“There’s no heartbeat,” the nurse said.

Earlier that year, I had finally accepted that my 40th birthday was not going to magically go away. Nature was not to be messed with and time was running out if we wanted to start a family. A couple of months before, chest issues and a health scare forced me to opt out of my big race, a 100km alpine challenge. As a non-running runner, I had developed multiple variations of talking about my health issues – most of which were engineered to make the scare sound like a niggle. I didn’t want to appear weak or fragile and didn’t let the lack of training eat up too much of my mental resolve. However, the night before the race, fear started creeping in as I was staring at my neatly packed race bag: what if my heart gave up in the middle of the night, up in the misty mountains? Was a race a risk worth taking? Through teary eyes, I could also picture a life worth living – one with a cabin in the woods and children running around. With a heavy heart, I resolved to let go of the dream of finishing my first 100km before the adventure of motherhood.

I got pregnant immediately, which gave me confidence that my body was not broken and allayed my health anxiety. The first scan revealed the miracle of life growing inside me and despite a massive panic about where we would find the money and time to add this adventure to the three businesses we were running, I started to relax into this new role. As an ambitious and competitive woman, motherhood had always scared me. I saw it as a brake, as sand in the machine. I had desperately hoped that age would bring the desire to create life that everyone else seemed to experience, but instead there were always more ideas to bring to the world, more opportunities to develop businesses, more challenges to solve – and more races to run.

Pregnancy unexpectedly gave me licence to relax. I had a new challenge, I was blown out of my comfort zone, and I liked it. I initially found it hard to accept the changes my body was undergoing. The belly, the boobs, the urge to pee – not the ideal combination to keep running. I went to yoga and walked instead, trying to be the best I could be at protecting life. Most difficult was to refrain from telling everyone. At 11 weeks, my belly was starting to show and going to business meetings or public events involved looser clothes and strategically placed bags. I couldn’t wait for my 40th birthday, which coincidentally was the day we would be able to reveal all, and the day I could stop making poor excuses for not going running.

But it wasn’t to be. The baby had stopped growing at 11-and-a-half weeks and my body had not bothered telling me. A second scan confirmed the diagnosis. Shock followed. We had gone into the 12-week scan in such utter naivety that six months later, I still feel stupid. We had never heard of “missed miscarriage” before, and naively expected that if you lose a baby, there will immediately be physiological signs. We also had no idea that one in four pregnancies will end within 12 weeks, most within the first few days.

Marathon double Olympian and Commonwealth medallist Liz Yelling is part of the sad statistics. “Unfortunately, I had failed to make the GB team for the London Olympics, so that year we decided to add to our family. I fell pregnant fairly quickly and the week before the Olympics I was 11-and-a-half weeks pregnant.” Wanting to be part of the Olympics marathon experience in one way or another, Yelling had agreed to be part of the live commentating team for BBC TV. But two days before the marathon, the bleeding started.

“We went to the hospital and they told us that we had lost the baby, that it wasn’t a viable pregnancy. They offered me the option to have an operation the week after or to let nature take its course; I thought I would just leave it and see what happens.”

By Sunday morning, the bleeding had petered out and Yelling headed out to the BBC commentating booth – with a change of clothes just in case. Unfortunately, when the race started, a familiar “warm gush feeling” showed that the bleeding had only just started and it got much worse. “I was live on TV and kept excusing myself to disappear into a portaloo outside, which is not ideal. I had kept pushing the issue to one side as I wanted to keep doing what I had committed to. I must have been to the toilet about four times before I accepted that I just had to explain what was happening.”

“Of course, it was quite ironic: it was the event that I had ran in the last Olympics and that I really wanted to be part of in some way. My grief at the loss of the baby had turned into anger; that the miscarriage was also affecting something so significant for me made it the most awful moment in my life.”

Like Liz, I too felt angry and betrayed. Unlike Liz’s, my body had not warned me about what had happened. In a small minority of cases, there are no signs of miscarriage, such as bleeding or cramping, and the unviable pregnancy is only discovered by a scan. Those are called the missed miscarriages. After the initial shock of losing the baby, the weight of failure and sadness compeletely engulfed me. My 40th birthday was spent waiting for nature to take its course. The feeling that dominated those first few days though was, unexpectedly, shame. I had failed to care for the baby where most people – seemingly – succeed with ease. I had been presumptuous to believe that all was going to be OK.

As Liz said, “Everyone knows that there is a higher risk of miscarriage in the first 12 weeks, but if you’re fit and healthy, you don’t necessarily think that it’s going to happen to you – especially if you’re told that you’re a low-risk pregnancy.” Indeed, I too felt like I had been given a false sense of confidence by the midwife, who didn’t once mention the risks of miscarriage, especially after a first scan at seven weeks showed a healthy baby with a strong heartbeat.

According to research published by the Miscarriage Association, if you see a heartbeat at eight weeks, the chances of the pregnancy continuing are 98%. Is it normal therefore to feel confident and positive about the pregnancy, or is it downright arrogant? I wonder whether shame is the reason why so few women (and even fewer men) talk about their experiences of miscarriage, thereby perpetuating the taboo.

“If it’s that common, why does no one talk about it before it happens?” Liz says. As a professional athlete, while trying to conceive and in early pregnancy, she had to fence off the daily litany of questions about her running plans. “People would ask ‘What’s your next race?’ or ‘What’s your next target?’ and I would say ‘I’m retiring’ or ‘I’m taking some time off’. I found it quite difficult to explain that actually I wanted to be a mum and do something different, and that running was not my main focus any more. It’s almost easier to make up an injury and lie. I used to just dress it up and say that I was taking time off mentally and physically before setting new targets. Of course, when you then announce that you’re pregnant, people are like ‘Ah, I get it now!’”

Hence the problem when you lose the baby and never get to “come out”. More than once, it was tempting to commit what seems to be a social faux pas and tell everyone about what had happened. As the publisher of an independent running magazine, I didn’t want fellow runners to assume that I wasn’t taking my running seriously, or that I had turned lazy and grumpy – because that’s what grief could look like. “Runners can forget that running is not everything to everyone. There are ebbs and flows, and you’re not necessarily running or racing or training all the time,” says Yelling.

Even when not trying to conceive, at some point or another, female runners generally will be impacted by their menstrual cycles when it comes to training and racing. Anna Frost – the New Zealand ultra-runner who regularly tops the podiums of the hardest mountain races on the planet – knows a thing or two about woman-specific training. In front of a captive audience at a female-only trail running workshop in Wales, “Frosty” (as she’s affectionately known among her followers) said that, although she had long observed the impact of her cycle on her performance, she struggled to find any resource or research to help her train better. Months of study of her luteal phase, linked with her training log, led her to be much more attuned to her body. Learning to run “with” and not “against” her cycles has “taken the pressure off, mentally and physically. We [women] have to be aware and conscious of who we are and then celebrate that instead of keeping pushing through pain or stress when we really don’t need to. My recovery is better, I don’t get PMS and my running through this time is so much more enjoyable.”

I have never heard an elite athlete say that they had a bad race because of their period. Yelling admits that “within team GB, because we did so much running, we might have been more attuned to our bodies than amateur runners – we would notice performance differences and we would discuss those things. I actually researched the topic a while ago and noticed that there’s very, very little research done on the subject.” Frost agrees that “it seems crazy that there is not more information. In the previously male-dominated sport of trail running, which has grown so big so quickly, more and more women are becoming empowered and we now realise that we are different and need different things from men. It is hard to research menstrual cycles, there are so many variables, but it needs to be done.”

Doctors will tell you not to run after a miscarriage, a double whammy as you lose the very thing that allows you to keep your mind clear, ease the mental pain and rebuild your confidence. My own running started again when I was invited to run a mountain marathon and decided to toe the start line despite a six-month running hiatus. The punishing uphill forced me to move in silence and, as we hiked towards the summits, I found inner peace and joy. It wasn’t just the incredible scenery or the thin air that got me dizzy, but the realisation that my body was once again capable of great feats of endurance. That day, I got my mojo back and some sense of future possibilities.

About 10 days after she miscarried, Liz, too, had to go for a little run. “I had all that energy from watching the Olympics and I think that running helped me find myself again; you can feel a bit lost and it’s good to go back to what you know. For me, running is my security blanket in a way, because I’ve done it all my life. It’s what I know. Being a runner gives us one more thing we can do to try to get over a miscarriage. Running can give you a mental break and internal peace – it’s almost like you can run it away.”

• Julie Freeman is the creative director of Like the Wind Magazine, an independent running magazine about why we run

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