Menopause snuck up on me. I was in the best shape of my life leading up to it. I was hitting PRs in the gym, I had fantastic endurance, and I was climbing hills on my bike that actually felt kinda easy. I thought perimenopause was a breeze! I didn’t experience any of the symptoms I was expecting until about a year before I hit menopause. Then it all went downhill.
The first thing that happened was the injuries. Not bad ones, but I somehow pulled a muscle putting my kayak on my car. That manifested as elbow pain and took months to resolve. Then came the shoulder. Literally out of nowhere. My form in the gym was good, I hadn’t changed anything, but my right shoulder was in agony. While the injuries piled up, I also noticed I’d put on a bit of weight. No big deal, I told myself. I typically gain a few pounds over winter. Spring came, activity picked up, and the winter weight would come off like it always did.
Except this time it didn’t.
My usual tricks weren’t working. Normally upping the intensity would do it. This time it just made me tired. I was still dragging myself up at the crack of dawn to hit the gym or squeeze in a Zwift session, but the weight kept coming. Five pounds. Ten pounds. I was starting to freak out. So I did what made sense to me at the time… I pushed harder and cut calories. The only thing I actually managed to do was put myself into RED-S.
RED-S (Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport) happens when you’re not fuelling enough to support both your training and your basic body functions. The symptoms? Fatigue, mood changes, disrupted sleep, weight that won’t budge, injuries that keep coming back.
Sound familiar? Yeah. It also sounds exactly like perimenopause.
That was the problem. I was experiencing both at the same time, and they were masking each other. Every time I thought this must be hormones, it was probably also under-fuelling. Every time I thought I just need to eat less and train harder, I was making the RED-S worse. The cruel irony is that the playbook that had worked for me for years (push through, tighten up the diet, add intensity) is exactly the wrong prescription when your hormones are shifting and your body is already running on empty.
I didn’t recognize it at first. No one had told me these two things could show up together and look identical. And I’d been an endurance athlete and coach for years.
Once I figured out what was happening, I pulled back hard. I stopped all training. In that state, I was setting myself up for more injuries in the gym, and I knew my body couldn’t sustain the stress of high intensity cardio. So I walked the dog. Did the occasional zone 2 bike ride with him (7 km max, because that was his threshold). I ate more. I looked at the stress load in my life and changed what I could. Then I just let my body heal.
Part of that healing process involved weight gain, and I just had to let it happen. After about a year after I stopped training, it stabilized. I gained around 40 lbs overall and have since lost 10 of that without doing anything deliberate. I stopped stepping on the scale (I didn’t like what the numbers were telling me) and started going by how my clothes fit instead. At the peak I went up three sizes. I’m down one now.
And that brings me to here. The comeback.
I’m not sure what it’s going to look like this time around. It has been over two years since I stopped training. I know my body is going to respond differently than it did before, and I’m going to be figuring it out as I go. I’m not eyeing century rides straight out of the gate. I’m starting small.
The only thing holding me back right now is allergy season.
And it’s almost over.
Leave a Reply