This is part of a series of blogs on my experience of menopause. For the others see intro, physical impacts and mental health and mindset. As I said in the intro, this is what worked for me, based on a lot of trial and error . Everyone is different but hopefully it might give you some ideas to try.
My body had not been playing ball for the last year or so, but I’d ignored it. I knew I was entering perimenopause (I have a coil so don’t have periods but track enough to know things were changing).
But despite working on menopause almost every day, I hadn’t joined the dots (or didn’t want to?) to realise the impact it was having and how much I needed to change things.
It wasn’t til the pain in my shoulder stopped me from swimming, the heart palpitations were disrupting me even when I was just sitting and I kept grinding to a halt on my marathon training runs that I eventually went to the doctor and got prescribed HRT (see physical impacts) and updated my training approach.
I realised I had to treat myself as I would any new client. Rather than presuming I knew what I could do and how much training I could take, I had to get to know this new body and find out how I could work with it to do its best.
And just like when a client tells me what they do regularly, I had to tease apart the difference between what I aspired to do and what actually happened and recommit where things were drifting off course.
Join me during Menopause Week - 8th to 11th October
If you’d like to learn more about navigating your training through (peri-post) menopause then join me for my upcoming Menopause Week - a free series of online events.
Maximising rest and recovery during menopause
As all my clients are sick of hearing me say “you don’t get fitter from training, you get fitter from recovery from training” and its this balance between training and recovery during menopause that becomes so important.
If my body could take less training, I needed to get as much as I could from each session, and if I could recover better, I could reduce the time I needed between sessions.
I recommitted to meet my daily target of 1.5g+ of protein per kg of body weight to ensure I was getting the building blocks of recovery, as well as a focus on micronutrients (veg!).
I started paying a lot more attention to Resting Heart Rate and Heart Rate Variability, as well as Form and Fatigue on Training Peaks (I monitor this for clients but was less good at doing it for myself!), to guide my training, and stopped ignoring it when it didn’t give me the numbers I wanted.
I paid far more attention to planning my training each week, building in extra rest days and really thinking about the sequence of sessions in a week and how long it would take me to recover from each.
Probably most importantly, I chilled out - I really changed my attitude to work, I worked less hours and added in regular yoga sessions and nature writing, and developed better technique for planning my workload to get rid of the ‘impending to-do list of doom’. And my business didn’t suffer, instead I achieved more in the time I had.
How I learnt to sleep better during menopause
I was already pretty hot on sleep hygiene but I got better. I ramped up (in a restful way!) my approach to both ensure I could get back to sleep after waking with shoulder pain and to improve recovery from training.
One of the most striking things I heard a sleep expert say is ‘how often do you practice having an empty mind like you want when you try to sleep’. I used a series of relaxation and meditation apps and support (some of my favourites include the Balance app, Waking Up app, NSDR scripts, all installed on an old phone with nothing else on, to remove temptation).
Often I couldn’t get back to sleep after I woke up in the early morning but I became an expert at lying there so relaxed my watch and boyfriend thought I was sleeping, and I’m convinced this was key to the lack of sleep not getting to me more.
I rediscovered reading before bed (yes, with actual books!) which really helped
I work on my mindset to reduce spiralling thoughts and catastrophising when I wake up (see mindset).
I was already pretty good on sleep hygiene but recommitted to some of the things I found most useful including:
a phone curfew before bed, plus automatic switching into black-and-white mode.
prioritising early morning light exposure.
eating earlier to allow my parasympathetic system to focus on sleep rather than digestion and prevent late-night glucose spikes.
keeping the bedroom cool with a thin duvet plus a blanket I could add/remove for temperature control through the night.
removed all phone notifications and set app limits.
I let go of ‘sleep perfectionism’ and went with ‘good enough’ which was key
How I adapted marathon training for menopause
(Once the GP said I could go back to exercise), I cut out any training that wasn’t supporting my running, dropped my pace by about 10 secs per km, and added a walk break every 10 mins (or whenever there was a hill).
Mindset - For a long time I have focussed on aiming to do the best I can on race day (rather than a time-based goal), but it still took some time to accept that what I could do would be considerably slower than the year before.
I really focussed on fuelling, getting in as much as I could. Read more on my nutrition.
On the day, despite almost every training run feeling like running through treacle, it all came together and I finally enjoyed the run! (and only came in about 11 mins slower than the year before).
How I adapted the rest of my training for menopause
I’ve always been a big believer in the importance of easy runs, but I took them even easier, with more nose breathing and walk breaks
I started doing more regular mobility work (which unsurprisingly really helped me feel and move so much better!)
After I’d finished marathon training I recommitted to a weekly strength session in the gym (on top of the S&C classes I teach from home with lighter weights).
Where I am now
For the last 6 months things have been going much better and I'm currently training for some end of season Olympic distance races.
I slowly, slowly rebuilt my swim from tonnes of drills alternating with about 50m crawl before my shoulder said no. On the physio's advice I recently started taking anti-inflammatories and I cant believe how great it feels to swim almost pain free (and how much I hadn't actually realised how much it was still hurting!)
I had to accept I could do less. I went from being a regular Audaxer who did at least a 200k ride once a month to 100km being my limit. And rather than worrying that my FTP had dropped by almost 50 watts, I just worked on building it back up.
Full disclosure: the original draft of this blog said, 'I'm getting my training back on track but there's no way I could contemplate doing another Ironman right now'. Then they announced Ironman Leeds. We'll have to see how that goes!....
Want help with training during menopause?
As well as all my learnings from training myself, I've successfully helped lots of my clients navigate their training through peri-post menopause. If you want to hear more of what I recommend in terms of training, recovery, nutrition and mindset, join me for my upcoming Menopause Week - a free series of online events from 8th - 11th October.
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