To be clear: I did not sign up for the Menopause 200. My ovaries did. Oh, they had warned me this mandatory event was coming, waking me with a drenching sweat or anxiety storm, tapering periods and replacing my brain with mush that increasingly felt like it was thinking on the wrong side of frosted glass. I was perfectly content to ignore it all (insert boiled frog emoji here), until I found myself at the start line, unable to run.
It began innocently enough, just a rough start to a rough training run. The North Nasty, in Portland’s Forest Park, features 2,900 feet of elevation in 11.5 miles. It’s a perfect training loop, for weekends when you can’t get to the Columbia River Gorge trails. My training plan included a double. I struggled from the start. I struggled to start. I struggled to find anything resembling a running stride. Climbs are my happy place. I power-hiked every hill. After loop one, I texted my wife. “I would be late, very late,” and settled into “Slowest Known Time” pace.
In my 46 years of running, I’ve experienced some rough training and racing. This was different. It wasn’t just my energy. My drive to run was gone. I joyfully run five or six days a week. Suddenly, I just wanted to walk. I struggled through my next race, dropping from the 50M to the 50k, and was glad to finish. Depressed, I threw my fall training plan away, took off my watch and started looking for answers.
I won’t bore you with the soul searching and research, the decision to start hormone replacement therapy or the dramatic change it made in my mood, sleep and my running. The bigger story is why so many women athletes in their 40s, 50s and 60s have a similar experience and either leave the sport or stop exercising. The bigger story is why I, a veterinarian and medical writer, conversant in reproductive senescence and hormone cycles, failed to appreciate my own changing hormone cycles. The biggest story is the conversation I hope to start, sharing science and stories mature women athletes need to keep ourselves healthy, moving and running.
If you are a woman athlete, menopause will come. Age is inevitable, but the exercise and nutrition choices you make will determine how you navigate this transition. Right now, though, if running is your identity, your therapy, your exercise—you want to run. Let’s run. Let’s approach menopause the same way we would any big race: with a plan. Here is a format I use when building a race training plan. I call it Head-Heart-Heat:
Head. Head is the research, looking at the course, the maps, figuring out how a big race fits into my overall training, and reading everything I can from people who have run the course before. For the Menopause 200 (MP 200 for short), it includes an overview of menopause, followed by a deeper dive into how estrogen and progesterone influence muscle, bone and type I collagen, and how waxing and waning hormone cycles impact muscle mass and bone density.
Heart. This is the mental part, where I look deep at my motivation for doing a race, connect with my family and the trails. For the MP 200, heart work focuses on how to embrace this point in your life, and the inevitable “life quakes” of slowing down and adjusting race expectations.
Heat. These are actionable items, the things I do every day to stay race ready. This includes familiar territory—running and strength training—and some new things to try.
One final note, for the men and younger women who managed to read this far: you have a wife, girlfriend, training partner or mother. Please share this information with her. Have a question or a story to share? Email me at [email protected].