Encouraged by her parents, Rebecca grew up playing a lot of team sports with her brothers like soccer, softball, netball, water polo and rowing. When she got older and started working a job which required lots of travel, it became hard to commit to teams, thus she started doing swimming and HIIT, before discovering triathlons and running clubs where she could still train individually yet feel like she was also part of a team.

The 35-year-old management consultant started to do some running in her 20s, but was never really convinced by it. Yet, it was the easiest form of exercise when travelling as all you need is a pair of running shoes and some tights and you are good to go!

Rebecca moved to Singapore in 2017. A year later, she did her first triathlon (sprint distance) in the Singapore International Triathlon. As Rebecca started to take triathlons a bit more seriously, she begrudgingly started running more and then her husband decided that he wanted to run a marathon before he turned 30, so before she knew it, she was running more and more!

Her first half-marathon was in Shanghai, China, and that was a bit of an accident. She was hoping to do the 10km event but when the slots sold out, she thought she could just buy a half-marathon spot and sneak out at the 10km mark. Then she missed the turnoff and didn’t realise until she saw the 12km marker, so from there she just decided that she might as well keep going.

Now a mother of two (including a six-month-old), Rebecca still finds running challenging but she loves the flexibility of being able to pop out for a run whenever she gets a moment. Six months postpartum, she is focused on building up her fitness again.

She used to do two to three runs per week, a couple of days cycling and swimming and a couple of sessions a week for yoga and strength work. Still a long way to go to get back there, Rebecca is just taking it a week at a time and enjoying the process.

Whenever she takes time out to work out though, she can’t help feeling ‘mum guilt’. “Everyone has their moments of insecurity, whether it is physical or emotional, in your career or as a parent. I have suffered from postnatal depression following the birth of both my kids and this is a complicated mental health issue which can be hard to spot. Lots of time people just put it down to a bit of ‘baby blues’ or tell you that it will just pass on its own,” she revealed.

Fortunately for her, she found a wonderful psychologist who helped her. “As I have gotten older, I feel that I have become more self-aware and also conscious that everybody else is also feeling a bit insecure and in all likelihood don’t even notice the little things that you feel bad about in yourself. Now that I have kids, I am also conscious of setting a good example and that means being confident in myself so that they can learn to do the same,” she added.

What drew her to the Outdo Yourself programme by 100PLUS Singapore is the opportunity to find motivation to get going again after baby number two. “I was moving again not long after giving birth, but it was getting to the stage where I needed a bit more of a push to build up my training efforts. It’s been particularly hard to find motivation this year since COVID-19 has cancelled most races.

“The Outdo Yourself programme by 100PLUS is definitely giving me that motivation which I was having trouble to find on my own. I am hoping to be able to complete the @sgmarathon half-marathon again this year after I ran it in 2019 when I was five months pregnant. Hopefully I can go a bit faster this year without the extra baby weight!”

Photos by Tim Yap