This year I joined a marathon training group. To my disappointment there were no women in the team, the ladies group was focusing on the 10 km racing. But it was ok, the guys in the group were fun to hang around. In mid May the coach gave us the training plan and some instructions about the pacing of each workout, after that off we went with the training.

The first month was ok, but by the second month of training I was already struggling. I was no newbie to marathon training, I had completed training plans of my own designed before, I had run seven marathons and made it to a best time of 3:41:27 hours. The workouts the coach gave us were familiar to me, I had certainly completed similar ones before. Where was my problem then? I was struggling because I could not recover fast enough to be ready for the Tuesdays’ interval runs on the track and/or the Thursdays’ tempo runs! Some weeks were ok but others I could not hit the right pace. When I asked around about how everyone was doing, I found that my fellow marathon companions were also tired but could complete all the workouts in the plan anyway. 

Weeks were passing and my frustration was getting bigger. The coach told me to keep it easy, to either do less repetitions or to slow down. But I am a stubborn woman dreaming to run a marathon in 3.5 hours, so I was reluctant to follow the coach’s advice. I started to do some research here and there trying to understand what I was going through, and that’s how I learnt that women are not small men. Women should not follow generic training plans that were designed and tested by men for men.

Exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist, Dr. Stacy Sims, has the leading words on this topic. She says wake up girl! Learn that the large majority of exercise physiology research has been performed exclusively on male populations. Even until the 80’s, it was widely assumed the physiological responses of men were the same in women. Thus training, nutrition, and recovery strategies have been generalised to women without thought to viability of this generalisation.

Women are not small men! There are physiological differences between women and men, starting from body size, muscle mass, ratio of muscle to body fat, among others. But the most important difference is the fact that women follow a hormone cycle.

At the beginning of my period, I am in the low hormone phase, that it’s when I can access carbohydrates, hit high intensity workouts with no issues and I even require less time for recovery. As estrogen goes a little bit up for ovulation I feel bulletproof, and I am happy on the track running hard VO2 efforts. After that I go into the high hormone phase where estrogen is inhibiting carbohydrate utilisations, so I can’t quite hit high intensities. Also progesterone increases core temperature and I feel more fatigue.

Understanding women physiology means that there will be days when I will be the super star on the track, and days when I will be impeded from performance. However, by knowing this I can put in my training plan specific nutrition practices and recovery practices to perform better. 

So yes, women are not small men, women have periods, do not ignore this fact. Let’s work with our physiology to improve our performance!

Camila