Stacy T. Sims PhD - Next Level: Your Guide to Kicking Ass, Feeling Great, and Crushing Goals Through Menopause and Beyond

Selene Yeager

For me, the journey to writing this book started with, well, myself.

When I was 43, menopause was the last thing on my mind. I had just come off a jam-packed race season and was gearing up for a big year that would include two massive international bike races, among other huge fitness goals. In addition to all that, I was helping Dr. Stacy Sims write ROAR: How to Match Your Food and Fitness to Your Unique Female Physiology for Optimum Performance, Great Health, and a Strong, Lean Body for Life, a science-based training guide for female athletes. I had honestly never felt better or stronger in my life. ROAR was published in 2016, when I was 47, and I was still stage racing and feeling pretty goodbut I had stopped sleeping like the dead the way I used to. Instead, Id wake up at 3 a.m. in a pool of sweat with panicky racing thoughts. I chalked it up to work-life stress. My daughter was entering her teen years. Life was getting hectic.

Two years later I looked in the mirror one day and could barely recognize the image staring back. Id always been a super-muscular woman. Those muscles seemed to have diminished overnight. Id gained fat in places where Id never had it. My power was down. I felt sluggish and slow. My periods, which had always been like clockwork, were now all over the map. It was pretty clear at this point what was happening: menopause, or more specifically, perimenopause (but well get into those details later).

Id hit it head on. For any cyclist in the crowd who has ever endo-edgone sailing ass over teakettle, or end over end, when the back wheel of your bike flips over the front, sending you headfirst like a spear to the groundit was a bit like that.

There were the body composition changes and night sweats. I was now having some hot flashes and mood swings as well. Hills that were no big deal in 20 years of cranking up them felt like someone had turned up the volume on gravity. Id always recovered from hard workouts and races relatively quickly. Now I fell flat when Id usually be bouncing back.

Even my vagina hurt sometimes. (Seriously, well get into that in a bit too.) Once confident and bold, I was feeling the ground shift beneath my feet, like running on an off-camber trail where one slip will send you sliding downhill in a hurry.

Worse, nothing I did seemed to help. I doubled down on going to the gym. I ate less. I did more yoga. Nada. I was still stuck. Im a realist. I accept that you dont just get fitter and faster till you die. Of course body composition is going to change over the years. But this seemed sudden and intractable.

Damn. Maybe all that shit about being over the hill is true. Maybe I am done. My head swam back into that sea of negativity, through all the stuff Id heard other women say over the years: You gain weight no matter what you do. Its impossible to get that muscle back. Nothing helps.

That first book I wrote with Stacy, ROAR, had normalized training with your hormones instead of just trying to pretend they dont exist. It had included a chapter on menopause, but I needed more information. So I started scouring the internet for resources for active women going through their menopausal years. It was like swimming through a sea of negativity, searching for a flotation device to keep from going under. Everything out there made it sound like the most awful time of life imaginable. The advice that did address menopause in a meaningful way wasnt directed at usactive women wanting to stay on top of our gamebut mainly at sedentary women. Thats because the majority of menopause research is done on sedentary women, who find themselves suddenly at higher risk for heart attacks and other metabolic disease. So the only advice I found was simply eat right and exercise.

Okay. Got that. And? There were clearly some gaping holes to fill. So I emailed Stacy. I went on and on, stress-gushing about all the changes Id been experiencing, seemingly out of the blue. As is her way, she was completely unfazed. She told me about adaptogens with long names that I had to Google a bunch of times before finally getting the spelling right. She told me to dial back all the sets and reps Id been doing in the gym and to start lifting heavy sh*t. She informed me that my usual endurance training was fine, but that now, because I was doing more long endurance rides instead of short, hard events, my body was missing the stimulation it needed to prevent the metabolic slippery slope I was on. I needed to reduce the volume and cue up the sprinting, stay out of those gray kinda hard, kinda not so hard training zones, and make sure I gave it my all and then went really easy to recover.

I took all this advice to heart. I started putting schisandra powder in my coffee, incorporated super-short sprint work into my training, stimulated my muscles with heavy weights, and took other advice youll find in this book. And it worked. In 2019, at 50 years of age, I won Iron Crossan arduous mixed-terrain bike race Id won for the first time 10 years before. I wasnt as fast as I was a decade earlier, but my deeper understanding of how to work with my changing physiology enabled me to feel good and finish strong.

More importantly, I got my mojo back. I felt confident that I could continue challenging myself, growing inside and out, and putting more successful days ahead of me rather than relegating them all to the rearview mirror.

And Stacy and I had the topic for our next book.