RUN THE MENOPAUSE
Menopause can be devastating for runners, but new research and a more open conversation can navigate the challenges, helping you to emerge stronger, healthier and happier in the long run
When the symptoms started, I had no idea what was wrong. I was experiencing heart palpitations, my joints and muscles ached.
Even easy runs felt laborious, as if I was carrying an unseen weight. I felt low, too. Where had my mojo gone?
Unsurprisingly, the combination of these symptoms wreaked havoc on my running performance, so I began to race less often, and then not at all. I saw my GP, hoping to identify this mystery run-wrecking disease and was sent for tests: thyroid function, iron levels, etc. Nothing appeared to be wrong with me. I’m just past it, I thought.
Now I know different. I wasn’t ill, or old; I was menopausal. Of course, the ageing process does impact performance, but the menopause years are particularly ravaging, mentally and physically. In a Runner’s World poll, 83% of runners who had experienced menopause said it had affected their running. So it’s important both we and our loved ones understand what we’re up against.
Menopause has only recently begun to get the attention it deserves, after decades of being disregarded by the medical establishment and belittled with terms such as ‘women’s problems’ and ‘the change’. In a 2022 survey by the Fawcett Society, 44% of working women reported that their ability to do their job had been affected by the menopause and its symptoms, yet 41% had witnessed it being treated as a joke in the workplace. The upsurge in interest is thanks, in part, to public figures such as Davina McCall, Michelle Obama and Mariella Frostrup talking openly about their experiences. A TV documentary McCall made in 2021, Sex, Myths And The Menopause, had such an impact on British women – including a 30% rise in demand for hormone replacement therapy (HRT) – that it was dubbed the ‘Davina effect’.
‘It’s great that, finally, there’s now a conversation about menopause so women are educated and informed and can make the right choices about how to navigate it,’ says Sam Brown, a GP who specialises in the menopause and co-director of the Bronte Clinic in London.
Kate Muir, producer of the McCall documentary, went on to write Everything You Need To Know About The Menopause (But Were Afraid To Ask), a book that taught me many things I wish I’d known sooner – what was happening to me? Was it normal? How long would it go on for? How could I mitigate the symptoms? It wasn’t so much a matter of being too afraid to ask as simply not knowing that I needed to.
Once I started to discuss what Muir calls the ‘sledgehammer’ of symptoms with other runners, I realised there was an army of us struggling with joint pain, extreme fatigue, the sudde
