exercise

So yesterday was my first time back at the gym since I got preggers. It was scary! I was always thought I'd be one of those laid back preggos who just did whatever and hoped for the best, but I feel like we worked so hard for this baby that I almost want to wrap my abdomen in bubble wrap and stay in bed for the next few months.

Normally I do about 30 minutes on the stairmaster, 20 minutes on this arm and leg bike/machine, and then strength training (usually just abs, chest, and arms) yesterday I did 40 minutes on the elliptical. The problem is that you're not supposed to overheat or let your heartrate stay above 140 bpm. I know when I do the stairmaster my heartrate stays in the 180-210 range (i do interval training, so it changes levels every 3 minutes). It's hard to work out and NOT push yourself to train harder, especially if you're overweight. My heart rate kept creeping up to 160bpm. I was barely sweating at the end of 40 minutes, but I was terrified to push it, so I did a cool down and called it a day.

about an hour later when we were at home making dinner I started having some light cramping. I didn't think too much about it because I've been cramping off and on the last week or so and my Ob said it was perfectly normal. She also said that if i start stressing out over the cramps, I should count to 30 every time I feel one and by the time I'm done it should already be disappating. So I was doing that. Counting to 30, taking deep breaths, drinking a shit-ton of water. they would be fading by the time I got to 30 every time. Then as we were getting ready to go to bed they started getting worse. My back had this stabbing pain and the cramps were staying longer and longer. finally I had one low in my pelvis that was still there when I counted to 250. I was officially freaking out. I felt "wet" and the cramps didn't seem to be going away and didn't i read something somewhere about low back pain being a precursor to miscarriage?? Then i started really freaking out. crying and sitting in the bathroom waiting to start bleeding. In retrospect I feel bad for O who just had to be there for me and try to comfort me. I was such a mess.

maybe i was just overtired. maybe i was dehydrated. i still don't know. but it's so hard to go to the gym and work out. I know it's the healthy thing to do, and in the long run it will be good for me. But I know if anything happens to this baby I'm going to blame it on "pushing myself" and that will destroy me. Last night way SO scary, I don't want to have to go through that again. But i also don't want to be a beached whale lazy pregnant woman. So what do i do?