Verified by 
The last time I ran a marathon—and probably the last time I will run a marathon—I staggered across the finish line. A few hours later I got my period. Maybe that explained my time, nearly an hour slower than I had hoped. My marathon-menstruation debacle was something I never thought I’d write about or care to think about. That was 12 years ago.
A few weeks ago, I heard that Olympiad Fu Yuanhi announced to the world that her menstrual cramps threw off her swimming times. Her remarks, one year after a similar it’s-my-period’s-fault comment by British tennis player Heather Watson, seems to have launched a whole new perspective on women’s hormones and sports.
The simple question, one that has plagued women for generations, is whether menstruation impacts athletic prowess. A 2011 study of rowers found no difference in performance when they tracked participants’ menstrual cycles with oxygen uptake, power output and other variables that impact physical abilities. But other studies have shown just the opposite.
The more complicated question is this: If menstruation does have an impact, then which hormones are doing what? One study suggested that high levels of estrogen during the first half of the menstrual cycle may make women more vulnerable to muscle tears. Or maybe it’s not muscles but the metabolism. Other researchers wonder whether hormone fluctuations altered the way women metabolize carbohydrates—and that could alter energy stores resulting in underwhelming results during some times of the month.
In the first half of the 20th century, getting your period was reason to avoid sports altogether. (Having a menstrual cycle was also considered a valid reason to avoid higher education, but that’s another story.) in a nutshell: physical or mental exertion, according to the medical dogma of the time, was considered hazardous to the baby-making process. All this pseudo-scientific advice was based on hunches, that is not on any medical information, as historian Lara Freidenfelds, Ph.D explained in her brilliant book, Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America. A bit of walking during your period was okay, but women were warned against doing any activity that sparked too much excitement and nothing that could “jiggle” the uterus. Swimming pools were considered too cold. Jumping was considered too, well, jumpy.
Advice like that was sure to keep any budding female athlete from discussing her monthly fluctuations.
The good news is that today’s openness about menstruation is the impetus for research. According to an article in last week’s New York Times, Northwestern researcher Lynn Rogers is launching studies to investigate precisely how fluctuations in estrogen and progesterone (the hormones that go up and down during the menstrual cycle) may impact athletic performance.
I’d like to think that my hormones were to blame for my shoddy run.
I really did feel bloated and kind of awful from start to finish. But I think it had more to do with the fact that I just didn’t train enough. I had four little kids at the time and I spent more time watching them run around soccer fields than getting out for my own runs.
Regardless of my own excuses, it was refreshing to hear Fu Yuanhi’s frank discussion of her period and how it is spurring the kind of studies that will help women succeed, rather than keep us on the sidelines.
