WASHINGTON — Years ago, I was pregnant with my son Gabriel and didn’t even know it when I ran my first half-marathon. All I knew was that I felt terrible the morning of the race.

It was May 2002. I had flown from Baltimore to Indianapolis the day before to run the Indy 500 Mini-Marathon with my mother-in-law. The night before the race, I felt nauseous and had stabbing pains in my back.

It never occurred to me that I might be pregnant. I thought it was a combination of PMS, bad nerves and a too-soft mattress. I was running my first 13-mile race in a strange city. I was lying on a marshmallow-soft mattress in a bedroom that wasn’t my own. Besides that, just before my twins were born 18 months earlier, my doctor told me that, given my health history, there was a one-in-a-million chance of my becoming pregnant again…read more