on the piece by piece.
(25:27):
I have to focus on the Cago exercises that are
so annoying, but I have to do them. I gotta
focus on my hamstring is swore today, but I gotta
get treatment on my head. You know. So I don't know.
Now I'm concerned what does this look like for my sponsorship,
(25:50):
my support. You know, people think that I'm not taking
my job seriously because I decided to start a family.
What people would say that to you? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I hit my pregnancy for about five months. Of course,
I told my close friends and family, but I didn't
(26:10):
tell under armour until I was about five months. And
at that point you had no choice. I had no
choice because I had already made the decision that I'm
gonna train through this, I'm gonna come back for Tokyo.
After a while, you can't really hide a baby bump,
So now it's like, all right, Natasha, you gotta do
(26:31):
something here. So I finally pick up the phone and
make the phone call. They were like, okay, congratulations, we're
going to support you through this. About a month later,
you know, all of the things started hitting the media
about what other female runners were going through, dealing with
being cut, being reduced healthcare, all of this stuff, And
(26:55):
they actually called me back and said, you know, you
told us that you were nervous to share this news,
but I wasn't aware of the pressure that you were under,
and if that's what you were sitting there feeling, I'm sorry.
I apologize. This is something that even before I got pregnant,
that when I talked about being a part of a brand,
(27:19):
that makes me proud to be a part of the
brand is seeing women in positions that I'm making decisions
for women, and the fact that when I made the
phone call it was to a woman that she understood
what I was going through, and that was her comment
to me that you know, I'm not a professional athlete,
(27:41):
but I remember having to tell my employer that I'm
pregnant and I was definitely afraid, and my husband didn't understand.
And and that's the thing that I'm even realizing in
this journey that beyond the female athlete, it is a
woman's problem. It is the American woman's problem of when
do I start a family, How do I start a family?
(28:03):
How is starting a family going to impact me if
I have a career. I'm grateful that my experience was
one that I still have the support of my sponsors,
and I didn't, you know, the torture that I went
through was self inflicted or not because of them. And
it actually seems like on the other side of that,
(28:23):
not only were they supportive, but Paul Mikey they wanted
to really understand what you were going through to learn
from it. Mike Watts's Paul whispers right here man. Before
Natasha got pregnant, she came to the Portland facility and
met with him to discuss ways she could improve her performance.
(28:46):
Here's Paul and Mike s. Natasha was actually one of
the first athletes we had at the performance center in
under Rama. She came through initially and we screened her
and assessed her, and at point we were really thinking
more about some of the minus of the detail of
how something could be tweaked in order to get a
(29:07):
faster time off the blocks. And she was amazing, I
mean amazing. She There's a reason she's an Olympic gold medalist.
She does again, sweat the details, tell me more, how
is that going to pack? What do I do? How
do I do this? She then said, okay, this is awesome,
but I'm now going to bring my culture along. She
came back, you know, a few weeks later with her
(29:28):
physical coat and her track coat. She's very much about
the process and understanding what she needs to do to
be the best, and she makes sure that everybody and
her team understands their role and how she's going to
become better. And that was the conversation back then, and
then all of a sudden we were asked to engage
and help her with this postpartum and through pregnancy. I
(29:50):
didn't know what I was up against. But Mike's wife
had I think, two kids, and so he kind of
walked me through, Okay, these are some of the exercises
that my life did, and this will help you with this.
We've got to strengthen your public floor. We've gotta so
they I mean, there were guys, but they definitely helped
with their protocol because I mean, I started peeing myself.
(30:11):
Nobody told me I was going to pee myself. I
didn't know that the muscles change after childbirth. I just said,
I just want to be here to try and inform you.
There's not a lot of information out there, and it's
really difficult for for a female to know what to
do from what we class as an evidence based approach.
(30:34):
We talked very much about self care, like how can
I stretch these areas? How can I phone roll these areas?
The tilting of the hips is going to start to
elongate that area of the abdomen. Do some activation exercises,
Do them in a in a manner that is controlled,
relevant and correct for that stage of pregnancy, because it's
a It's a beautiful part of being pregnant is seeing
(30:56):
these changes occur, but just making sure that from a
nutrition point of view, from a sleep point of view,
from a movement point of view, from a training point
of view, you stay as healthy as you can in
order to sort of mitigate some of these circumstances, so
that once postpartum comes and once mother wants to get
back into training, you start from a better position. You
(31:18):
can almost hit the ground running, so to speak. I
guess that new things would be different, but I'd never
put my finger on what that different would be. I'm
now a nursing mom, so that makes a difference in
terms of my nutrition. There have been some days where
I've literally gone through the workout and by the end
of it, I was like, man, I didn't need enough.
(31:40):
I didn't have enough fuel today. So I mean, they
were helpful in that, you know, beyond we're going to
support you, we're gonna also support you by helping you
get through what this new journey is going to be. Now,
at that point, you could have said, well, I'm look,
I'm just gonna have my baby, and no, you couldn't
(32:01):
do that because why would I make it that easy? Okay,
so it's five months before you tell anybody. Then you go.
I guess about eight months. You go out on the
track and you do that video that's on Instagram that
you debated putting up, and it's it's wild because you
(32:22):
can see your arms just churning like anyway, and it's
like you're what's the hockey expression, skating and sand. It
is the very definition of conflict. I asked um, my
mental coach, to come to training one day because I
(32:44):
felt like I wasn't grounded enough in my training. I
need to make sure that I'm actually out here doing
the work because I find myself I can't stop thinking
about him. And so how do you see the path
towards Olympics in they're coming up soon. Um, I'm no fool.
(33:08):
I know I'm up against a very very hard road.
My thing is, I haven't given myself a choice. I
decided this is what I'm gonna do, and I'm going
to see it through to the end. If that means
I don't make it, I can walk away from this
knowing that I gave it. But if I do make it,
(33:32):
I plan on being on the podium. So I just
sounds like a great conflict to me. There we go.
I didn't even do that attentionally. That just is what
it is, I guess, but you you actually seemed at
peace with it. It's a peaceful conflict. Yeah. Yeah, And
(33:54):
that's the emotional maturity of just you know, there's focus
on I have control over, and what I have control
over is the effort that I give this. I think
back to giving birth and I compared it earlier to
being at the Olympics. Just you know. In preparation for birth,
(34:18):
I hired a dula and my main reason for hiring
a dula was, you know, being a black woman, we
face um mortality around childbirth at higher rates than any
other race. And in fact, I had a training partner
that broke it down in a way that I was like,
She said, you know, I'm unsure of having kids because
(34:44):
pain is a sign is your body telling you to
stop doing what you're doing, because what you're doing is
killing you. Pain is a sign of your dying literally
to bring life into this world. We are on the
brink death. If you damn near laid your life on
(35:04):
the line to bring life into this world. What is
scarier than that. I lost it for a split second
when I found out that I was in labor, and
I had to bring my thoughts back to remember who
you are. You can do this. Everything is going to
be okay. You've been to the This is just like
(35:26):
running another race. But it was all in how I
was speaking to myself. There's so much pressure to get
back to your old self, and there's so much pressure
to can I do these things training for the Olympics.
I know a lot of people listening to me listening
to this are like, girl here crazy, that's impossible. I
(35:51):
brought my kid into this world, so I can't think
of anything harder, anything more amazing, anything. You're stronger than
you even know. This has been The only way is
(36:17):
through a podcast collaboration between under Armour and I Heart Radio.
Join us next time to hear more stories of athletic
performance and what it means to push yourself through
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