Rethinking when women peak. Perimenopause, race week, and a personal best

 
After a decade of running and a year of disciplined nutrition, I ran my strongest race despite everything that wasn’t in my control.

I was on the metro, on my way to the race start, when I met this young boy of 22. We got talking. It was his first race. There was excitement in his voice, a kind of nervous anticipation that felt familiar. He spoke about the distance, the crowd, the uncertainty of how it would go.

I remembered that version of myself. Then, almost in passing, I mentioned my age. There was a brief pause. Two people on their way to the same start line but standing at very different points in time. That moment I didn’t feel like I was at the end of something.

My period arrived just days before my race. At a stage in life when even predicting it feels uncertain. And yet, I ran my personal best.

It has taken me ten years to get here. Ten years of showing up through phases where nothing seemed to change. Of training when results didn’t reflect effort. Of trusting a process that offered very little immediate validation.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea of the 10,000 hour rule that mastery in any field requires sustained, long-term effort. Whether or not the number is exact, the principle holds.

Time matters. Repetition matters. Consistency compounds.

And sometimes, what looks like a sudden breakthrough is simply years of work.

The narrative we’ve been given

There’s a story many women internalize without ever consciously choosing it that performance belongs to the youth and beyond a certain age, the curve inevitably declines. 

In endurance sport, peak performance doesn’t just depend on physical capacity. It reflects years of accumulated training, adaptation, and resilience through mental conditioning.

Training through uncertainty

I am in perimenopause. A phase that is anything but predictable. Energy fluctuates, recovery feels different, sleep can be inconsistent and something as basic as your menstrual cycle no longer follows a rhythm you can rely on.

Even when training remains consistent, your body can feel like a variable you are constantly recalibrating against and the expectation we place on ourselves doesn’t always change. We still want to perform, improve and progress but now it demands a deeper level of awareness and effort.

Race morning

Race mornings are always a test of logistics as much as fitness. But for women, there is an additional layer that rarely gets spoken about - the queues.

Long lines curling around portable toilets. The clock ticking steadily toward the start. The quiet calculation - Do I wait? Do I risk it? Do I start like this? Add your period into that equation, and it becomes something else entirely.

It’s not just about routine. It’s about managing discomfort, uncertainty and anxiety of things not going according to plan. I was racing without ideal conditions.

This year ..

If the last ten years built the base, the past one year changed how that base expressed itself. I made a decision to focus on nutrition. I stayed consistent for a full year. No extremes, no shortcuts. I lost weight which resulted in better energy and greater efficiency in effort. 

At this stage, you realize that training alone is not enough. Nutrition, recovery, and consistency are not secondary. They are central. All this along with working on mental conditioning which involved multiple self-talks and visualisations helped me move faster and stronger.

Rethinking the Peak

We need to rethink how we define peak performance for women. It is not a narrow window. It is a convergence of years of effort, accumulated adaptation, mental maturity and disciplined living. When these align, performance shows.

Closing

Somewhere at the start line, that 22-year-old stood ready for his first race. Full of possibility. And me? At 47, after ten years of showing up, I stood there too. Not at the beginning and not at the end either. Just at a different kind of peak. One that took time to build. And even more time to understand. The hard part now is to aim to get better or at least sustain it. Settling with the latter seems equally hard but we are build to do hard things.