I’m a certified endurance coach with over three decades as an endurance athlete, and I spent two years missing Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) in myself. Not from restriction and not from a difficult relationship with food. My appetite quietly dropped as my hormonal needs quietly rose, and the gap between the two went unnoticed by the one person whose job it was to notice: me. I kept training through declining performance, unexplained weight changes, and exhaustion that didn’t match my training load, and I attributed all of it to “just menopause.” It wasn’t just menopause. It was RED-S layered on top of an unsupported hormonal transition. Those two conditions share symptoms, compound each other, and neither of whose standard recovery protocol works alone.
Effortless Endurance is where I document what actually pulling out of that looked like. I include the data, the missteps, the slow return of a functioning autonomic nervous system… It’s to share with other women likely living some version of the same thing without a name for it yet. It’s a corner of women’s endurance health that’s barely documented: most menopause content stops at hormones, and most RED-S content assumes a 25-year-old collegiate athlete, not someone navigating both at once in her forties or fifties. If you’re a masters endurance athlete watching your performance decline, your weight shift for no clear reason, or your energy disappear right as menopause hits (and every explanation you’ve been offered is either “hormones” or “eat less and move more”) this is built for you.
You’ll find real-time reporting on rebuilding a depleted system: HRV trends, fuelling adjustments, training load and recovery status. I’m tracking and sharing as it happens rather than cleaned up in hindsight. Alongside that sits a growing reference layer with articles on RED-S, low energy availability, recovery, strength and mobility for masters athletes, nutrition that supports rather than restricts, and the mindset behind long days in the saddle when your body isn’t cooperating the way it used to. New posts go up most weeks, sometimes a data breakdown, sometimes just an honest account of what a hard week looked like from the inside.