(Meet Bud Montaño via Here and Now...Petaling Along)

2013 U.S. 800-meter champion Alysia Montaño is pregnant and expecting her first child in mid-August. The five-time U.S. Champion made the announcement on her blog “Here and Now...Petaling Along” on Monday afternoon. 

She wrote the following:
“We started working together in November, and in the beginning we did not know each other very well, but my new bud kept making its presence known. Around our 1st month together I started to notice this relationship was going to have a very strong bond.

My new training bud challenges in me in new ways that I had never experienced ever before. In the beginning months I quickly found a new level of exhaustion that would have me laid out after our morning sessions. My training bud was going HAM on my energy levels. This new addition to the team had me breathless on mere 30 minute runs, and was getting me dropped on any sort of tempo paced run. Here we are going on our 4th month training together and things are turning around, I have a new desire and love and my energy that was nearly non-existent has returned and then some. I FEEL SO ALIVE with my new training buddy and I couldn't have asked for a better buddy!”

Montaño also noted that she is no longer sponsored by Red Bull after asking for a change in marketing when promoting the product.

“One day I saw a magazine I was featured in and they explained that I drink Redbull before races. For the reasons above, I was mortified, and that is when I knew that I wanted/ needed to pursue other partnerships,” Montaño wrote. “Although I respect them and cannot thank them enough for the many opportunities, I could not go through with what I perceived to be deception.”

Montaño is coming off a season in which she finished fourth at the IAAF World Championships in Moscow and was less than a second away from the bronze medal. She ran a season’s best of 1:57.75 at the Paris Diamond League Meeting on July 6. Her personal best remains 1:57.34 set in 2010 at the Monaco Diamond League Meeting.