417 Lesley Waldron ~ Adventures in Perimenopause

Transcript

HOLLY: Hello!

LESLEY: Hello Holly!

HOLLY: I am really looking forward to our chat today!

LESLEY: Me too, thank you so much for having me here, I am thrilled to have been invited.

HOLLY: Thank you for being here. We are here to talk about adventures in perimenopause which is a topic that, not surprisingly, that has been coming up with friends over the last few years. I am of that age! So before we get into the conversation, lets talk about what is perimenopause?

LESLEY: Okay, well perimenopause refers to the time around menopause. Menopause is actually defined as the day 12 months after your last menstrual period. So menopause itself effectively is one day. Now there are different ways, it is also defined as that kind of 12 months, or as that phase of menopause. But perimenopause, when I am talk about perimenopause, mainly I am talking about the years before we hit that menopause day. And after that we are post-menopausal and that post-menopausal phase is almost like we are stepping into a new version of ourselves, which I think is exciting. It is also a phase where, because we have lost the protective benefits of oestrogen and progesterone, it becomes even more important that we look after our health and well-being.

Perimenopause can start in our late 30s, we can start feeling the impact of lowering levels of oestrogen and progesterone, or of oestrogen and progesterone being out of balance. So we can have too much and too little, which has different effects on our wellbeing. Basically, oestrogen and progesterone are mainly made in the ovaries and they are made with healthy ovulation, so every time a follicle grows from our ovaries to release an egg, that first phase we release oestrogen and then as the egg is released we are left with the corpus luteum, which produces progesterone. But as we go through perimenopause we don’t necessarily ovulate every month, or we don’t have a full ovulation, so we don’t necessarily release an egg. Or follicles develop but we don’t necessarily release an egg, so we end up with lowering levels of oestrogen and progesterone and our body then has to get used to that. So there are 400 different cells in our bodies, different cellular processes that have oestrogen receptors on them: in our brain, in our joints, in our guts, in our bones and so when oestrogen receptors, so it is kind of a key in the lock, oestrogen acts on that receptor and a cell performs whatever function it is supposed to do. Without oestrogen that cell doesn’t necessarily perform that function and that is part of what gives us the symptoms we might associate with perimenopause, which might be brain fog, might be hot flushes, might be anxiety and low mood, might be temperature fluctuations, it might be ‘can everybody just go away now’ {laughing}, joint aches and pains and things like that. So it is this phase in our lives when lots of things are changing in our bodies and we don’t necessarily make that connection with hormones, particularly if it starts in our late 30s for example, it is exacerbated by stress and also often our lives in our 30s and 40s are busy and stressful. And I think it is a really important time to really look at our wellbeing in a really well-rounded integrative way.

HOLLY: Well! {laughing}

LESLEY: I couldn’t give you a short answer to that question!

HOLLY: I know, I know. It is something that I have been aware of over the last couple of years. So how long does it last? Obviously it depends on every individual. So if it starts in your mid-to-late-30s and then obviously if you are in the middle of perimenopause you don’t know when menopause is going to start, but it could last a good 10-15 years, couldn’t it?

LESLEY: It could do. I read something recently, it could last three months and it could last 25 years. I think that was a massive exaggeration, but don’t quote me on that one! But some people don’t really notice and feel the impact until maybe their mid 40s. So for the women I work with on this most of them are coming to me in their mid-to-late 40s and it is that phase from say 45/46, through to around 52, the average age of menopause in this country is about 52. I would say that is for most people, not all, that is kind of the really most intense phase of perimenopause but there is so much that you can do prior to that as well. So if your oestrogen and progesterone levels are going down in your late 30s onwards, there are ways to focus on your wellbeing that can help you ease through that phase.

HOLLY: I think it is really interesting what you said about how a lot of times we don’t associate the different symptoms with perimenopause and I think that is what happened to me in the beginning and it wasn’t until I started realising, I have got this and I have got that and I have got the other and I started talking to other women and they were like, maybe it is perimenopause and that was kind of what first clued me in and it was like, ohhh that’s why all these things are happening.

LESLEY: Yes and I think I am on a mission to help women understand that from a younger age, that that’s what you are heading towards. There is a real push at the moment towards improving understanding, as well as improving care, because doctors unfortunately don’t have to do any training on the menopause so even though it effects 51% of the people who come through the surgery doors! So there is no kind of compulsory training so there is some work that is going on by various people to try and change that. But you don’t necessarily, because often, as I said, we have got all of these cells in our body that have this response to oestrogen and progesterone and the levels go down really slowly so there is this really slow response, so it might just be that there is this one thing and you just put it down to something else. So pelvic floor issues, or low libido, and you could just say, it is because I am really tired, or it is because of the kids and actually there is a hormonal component there as well. Often it is knowing what it is and being able to ask for the right support, so that is how I hope to empower the women I speak to, and hopefully perhaps some on this podcast as well.

HOLLY: Yes.

LESLEY: To gauge better understanding and then feel a little bit more powerful about their own wellbeing in their 40s and 50s.

HOLLY: Well I think also if it is a thing that you know about, you are aware of it and you know it will be coming, I think that a huge part of it is awareness because I had never heard of perimenopause, obviously I knew menopause was going to happen but I didn’t realise there was this whole phase that kind of eases you into it and I think that would make such a huge difference if women knew to expect this.

LESLEY: Yeah, massively so. I was in my late 30s and I was very, very, stressed, and very sleep deprived thanks to my youngest child and I had never had anxiety before in my life and I was having anxiety attacks. The sleep deprivation and stress actually meant that I couldn’t sleep so and I was stuck in a cycle of insomnia which is a really common side effect, particularly of lowering progesterone, aches and pains, and just really didn’t feel myself and I remember somebody suggesting to me that it was perimenopause and I was horrified, you know horrified! I was like, that’s something that happens to you in your 50s! But actually, once somebody actually said the word, I started looking at it and I started recognising that there was a power in understanding a little bit more about it and actually understanding a little bit more about my menstrual cycle and kind of tying those two things in together is actually a really empowering way through perimenopause, understanding your menstrual cycle, understanding who you are through the different phases of your menstrual cycle can actually help you tune into, what is a bit off? What is hormonal and what is just life, or a virus, or something else? So you might find, an example of mine is, that I will struggle with sleep for the last six or seven days of my cycle, so when my progesterone will be at its lowest in my menstrual cycle and that might happen every month, but because I know that is associated with that latter part of my cycle I can make sure that I take extra action to support my sleep or to build in a nap, for example, in the afternoon, so that I don’t end up, because I am so overtired, going for sugar and caffeine to get me going through which then has this knock on effect on your sleep anyway, or just getting really grumpy!

HOLLY: Yeah I think one of the best things I ever did, and sadly I have fallen out of the practice, I started this spreadsheet to track each day of my cycle and what were my energy levels like? What was I feeling? Was I craving things? What was my body doing each day of my cycle and obviously after doing that for a few months of my cycle I started to notice patterns but that does take a certain level of discipline but it is very useful information.

LESLEY: It is really useful. There are dozens of menstrual cycle tracking apps now and I, like you, I do it slightly differently now but when I first started I would just draw this circle in divided into 28 sections or 29 with some added, because sometimes my cycle was all over the place, but that was a tale in itself. I got doing that for about a year, like you, it meant I got to know a little bit more about my energy and a little bit more so I could just say to the children and husband, it is day 22 ok, you are going to have to do what I tell you to do today, because otherwise I am afraid, mama bear isn’t feeling very friendly {laughing}. Also if I am doing events or running workshops then I will try not to schedule them in the final 10 days of my cycle because I am just not as outgoing and my brain doesn’t work as quickly. So just small things like that and getting to know yourself a little bit better.

HOLLY: And I think getting to know yourself and giving yourself permission to go with the flow of the cycle also reduces stress because if on day 22 you force yourself to have a big event and talk to people then that is going to create an extra stress that is going to make the rest of the month more difficult.

LESLEY: Absolutely and we are much more stress sensitive with the decline of oestrogen and progesterone, they kind of act as a buffer on cortisol and then we get stuck in a cycle where if we are stressed all the time then the precursor hormone, the hormone pregnenolone can either become cortisol or progesterone and oestrogen can end up being diverted down that cortisol track and so we end up depleting our oestrogen and progesterone even further, so exacerbating our symptoms. So that was one of the things that I would track that I would notice that some things were worse, so that day 22 would be worse, 22-24, if I didn’t rest basically, if I didn’t rest in that menstrual phase, then it will have a knock-on effect over the course of that whole cycle. And I love the analogy of the seasons of the year and how, every year, living in a temperate climate like we do, nature around us needs the winter to kind of restore, to shore up, to strengthen in order to be able to go into bloom and blossom and fruit again in the spring and summer and autumn. So we need that winter, we need that downtime so we can withstand the stresses of the year and we have that opportunity every cycle and I think we need that opportunity more in perimenopause when we don’t necessarily have the same reserves and because I think it is an important time for us to step into kind of out strong wild woman, to say: actually this is what I need to do and to actually do it and to step away from the dialogue around us in society that says we have to be busy, busy, busy, all the time. When actually we would be much stronger, more powerful women if we engaged with rest.

HOLLY: Yes. So how does perimenopause change our ability to have adventures and have physical activities and be fit, how does that change?

LESLEY: Well, you can go down two tracks here, you can say: well, it shouldn’t change and we can carry on doing whatever it was that we are doing but actually, depending on your experience of the perimenopause, it will have a different impact. So, for example, you might find that your energy levels weren’t where they were so if you are used to being able to go out and go and carry everything on your back and do a ten day/two week hike where you stop and camp, you just might find that actually you don’t have the same energy reserves and you might find that actually you ache a little bit more. So as oestrogen lowers our joints and muscles can be impacted by joint pain, so we might find that we need a little bit more cushioning than a camping mat. But, at the same time, it is really powerful for us to keep moving. So we don’t want to give ourselves an excuse to not do anything but, if you are an outdoor adventuring type, understanding yourself is really powerful and noticing, having tracked your cycle, the ebb and flow of energy and also noticing that actually you might need a little bit more recovery time at the end. You might need a little bit more recovery time and you might need to train more than you did beforehand, we were used to, when we were young when I would just go out the door and go for a run and come back and get on with the rest of the day. But actually, I know if I don’t pay a little bit of attention to my hips before I run and if I am not paying attention to my posture I am just going to pay for a little bit the next day. So there is the sense of knowing yourself and tuning into your needs. I think we should all be doing that anyway but we need it a little bit more in perimenopause because there will be an impact on our energy and our sleep.  

HOLLY: The repercussions are bigger if you don’t pay attention.

LESLEY: The repercussions are bigger and we are a bit more stress sensitive as I said, there is this cortisol/oestrogen play off that happens and we are just a little bit more sensitive to stress and we are a little bit more sensitive to blood sugar levels as well, so you need to fuel yourself well if you are going on an adventure to make sure that actually you have got the right balance of protein and carbs and fats that is going to keep you on an even keel blood sugar wise because if your blood sugar level drops that makes you feel very, very, stressed and very, very, low, quite quickly. That is certainly something that I have had to work on and have worked on with my clients as well, to try to avoid ending up on a blood sugar rollercoaster which can exacerbate some symptoms, particularly things like hot flushes and we can find that we are a little bit more sensitive to things like caffeine and alcohol and certain food. So it is knowing yourself and paying attention.

HOLLY: So many light bulbs are going off in my head as you speak! Alcohol, I have never been a big drinker but now I pretty much have a one drink maximum.

LESLEY: Yes same here.

HOLLY: And it has to be accompanied by food or water or other things… and caffeine as well, I have gotten to the point where I very strictly have just one cup of coffee in the morning and after that everything else I drink is either decaf coffee or herbal tea, or something non-caffeinated and it really does effect me, I just feel like I don’t need that extra caffeine, I can’t handle it.

LESLEY: Do you kind of get a little bit more agitated by it? It doesn’t wake you up, it makes you agitated? And alcohol we don’t process it as well. Again this is not every woman, every woman is different and individual. Alcohol if I have a glass of wine it sends me to sleep and I feel a bit ill but also the next day I will feel quite groggy and it is like if you can still drink a glass or two of wine you might find if you are struggling with insomnia it will be guaranteed to wake you up between three and four in the morning that night after you have had a drink as your liver goes through its detoxification process, I think it just releases a little bit more sugar into your blood stream and it wakes you up and it is very hard to settle back down into sleep again. Again, not all women, everybody is different but it definitely has an impact on sleep patterns and I think that is something that is helpful to prioritise in perimenopause, good quality sleep.

HOLLY: Absolutely, yeah. So how else do we need to adjust our adventures so that we are not overdoing it or causing more stress?

LESLEY: I think I said knowing yourself and knowing your energy levels and keeping your blood sugars balanced and knowing where the sensitivity might be and then I think there is an element of going, who is this adventure for? Is it for me or is it for whomever I am with because I have always done it. I think we get to this point in our lives where our adventures change, what we want to do, what fills our cup, what lights us up, what gives us purpose can change. So tuning into that is really important and really powerful and I think we can use these adventures, whether it is a walk in the woods or whether it is something that is a bigger, grander, adventure as an opportunity to make sure that we are living kind of on purpose in our lives. I have taken it from that.

HOLLY: I feel like, at the time I am going through perimenopause, I am also probably going through a midlife crisis. About a year ago, I realised that I am probably about half way through my life and there are so many things I want to do and I don’t have time to do it all and so [I start thinking] I have to do it, I have to do all the things and so I have this part of my brain that is kind of scrambling to sign up for all the races and do this and do that because time is running out! So it is really hard to slow down and rest and relax when that part of my brain is like, do the things. {laughing}

LESLEY: But that is a brilliant realisation, we are halfway done, we are halfway through our lives, but we are only halfway through our lives, which is amazing. If you reflect back and all of the things, the experiences we have had and the achievements through our lives, I don’t think we do that enough, to go well done me look at all the things I have done and I have got another 30/40/50 years in front of me. So how amazing is that? How do I make sure that I use them optimally? I look at my parents and kind of their peers and I see a real variety, those who have retired and just seem to have got old and ..boring? I suppose. But have kind of limited what they are doing and I think it has limited their ages. And others who have just carried on having adventures but they have just changed, so they might travel in a slightly different way or they might change the kind of adventures. This incredible woman I met at a running event and she does a 100 mile race every year, a 100 mile or a 100k every year and she says that she just anticipates that she will gradually start further and further back. So that she will carry on going and carry on signing up to races, but because in her mind she is going to carry on doing that until she is in her 80s, it means that she continues to work on her physical well-being right now, so she is not giving up.

I think that it is brilliant that you have got all of these races that you want to do. I think that is superb because it makes you keep thinking about, well, how can I stay fit enough to do that? But also to check in and go, is it for me or just another medal on the wall? Am I going to enjoy this? My running has changed in the last couple of years, I kept getting injured and it kept really frustrating me and then there were things like falling down and making a massive hole in my knee and you know, not just muscular but actually being sewn back up again and because it kept taking my training back to what felt like the beginning I started to reshape how I thought about the running and to use it as connection time with my body, with nature, with the seasons, with moving, and to slightly take away any pressure that I was putting on myself to go further or faster and just to come back to just loving it. Because one of the things about races and distance racing is that we are more stress sensitive and so running, going for a couple of hours for a run where you are pushing it, if you are already quite stressed or you have got some kind of cortisol dis-regulation then you are going to raise your levels of cortisol by going for that long run. So there is a school of thought that says in the perimenopause years that you do less of the long distance work and more of the lifting and strengthening – mountain climbing for example. I think that anything that involves a hill counts as strength training – in my book!

HOLLY: Thank you for that tip!

LESLEY: But then post-menopause you can go back to them distances again but this again is so much about the individual as well. But if you are very stressed, if you are burning the candle at both ends and if you are using a two-hour training run at the weekend as your way of kind of downloading and of feeling better then it might not be ideal, because you are more stressed and the high levels of cortisol have a knock on impact on various aspects of our digestion, our menstrual cycle and even on our bone density and it is not necessary a good place to be. It doesn’t mean that you stop doing it, you might just relate to it in a slightly different ways for a few years, and it is down to the individual.

HOLLY: I think this is very timely for me to hear personally because I have been really getting into ultras lately. So I am at the point, how far can I go? I have got a 100k this weekend and the next thing is I want to go for a 100 miles and it is like really exciting and my husband and I are watching non-stop YouTube videos about ultras every evening {laughing}. And so we are really into this and obviously he doesn’t have the same hormonal changes that I have. But I have been aware lately, the running makes me feel good, I am enjoying it, but I am starting to crave something that I don’t do, which is meditation. And it is like, it is something that keeps popping into my awareness, I should start meditating, I should start doing breath work, and I think that is because my body probably needs that to calm the cortisol because I am doing a lot of stressful things in my life. Life in general is stressful because of Covid and lockdowns and the weird stuff that we have been doing for the last year and then with ultras on top of that, so it is like, stress, stress, stress, stress, stress, and I think I need to find the ways to kind of balance that through meditation, breath work, something like that.

LESLEY: I think meditation is powerful, really, really, powerful and a great way, particularly for ultras and the breath work of taking yourself back into that parasympathetic nervous system, you know how we have our autonomic nervous system and parasympathetic, so that rest and digest phase and that is the phase in which our body can rest and repair itself, in which we digest our food properly, we just feel much better and it is very beneficial to our mental health and overall balance to be there. So if you are doing lots of training for ultras and it is brilliant, I love that you do that with your husband as well, because that is kind of so important to have that sense of connection and adventure and purpose. But there probably does need to be a little bit of a balance there and I really notice the difference in finding, even if it is five minutes, to just do some deep breathing, to listen to a guided meditation that depends on where I am in my headspace. But back in my late 30s when my son wasn’t sleeping it was meditation that massively helped me get through and it is where I always go back to when I can feel myself staying a little bit more in that stressful state.

HOLLY: I think I need to remind myself that it could be five minutes, it doesn’t have to be a half an hour of meditation.

LESLEY: No I think that is absolutely key. I use the insight timer app, which is free, or you can just set a timer with some background music for five minutes. If I don’t manage anything else that day then that’s what I will do, just before bed, just as that peaceful downtime. So I think it is very, very, valuable and comes up in a lot of the research around women and stress and perimenopause is that the benefits of mindfulness, of staying in the present, particularly if you are feeling very anxious which can be a side effect of hormone change then meditation can be really beneficial because if you are anxious all the time then you are always in fight or flight and if you can find ways of switching yourself and know that state of calm is accessible, that can be hugely beneficial.

HOLLY: It is funny because you are talking about the parasympathetic nervous system and that seems to be coming up as a topic of conversation with so many people these days. It is like we are all starting to learn about this and learn about this as a need to tap into this and calm down.

LESLEY: Yeah, there are a few people that I follow on Instagram who are all about rest and about the idea of creating a rest based lifestyle. Rather than how we think about it, there is always something to do, literally always something to do, if you run your own business or if you have got a job, if you have a family, or if you have got a passion like ultras, there is literally no time where you sit down and think, oh I haven’t got anything to do now. So there is always something to do, there is a house to clean, there are weeds to be pulled, all sorts of things, but, actually, if you build the rest in first everything else functions better and meditation is one form of rest, but some people find that really hard. One of my ways to meditate is a walk in the woods, so with no agenda, with no speed, I have kind of got a very wild woodland behind where I live and you can quite easily get lost because there aren’t many paths and fight your way through the undergrowth, but you are never very far from the next field either. But you can’t walk fast, it can’t be somewhere where you go for a stride, there will be something to fall over! But sometimes what I need is to sit down and be still and sometimes it’s about that movement, that mindful movement through nature and connecting back in with myself. Or it could be, somebody was mentioning to me, oh they use those colouring books, or crafting, those things can count as rest, as long as there isn’t necessarily a, ‘oh I have to do this’, and you get completely absorbed but in a restful, clear thinking state. But yes, parasympathetic, we need that difference, to move from sympathetic to parasympathetic and back again easily and we can kind of get a little bit stuck in sympathetic mode in our 40s for many reasons including the hormone change of perimenopause.

HOLLY: I think sometimes what I need to do is to create a menu of different things I need to do to get into the parasympathetic. I just did a podcast, it is going to go live a couple of weeks before this one, about this woman who considers sea swimming to be her form of mediation and mindfulness and so she swims in the sea for ten/fifteen minutes. Yeah.

LESLEY: I just started doing that this year actually.

HOLLY: Oh did you? Tell me more.

LESLEY: In January, so I felt like I needed something else and I love the cold swimming and so I started in January when the water was four degrees. You went in for four minutes and that was it, no wetsuit just in my swimming costume, and it felt amazing, absolutely incredible. And I now swim a mile in that same lake, but it is much warmer now so I can stay in for longer. It became a reset button, it became one of the tools. I have a toolbox or me, and again how I work with my clients, they walk away with a toolbox, but I have one for me and sometimes as we said it is not meditation, sometimes it is the walk and sometimes it is the swim. With the cold water swimming there is again some really interesting research around cold and the benefits to the immune system and the benefits to mood and anxiety and depression, benefits for metabolism, benefits for hormones to a certain extent as well. I think some of it is about this shock of going into cold water makes you go into that sympathetic nervous system to fight or flight but once you are there and you are swimming and you have calmed down, then you move back into parasympathetic, but you are still in the same state. So it is a bet like exercising a muscle by shock and then calm, then you are able to make that transition a little bit better. There is, I don’t know if you have come across the vagal nerve and poly vagal theory as well.

HOLLY: Yes.

LESLEY: And cold water is one of the things that comes up in that as well.

HOLLY: Do you mind talking a little bit more about the vagal nerve, because that is another thing that keeps coming up in conversation with people, but I don’t know enough about it to explain to listeners.

LESLEY: Well, I will do my best because it is something that I have started getting interested in but by no means feel like I truly understand it. The vagal nerve kind of comes from the brain stem and then it comes down through the body and one of the things about it, there are nerve connections into most of the major organs along this vagal nerve and that there seems to be like a two way flow, up and down this vagal nerve and there are two or maybe three branches to it (I am losing myself now!). The thing I know about it is that it is being able to stimulate it is very powerful for our overall health, it is like a really ancient way of… I can’t put it into words properly! But a really ancient way of calming ourselves down and things that can help with vagal nerve are things like humming and singing, movement, cold water, meditation, and it is thought that that vagal nerve tone can really help with things like digestion as well because there are connections into the gut, as well as into the kidneys, liver, everywhere. It is like a little bit of a… a way of measuring health is about signalling and I don’t think I have done a very good job there at all.

HOLLY: No I think that is a good introduction and it explains it enough to kind of if you want to know more about the science look it up, but it gives you lots of ideas about why it is useful.

LESLEY: Polyvagal theory – there are lots of useful videos on YouTube and some really good books out there. Stephen Porges is the guy whose name is out there when it comes to Polyvagal Theory. And what is interesting is that it comes into so much of my reading at the moment, so whether I am looking at hormones, or whether I am looking at trauma, whether I am looking at fitness, understanding the vagus nerve and understanding how we can stimulate and work with that vagal tone seems to be really powerful. So cold water swimming is probably the one that I have taken on board the most but deep breathing/breath work, also, because it goes down through he diaphragm. It is really interesting.

HOLLY: So many things we can do to regulate.

LESLEY: And a lot of them are ancient, if you think about yoga, you think about oral religions that singing and chanting have been a part of those for millennia and that is a way of calming us all down and connecting us which is really powerful as well.

HOLLY: Is there anything that we need to know about how to manage our adventures with perimenopause?

LESLEY: I think it is that self-awareness and being aware of stress is really key. And also understanding, so tracking things, so undemanding the impact so that you don’t end up blaming yourself as well. You might find that actually for a while your running time seems to go backwards or that your recovery time is much longer and that could be partly down to managing that stress level and actually understanding and spending more time in that parasympathetic nervous system both before and after an event, could help with that balance.  

HOLLY: That makes sense.

LESLEY: If you are doing ultras to understand how you feel before and afterwards and whether it is effecting your stress levels in a negative way and thinking about how you approach that, even if it is just for a few years, but to not let it stop you, not let it stop you doing anything but to think about how to do it well.

HOLLY: How to do it differently, differently for me as to how you have done it before.

LESLEY: Exactly and think about who you are evolving into. I think about perimenopause as a little bit of a caterpillar phase, going back into a cocoon again and so some things, when you come out of that cocoon you are going to be different but in a good way.

HOLLY: So what happens after perimenopause and menopause? I have talked to a couple of women who are athletes and are beyond the menopause and they seem to be really thriving physically.

LESLEY: Yes, by the time we get beyond that, if you think about it we are a bit more on a par with men to a certain extent because we are no longer cycling and so we are no longer having the ebb and flow of the menstrual cycle, I mean our testosterone levels might be lower but without that cycle you can keep going in a different way. And I know that keeping going with our adventures is really important because we want to maintain our bone density, maintain our muscle mass, because that has a longterm health implication and there is a certain amount of leaving the old you behind because you are post menopausal version of you. It doesn’t mean that you have to stop doing things but it might mean that you need to pay attention to, so if your joints aren’t as well protected by the kind of juicy effects of oestrogen it might be that adding in Pilates or yoga into a running schedule is going to be more important than it used to be. Something that helps with that flexibility. But otherwise you can do just as well, absolutely.

HOLLY: How exciting!

LESLEY: You can thrive! You can be running ultras into your 80s. 

HOLLY: I know I love it when I see older women and men in these videos that we are watching of people running ultras, because it is like wow, I can keep doing this.

LESLEY: Yes and I think that is a brilliant aspiration, to say, yes I can keep going.

HOLLY: Yay!

LESLEY: But making your wellbeing a priority right now and eating well for maintaining that kind of stamina, but yes, good luck to you.

HOLLY: You too. So tell us about Wild Country Woman?

LESLEY: So Wild Country Woman is a women’s health and fitness business and I initially started working with kids and then moved into working with women because that’s actually where I prefer to be. I started by running courses and outdoor fitness classes and they were always about falling in love with movement and running. So I tended not to have a focus on times, not to focus on particular numbers-driven goals because women are so often put off movement and sport. Not all women, but so many are put off by that competitive element by having a really strong dialogue that, I’m no good at this to end up just not doing anything, not doing any sport, or feeling like exercise is only to lose weight or for a specific goal. Whereas exercise is for life.

HOLLY: It is for health.

LESLEY: It is for health, it is life-enhancing and it is life-lengthening. So yes, this idea of bringing connection and community and a love of being outdoors in together into one business, one thing, so that a woman could feel at home and feel part of a community. So I run outdoor sessions and obviously some of those were on zoom for quite a while during lockdowns and I still run outdoor fitness sessions but on zoom, so I do it in my garden.

HOLLY: Lovely!

LESLEY: And I run day retreats that are called Wildly Well Woman, and they tend to be about cycles and hormones and connecting to nature and I also do 1:1 perimenopause coaching, so I have a framework that I use that is about bringing and integrating lessons from nature and our cycles into understanding ourselves well and then living wildly well through the menopause, which is really, really, powerful and fun stuff too. I do have, if anyone wants to know a little bit more about menopause, I do have a free download on my website, WildCountryWoman.com and that gives an overview as well as resources and books that might be useful to read.

HOLLY: Oh perfect! So where can people find you online?

LESLEY: So on Instagram I am LesleyWaldronHealthCoach and I am on LinkedIn or you can find me at WildCountryWoman.com. I have a facebook group called Wild Country Women and that’s about sharing wisdom and I bring in people whose wisdom I think women should know about. So sometimes it is about nutrition and fitness and sometimes it is about motherhood and sometimes it is about creating visions for our future and that’s a really lovely place to hang out.

HOLLY: Lovely, great! Thank you so much for joining me today.

LESLEY: Thank you so much for inviting me, I have loved our conversation!

HOLLY: Me too and it gives me hope for the future and future adventures.

LESLEY: There is no need to stop your adventures that’s for sure.

HOLLY: That’s good to know, thank you.

LESLEY: Thank you.