Morning! Between Life and W&D, I haven’t had time to do much DISing lately, but I’m trying to catch up. Congrats to all who’ve toed the lines and smashed some goals recently!
I have an update to share - it could get stupidly long, but I’ll try to keep it brief. Ish.
I finally bought the book “Next Level” by Stacey Sims and Selena Yeager - basically a guide to dealing with the challenges (which is a REALLY nice way of putting it) of perimenopause and menopause as an aging female athlete. It’s been enormously eye-opening and helpful!
Consider this: my generation and beyond are the first to have benefited from Title IX - the first really large group of US women to have had wide access to sport is just now hitting the menopausal stage of life, which means there’s been precious little research into how peri/menopause impacts the athletic female body. We’re only just beginning to figure things out. Which is why it’s so incredibly hard to get good sports medical care with peri/menopause in mind.
Anyway, the book is chock full of wisdom, advice, very specific tips for supplements, training, and more. I highly recommend it! And I won’t attempt to regurgitate much of it here, but a couple things I learned have totally transformed my approach to training and running, so much for the better…
1. The idea that after more than a decade of long distance running, endurance should not be my main target in training: the endurance is already there, baked in. For the past month+, I’ve been doing more HIIT runs, less mileage, and some days not running at all if I feel awful. It’s a HUGE shift in mentality for me, but it’s working a treat!
2. More protein; more quality calories. I’m hitting protein hard after every workout - a protein shake, hard boiled egg, Greek yogurt or the like. It is shocking what a difference that’s made in my recovery and reduction in soft tissue pain! And adding that in is adding more calories that I really need, too.
3. Lift Heavy Stuff (only it’s not really “Stuff”). I hate strength training, so the advice to lift heavy for very few reps is actually a winner for me lol! More weight, less time? Done. I feel stronger, look leaner (not that that is what this is about at all, but it’s a nice side effect), and am running better.
In real life, here’s how these changes have played out recently:
My penultimate b2b2b training weekend for W&D went great!
My final b2b2b training weekend was a different story: hormones were out of whack, pain levels and fatigue were high, and I bailed at mile 9 of what was sopped to be a 12-miler. Told myself all week before W&D, “This is FINE: you’ve got 10 years of marathon and Dopey training built up, not to mention a gazillion halfs - you do not need those extra miles to be ready.”
W&D weekend… I was exhausted from lack of sleep (thanks noisy neighbors), under-nourished thanks to dental work and an inability to chew properly, and frankly not into it at all… but I finished all 3 races, and even ran hard the second half of the half, with what felt like minimal effort! I still battled the chronic pain I’ve had for several years now, but it was tolerable - and I recovered quickly.
So I’m hesitant to say I’M BACK, BAYBEE!!!, but I’m… a bit more hopeful than I was a couple months ago? I still have no interest in ever agin doing a marathon, and swore after W&D no more 3 days of racing in a row, but I’m feeling reasonably confident I can still keep doing halfs if I want to. That’s a pretty big shift from where I was mentally not so long ago!
Now if I can just find shoes that don’t torture me…