Sara Vaughn fits a lot into a day: She’s a realtor in Boulder, Colorado, a top U.S. marathoner, and a mom of four children with her husband, Brent. Now she has yet another gig: She has launched a nonprofit, the Vaughn Childcare Fund, Rob Gronkowski Named Boston Grand Marshal.

The first two recipients of $5,000 childcare grants are Sydney Holiday, a sprinter at the University of Oregon, who gave birth to a daughter in November, and Brooke Skoog, a distance runner at Grand Canyon University who has a 15-month-old son.

The fund was inspired by Vaughn’s experiences getting pregnant and having her daughter in 2006 while an undergraduate runner at the University of Colorado. Vaughn, 36, who has returned to the elite ranks after the births of each of her four children, is training for the Boston Marathon, her third. Her PR, 2:26:23, is from Chicago Is it limited to runners Runner’s World in February.

This is not your first time supporting college students. What is different with the Vaughn Childcare Fund?

We have an endowment scholarship at the University of Colorado at Boulder, but it’s only available to students there. The Vaughn Childcare Fund works a little bit differently. We’re not limiting it to CU or Colorado or even Division I athletes. And because it’s a nonprofit grant, and it’s not based on academic or athletic performance, a full-ride scholarship athlete can apply and accept the money, no problem.

Did you continue going to practice for several months after you said you were pregnant?

It’s been on my mind a long time. I feel like I’ve been talking about it forever. I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing, starting a nonprofit. I was just trying to be really careful. At the end of the day, we need to go for it.

Is there a dollar amount?

Ideally I would like to give around $5,000, which would hopefully cover the school year for part-time childcare for one kid. If we get two applicants, we’ll be fine. If we get 20 applicants, we’re going to have to do some serious fundraising. I know that there are a couple of dozen student-athletes in the NCAA who should apply. Whether they do or not, we’ll see.

Is it limited to runners?

Did you have people in your corner on campus? Was there family nearby.

I cant imagine you were?

At something like 90 percent of universities, the athletic departments don’t have written policies to address pregnancy and postpartum [training]. The NCAA has guidelines for it. There’s no reason for universities not to have it.

I think that was part of the problem when I had a baby in college. But now there’s plenty of research about what’s safe and should be acceptable and should be allowed.

Can you tell the story of having a baby when you were an undergraduate at Colorado?

Kiki was not planned, and she knows that. Nine out of 10 pregnancies in college are unplanned. We were not married, I was on birth control. I was not feeling like myself. I wasn’t running well. I went to our trainers and told them my symptoms and they told me I was experiencing some depression and heartburn. They prescribed some medication for both of those things, which are both known to cause birth defects. They did not ask me if I was sexually active.

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I was almost 12 weeks. I had known for a couple of weeks at that point. I never took the anti-depression medication or the heartburn medication, because I had a feeling. So I took a pregnancy test at 12 weeks.

As with most pregnancies in college that are unplanned, everyone just assumed I wouldn’t be having a baby. I would just go have an abortion and move on. So actually telling my coaches, “No, we are going to have this baby,” was way bigger of a battle than I anticipated. I went in to tell head coach [Mark Wetmore] and he kind of almost didn’t give me a chance to speak. He was supportive in a way, saying, “I hope you get what you need, come back to practice when you’re ready.” When I look back, I try to give everybody grace, because no one had really dealt with it before. It was a new situation for most people involved.

Were you freaking out?

It was a little scary, but my mom had me when she was in high school, so there was some built-in understanding there. But, I mean, still, you’re like, “I don’t know what I’m doing,” and I was 19. I was trying to figure everything out. I didn’t know if women had babies in college and stayed in college. I didn’t know if they ran after they had babies. I had one example, Shayne Culpepper, here in Boulder. Other than that, I didn’t know if that was something that women did. Kiki was born in 2006, the fall of my junior year. Brent was a year older.

My family was supportive. And I had Brent. We hadn’t been dating that long, and he was fully committed from the beginning. So that made the decisions a lot easier. He was fully on board.

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I did. They didn’t kick me out of practice or anything. I kept showing up for quite a while.

Did they welcome you back after you had the baby?

I felt like much less of a liability to them at practice. It was more while I was pregnant that was awkward. Coming back, I had just turned 20, and physically I was able to recover in four or five weeks. I made it to the NCAA outdoor championships when Kiki was 8 months old, in the 1500. Brent ran really well. They won the team championship in cross country when she was like 12 weeks old.

I can’t imagine you were sleeping a lot.

Definitely not. I felt like I didn’t see my husband. We did get married when she was a few months old. I felt like I didn’t see him for almost two years. We would schedule our classes opposite each other. We would literally hand Kiki off on campus. And then a couple of times a week, when we had big workouts, we would hire a babysitter. We would have dinner together and then I would be up late doing homework, he would be up early with her. We were burning the candle at both ends, for sure.

I graduated in 2008. Technically I had a year of eligibility left, but the compliance department never filled out my redshirt paperwork. So I left after four years.

126th boston marathon
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Do you think there’s been progress for pregnant college athletes?

I don’t know. Not that I’ve gotten any pushback on this nonprofit organization, but the one question I’ve gotten is, “Is this really needed? Are people really even going to apply?” I think it happens more often that people realize. It is just that the unfortunate statistic is that the pregnant woman drops out and doesn’t come back to school.

The fact that we both had full-ride scholarships, we could pay for rent, buy groceries, I tutored a little bit, Brent played some online poker, we used that money to pay our babysitter. We had a unique situation. I remember thinking the whole time, “Man, it would be nice to have a little more money or just a couple of hours of babysitting a week.” Then I would have been up for fighting for my fifth year and staying. I do regret leaving a year of eligibility on the table. I’m always kind of bummed when I think about that.

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At CU, the student handbook did not address pregnancy or postpartum at all. The only thing it said was for every day you’re in the hospital, you get two days excused from class. I was in four classes. Half of my professors were super supportive, but two of them were awful. I had to bring Kiki to class when she was four days old so I didn’t fail, because I couldn’t get excused beyond four days. This is why I started a foundation, the lack of support I felt as an undergrad. My professors made me come to class with a four-day-old.

What saved me, I think, was that I couldn’t take a semester off, or I would have lost my scholarship. You have to keep progressing, and pass at least 12 credits to be eligible. Yes, it was hard, but it kept me enrolled to keep my scholarship.

We didn’t have family here. The most regular babysitting we had was our teammates, who would watch Kiki during the day if we had overlapping classes. They all knew her as a toddler. And now they’re all like, “I can’t believe she’s a junior in high school.”

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Sarah Lorge Butler

Sarah Lorge Butler is a writer and editor living in Eugene, Oregon, and her stories about the sport, its trends, and fascinating individuals have appeared in Runner’s World Running Shoes & Gear, Run Your Butt Off! and Walk Your Butt Off!