OLYMPIC golden girl Jessica Ennis-Hill managed to balance her illustrious track and field career with motherhood.
But she is horrified some fellow sportswomen have not had enough support to return to the world of competition after giving birth.
The 37-year-old from Sheffield, who won gold in the heptathlon at the London 2012 Olympics, is mum to Reggie, eight, and Olivia, five, with husband Andy Hill.
Reggie was born in July 2014, and after a three-month maternity break, Jessica returned to intense training while also getting up three times a night to feed him.
She went on to win at the Beijing World Athletics Championships in 2015 and to claim silver at the 2016 Olympics in Rio.
She says: “Reggie was a massive part of that motivation I had for those final couple of years of competing.
“I was a motivated athlete before I had Reggie but my level of motivation and drive went to a whole new level because everything that I was doing was for him.
“That’s why it blows my mind when there is this grey area in sports or other careers, where some women feel that they aren’t supported to be able to come back to their career. It’s so wrong.”
Jessica believes most sportswomen are hugely motivated before they have children and then come back ten times more committed.
She adds: “You want to make sure everything you do is pure quality and that it’s worth the sacrifice of not being with your child as much as you would plan to.”
Her comments come as the RFU has announced a maternity package for their rugby players to encourage them to have a career alongside being a mum.
On Gabby Logan’s Mid Point podcast, Jessica says: “The landscape does seem to be changing.
“Helen Glover, the rower, for example, has got three young kids and is coming back to do another Olympic cycle.
“There are a range of different sports where female athletes are saying they can go away and start a family and come back and continue performing and training.
“It’s so inspiring to see so many women athletes coming back to do that and feeling they have the support to do that.”
In 2016, Jessica was voted Great Britain’s favourite sporting hero in a poll conducted by Sport Relief.
One person who has been by her side through everything is husband Andy, a construction site manager, who she married in 2013.
The pair met as teenagers at King Ecgbert School in Sheffield.
They were determined to have kids, with Jessica hoping she would be able to bring Reggie along to training.
But she has previously said: “In my head, I was planning to bring him down to the track every session, and he would watch Mummy quietly from his buggy.
“Fast-forward a few months and this didn’t exactly work out the way I’d planned.
“It turns out babies don’t really have many moments of calm and, as a new mum, every little sound he made distracted me and I couldn’t stop myself going straight over to check on him.
“Not exactly the best way to train! So I had to put a new plan in place.
“I set up a home gym in my garage, and whenever he was having one of those unpredictable naps, when you’re never quite sure how long they’ll sleep, I would slip in a quick training session.
“Training was incredibly tough.
“My body wasn’t working like it used to, my speed had disappeared and the sessions were harder than they’d ever been.
“I doubted myself and constantly questioned whether I could do it and if it was going to be worth it, all alongside the awful, persistent ‘mummy guilt’.
“I think Andy found it a bit challenging at times because you do live in this world where you are striving for perfection all the time, and everything has got to be just where it needs to be.
“And actually, in everyday life and when having children, that is not achievable.
“Having kids taught me that you can’t be in control of everything.
“They are going to get poorly at times and life isn’t going to be perfect.
“Having the kids has taught me that you’ve got to relax a little bit and not be so ‘on it’ all the time.”
She credits Andy for being her “rock” and says he has never been jealous of her success.
She adds: “It’s crazy to think when we started as boyfriend and girlfriend I was 19, so young. We’ve been on this whole journey together from a young age.”
Jessica retired in 2016 and has now become a “tennis mum” as her kids focus on the sport.
She has also worked as a pundit and appeared in BBC documentary Jessica Ennis-Hill And The Next Generation.
But her main focus has been developing menstrual tracking app Jennis CycleMapping, which creates a fitness programme for women with a natural period cycle based on their own patterns, symptoms and goals.
She says: “There are so many changes and fluctuations that happen to us through the month, but also with the major life changes.
“I felt uncomfortable having those conversations with a male coach and team.
“It was a very male-dominated world.
“You can stop any woman and she’ll tell you she feels differently at this or that time of the month.
“We feel like we have to just get on with it but actually there is a way of understanding our hormones better and using them to our advantage.”