No more pain and suffering

“I thought as an athlete I better not complain about pain. That’s a massive part of being successful in sport – coping really well with being in physical pain. I thought ‘I can’t talk about my pain because then I’m weak’,” These are words spoken by NZ cycling champion Kirstie Klingenberg in an article talking about her journey from period pain to an endometriosis diagnosis, whilst pursuing an elite cycling career.

Pain and suffering are a big part of sport. Even my own relationship with running, which I do as a hobby, for pleasure, often involves pain and suffering! In elite sport this is only magnified. What it takes to reach the top is pushing your body and mind to the limit, and so some pain and suffering are part of the deal, and it’s a normal part of getting faster, stronger, fitter.

However, that should not mean that all pain and suffering is normalised and even celebrated as being part of the journey to personal best performances. We have to do better in sports by reducing judgement around women’s health issues and raising the standard of support and care of female athlete health, wellbeing and performance.

Silence doesn’t help anyone

The silence that has long surrounded female specific factors such as symptoms of the menstrual cycle, breast pain or pelvic floor dysfunction is largely due to the fact that female athletes don’t want to be judged as weak, or inferior to their male counterparts. And that judgement, and the subsequent silence, are what perpetuates the shame and stigma that surrounds these topics.

Let’s take the menstrual cycle. We don’t talk about it enough. There’s definitely lots of energy and loud voices trying to change this at the moment, but the silence continues in sport, at home, in school or work and amongst friends. I know, because I often ask how many female athletes have spoken with their coach about how they might capitalise on good days of the cycle or manage the challenging symptoms on other days, and there has been no conversation.

It seems crazy because we examine the colour of these athlete’s urine to record hydration, measure the composition of their sweat to inform what and how much they should drink, yet we still find it so difficult to factor in the menstrual cycle in our pursuit of peak performance. And because there is silence around it, women normalise things that just aren’t normal. Whether it’s extreme pain, like in Kirsties case, missing periods for months or dealing with heavy periods. If we don’t talk about it then women will continue to.

Normalising the abnormal

I was speaking to a PE teacher the other day who said girls still come in with ‘sick’ notes to stay off Games if they are having their period. They had other students who have suffered stress fractures because they lost their period. Unfortunately, this had been normalised but missed periods and stress fractures are an indication of poor nutrition.

We won’t dispel the myths that you can’t exercise on your period, or that losing your menstrual cycle is normal if we aren’t having open conversations about what actually is normal, what is healthy and what might help our performance as girls and women (athletes or not!).

The Problem with Secrecy

And then there’s the secrecy. We obsessively euphemise periods as though they are ‘he who cannot be named’ (big Harry Potter fans in this house!). We keep them a secret because we don’t even use the right words.

How can we expect girls to know anything about their body if we’ve been speaking in tongues about ‘aunt flo’ and her ‘hygiene products’ (although my favourite is the French slang for period – ‘Les Anglais ont debarqué’ – ‘the English have landed.’)

We use euphemisms, we smuggle tampons up our sleeves like they are illicit contraband. If we keep this stuff a secret, then we perpetuate the idea that we shouldn’t and can’t talk about it. And I think it’s quite the contrary. I am not advocating over-sharing, but I am definitely for sharing.

I was with a group of athletes who started discussing the menstrual cup recently, specifically, whether it was any good when you were doing high impact sport. Another started sharing her own experience of being dauted to insert it at first, but after describing how she managed it with the help of you-tube, she was raving about it. Another asked how you removed and emptied it. By which time another girl was cringing and said ‘I NEVER thought I would be talking about this (slightly embarrassed pause), but I am learning so much!’. Given a safe space and a little nudge, sharing between these girls helped them figure some stuff out and even encourage them to try something new.

We don’t need any more Judgment

Then there’s the judgement. Let’s not pretend that we aren’t all Mr or Mrs judgy-pants a lot of the time – its human nature. And it’s really, really hard not to cast judgement when you don’t have a lived experience of what someone else is going through.

We hear it a lot in sport. I’ve had a female coach say, ‘I always trained through my period pain, so why can’t my athlete?’, and a male coach question, ‘heavy legs – really – are you sure she’s not just being lazy?’ Because all menstrual cycles are experienced differently by every woman, it’s really easy for other women to judge because what the other is describing isn’t their own lived experience. And for men, who have no lived experience at all, it’s often even harder not to place judgement on something that you don’t understand.

That’s when trust and empathy come in.

If a girl or woman says they can’t drag themselves from bed because of menstrual pain, you think about a time that you’ve been bed ridden by some aliment, and you say ‘that sounds awful, I hope you feel better soon. When you do, I’d like to help you get to the bottom of this, because severe pain isn’t normal, there’s something we can do to help’.

When an athlete is missing her lap splits and says that she always seems to feel bloated and heavy on this day of her cycle, surely the best thing to say is ‘if that’s something that you find affects you every month, let me know so we can adjust the session accordingly, and let’s see if there are things that help, like what you eat or how we warm up’, rather than chastising her for being a slow-coach.

So let’s get rid of the silence, secrecy and judgement and create a space where we can discuss our amazing bodies and what they might be doing at any given time, and how it’s affecting us, and how we can use its super powers.