Marathon supermoms Aliphine Tuliamuk, Stephanie Bruce and Kellyn Taylor supporting each other to the start line
The three Northern Arizona Elite running team athletes have young families, and all of them are gearing up for this weekend's U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials in Florida – with each other's support and help.
Athletics
A growing number of top elite athletes are experiencing success after motherhood. They do so thanks to their support teams, family and friends – but very few will have had the chance to do so in the company of other mothers who are also elite athletes and even teammates.
That is the case for marathon runners Aliphine Tuliamuk, Stephanie Bruce, and Kellyn Taylor, who will all compete at this weekend's U.S. Olympic marathon trials in Florida.
All three have young families, with Bruce and Taylor each having given birth within the last 13 months. And all three are teammates on the Northern Arizona Elite (NAZ Elite) running team based in Flagstaff, Arizona, balancing motherhood with top-level distance running and supporting each other through the trials and tribulations that brings.
Tuliamuk, Bruce, and Taylor recently spoke to Olympics.com on a video call to talk more about being supermoms while also preparing for the trials, which could see them end up on the U.S. Olympic team for Paris 2024.
Living every moment as new mothers
That Bruce and Taylor will each take to the start line on Sunday in Orlando could be considered a feat in itself. Bruce gave birth barely four months ago to her third child Sophia, while Taylor has only run one competitive marathon, in New York City in November, since giving birth in December 2022 to Keagan.
Those timelines, Bruce pointed out with some precision on the call, match up with Tuliamuk's return from childbirth in 2021. Having won the U.S. Trials last time out in 2020, the Kenyan-born athlete used the subsequent pandemic downtime to have her first child. Daughter Zoe was born six months before the Tokyo 2020 marathon.
While Tuliamuk hasn't spoken to her teammates specifically about returning from childbirth to run such an important race, she has reminded them to be a mother. "When I had my daughter, I was training for the Olympics, and I felt like I wasn't there for those first six months of her life," she admitted. "I wasn't as present as I would have liked to. And sometimes I think back to that and I get really emotional because I'm like, did I choose to train so much and think too much about my running that I forgot that I was a new mom?"
Bruce said she took that advice to heart. "I have soaked in every moment of Sophia's first couple of months," she said. "I've trained really hard and done all the things, but not sacrificing, I think, any of the time with her. Could I have run 10, 15, 20 miles more? Could I have worked harder? Could I have done more things? Sure. But I want it to have a balance.
"I had that conversation with Aliphine and she was like, make sure you soak it in."
Aliphine Tuliamuk won the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials four years ago, earning a spot on the American team for Tokyo 2020. She ran in the Olympic marathon six months after giving birth to her daughter in 2021.
Being supported in pregnancy by the team and teammates
Equally important to the advice they share is the support they receive from each other – and the team -, whether someone needs help with a grocery run, child-sitting, or even a play-date for the children.
"My teammates, like if my kid is not feeling good they will be like, hey, I can come watch her so you can go out for a run. So that has been really nice," Tuliamuk said. "Before I had a kid, I don't think I would volunteer to go watch someone's kid, but I think once you become a mom, you know what it is like. They've always been very supportive, so I am very grateful that I'm in the community that I am with."
Taylor added that the NAZ Elite team's and their sponsors' support has been vital, acknowledging that many women hesitate to pause their careers to give birth due to a lack of support.
"Admittedly, when I first found out that I was pregnant with my last daughter, who's now a year old, I was nervous," said the mother-of-four. "And I think that that is kind of stemmed from, the 10 years ago when it wasn't it wasn't a common thing, but still being like, 'Oh gosh, are they going to re-sign me? Am I going to lose my contract? Am I going to be able to run fast again?'
"But really deeply down I knew that everything was going to be fine, that they were going to support me. They were excited for me. And that's something that I don't think that you get with a lot of companies."
Making comebacks at the U.S. Olympic marathon trials
These U.S. Trials will be a test for each of the three in different ways. While Taylor will do only her second major race since coming back, she said there was another side of things to being a new mom at the top athletic level many people don't think about either.
"I still am breastfeeding, so there's challenges that come with that, like the energy expenditure that you need in order to train at a high level," she explained. "I was like an extreme over producer, so I was making so much milk and constantly like having to pump; if I'm pumping – I don't know how much it was, so much – every day, that's calories. And you need to intake more calories because you're losing all those calories, and then you're still running 10, 12, 16, 20 miles.
"I think that just finding the balance between having this new human, and then not rushing right back into it. It's been a it's been an enjoyable process to be able to come back and know that I'm still good."
Meanwhile 2020 winner Tuliamuk is due to race for the first time since sustaining a hamstring injury towards the end of last season.
"It's definitely been like up and down," she shared. "It's been probably one of the biggest roller coasters I've been in. But I think we'll make it to the line and we'll just have to go with what we have, and experience."
With two other children, Sophia wasn't Bruce's first rodeo with childbirth. But such a big race just four months post-partum means she's had to draw on every ounce of her long experience in running.
"For me, it's honestly been like a linear curve, going up because my fitness is increasing, but then I'll have a particularly bad night of sleep and I'll say, okay, I have to run less today," Bruce said. But even being in Saturday's race will be a victory. "It's kind of exciting because for me coming at this, it was just like the big goal was 'Can you get to the starting line healthy?' And I'm getting pretty close to that goal.
"I have to believe that the accumulation of all the work I've done, even missing training for pregnancy, will catch up. And that's sort of what my mindset is going into the trials. Like. I've run 17 marathons, so even though I'm far from the fittest I've ever been, I have to believe my experience and all that will help me."
Bruce turned 40 in January, joking that it meant she'd now be eligible for Masters age group prize money at races. However she performs this Saturday, she knows she will have made her mark as a super-mother athlete.
"Maybe I never make an Olympic team. But there's a lot along the way that I can be really proud of. And the fact that I'm still – in my head – competitive on the U.S. scene and hopefully the world scene at 40 years old, is really encouraging."