It's about you joggers, who go round and round and round and round

What we can learn from female runners about life, progress and productivity

The third workshop in my Feminist Voice writing course - about writing the lives of women - is now available for purchase. This is the workshop that I WISH I had been able to access myself, twenty odd years ago, when I first started researching and writing about women’s lives. It contains a wealth of the information and techniques I’ve gleaned during my writing career, about where to look when you’re researching women’s lives, past and present; and ways to negotiate gaps and silences in the historical record. If you’d like to buy this individual workshop (only £30, or £15 if you’re an annual/founding/sisterhood subscriber), or to purchase the whole course of six workshops (£150, or £75 for the above paid subscribers), you can do so by clicking on the below buttons. For more information about the course, please click this link.

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Substack service at Small Revolutions, Every Day HQ has been slow this week - for which I apologise - because I’ve been preparing for, running, and recovering from an event called Endure24, which literally consists of running in lots of small revolutions around the parkland of a stately home. And participating in the event, which fell at the worst possible time in my menstrual cycle, made me realise the extent to which progress in running - and arguably all forms of progress in our lives - tend to be cyclical; but how we often berate ourselves with the doomed fantasy of constant linear improvement.

The concept of Endure24 is that there’s an 8km/5mile undulating course through the grounds of a stately home, and participants run that course as many times as they can or want within a 24-hour (well, 24 hours, 59 mins, 59 seconds) period. Some runners did it in teams, taking it in turns to run laps, like a relay race. Others did it in pairs, swapping with one another over the course of the event. And others - including myself - did it solo. There was an Event Village at the Start/Finish point, with various food and drink stalls, a DJ, and toilets; and you could go back to your car or tent whenever you wanted, as long as you re-entered the course at the point you left it. There was a fun, festival-like atmosphere, with a massive bar, and thousands of runners and supporters milling around in fancy dress.

Endure24 was my first time running an event consisting of identical short laps. Influenced by Oliver Burkeman’s suggestion of having in mind a number of different possible outcomes - ranging from acceptable to out-of-this-world - to ward off disappointment if I didn’t attain my Number One goal, I went into the event with four potential scenarios in mind:

• Best best best possible case scenario: I manage 100 miles in just-under-24 hours.

• Over-the-moon scenario: I run 50 miles in under 12 hours, setting a new personal best, and, for the first time in 6 years of trying, going under the 12-hour mark for that distance.

• Happy scenario: I run 50 miles in over 12 hours, which is longer mileage than I’ve run since last summer.

• Acceptable scenario: I don’t manage 50 miles, but have a nice time doing something new.

Although I’ve been running and exercising consistently, I haven’t done many long runs this year, partly because of the thyroid- and vitamin deficiency-related exhaustion I’ve been experiencing since last autumn. So I knew that I hadn’t done the work to deserve reaching 100 miles and that, for it to be a possibility, all the stars would have to align in some sort of flukey magic.

Once I started running, at midday on Saturday, I realised that those stars were definitely not lining up. No flukey magic for me. It was HOT - around 27 degrees - and about 60% of the course was very exposed, along hard white chalk paths traversing open stretches of grassland. More of an issue were the 40mph winds which, along one track, were so strong that it was an effort to even walk forward, let alone run. But the biggest hindrance was taking place inside my own body.

Now aged 45, I’ve been lucky to have a menstruating life that, since my early teens, has been relatively pain-free and straightforward. I have a fairly regular 28-day cycle, and short and light periods. However, the week before my period begins, my sports watch shows that my body temperature and heart rate are high and my heart-rate variability decreases. I bloat with water retention, eat more than usual, become constipated, and I weigh heavier on the bathroom scales. I sleep less well and recover from exercise much more slowly, and my breasts swell and become hard and achey. These symptoms become most intense on the day before my period starts, and are accompanied by a crashing headache, nausea and intense irritability. As my female readers will know, all of this is completely typical of what happens to women’s bodies in what is known as the ‘late luteal phase’ of the menstrual cycle, when levels of progesterone and oestrogen crash after an earlier rise. On the final day of my menstrual cycle, the day before my period begins, I usually try not to wear a bra, because the underwiring hurts my breasts too much, and I take it easy, downing a couple of Solpadeine and getting an early night. However, on this occasion, none of that was possible because it was the day on which Endure24 fell.

On the morning of the race, my watch duly warned me that I had slept badly; that my ‘body battery’ had barely recharged from the previous day; that my heart rate was unusually high, and that I should refrain from exercising and take a rest day. Hmmm. Instead, I crammed my hard breasts into the largest size of sports bra that I own, and took a Solpadeine to quell the headache that was lurking around my forehead. Once the klaxon sounded at midday, and the race began, I swiftly realised that I wouldn’t be able to ‘mind-over-matter’ myself out of how bad I felt. My heart rate soared in the heat, and the water and electrolytes I drank were soon pushed out of my body by my swollen uterus pressing on my bladder. Thank the GODDESS for TENA pads and portaloos. The worst symptoms, though, were the nausea, which made it difficult to eat, and the ABSOLUTE RAGE against all fellow humans, particularly noisy ones. This was an unfortunate emotion to be experiencing during an event packed with thousands of runners, a blaring tannoy system, and entertainers dotted around the course, including a very loud Elvis impersonator (to whom I apologise for grimacing with open hostility every time I passed him). I couldn’t even bring myself to smile at the local schoolchildren who lined one section of the course, stretching out their palms in hope of high-fives from passing runners. I was a right miserable git.

Immersed in my discomfort, and trying my hardest to ignore everything that was going on around me, there was something strangely meditative about my Endure24 experience. I was barely aware of thinking. I just kept moving; walking the inclines of the first two kilometres, cooling off in the wooded shade of the next two kilometres, visiting the portaloos at the half-way aid station, facing the headwind between kilometres 5 and 6, and plunging down the descent of the course’s final quarter. Over and over and over again I did this, making short stops back to the tent to be given cold flasks of water and lucozade, ice lollies, strawberries and orange slices by my lovely daughters, who were crewing for me. With each lap, I grew sicker and sicker, but - keeping my heart rate slow and maintaining a steady pace, which saw me finish each lap (including rest times) in around 70 minutes - I knew I’d keep going, round and round and round, until, nearing midnight, the tenth lap was over and I’d run 50 miles in under 12 hours (11 hours 55 mins and 40 seconds), and I could stop and go to bed. The next day, my period started, and all my symptoms disappeared and I felt brilliant: the best I’ve ever felt after running 50 miles.

Me crossing the finish line. Yup, that final lap really hurt. (Photo by Sportograf)

There’s something fitting about how it was during a cyclical race that I experienced, more intensely than ever before, how women’s running can be so profoundly shaped by our menstrual cycles. When my mother was going through menopause, I remember her making a comment about how strange it felt to not have a life shaped by cycles any more, and since Endure24, I’ve been thinking a lot about the psychological differences between experiencing life as a cyclical versus a linear event.

I think this distinction particularly characterises experiences and expectations of progress and productivity. What I mean, is that - taking running as an example - when I’m training hard and consistently, I still find that my progress is far from linear. I get a little bit faster and fitter for three weeks in a row and I feel like I’m making a massive stride forwards; but then, for that late luteal fourth week, everything feels so much more exhausting again, and it feels like I’m taking two steps back. And then the whole thing begins again. Over the very long term, there is discernible improvement (as long as I keep up my training) - but there are lots of troughs along the way. However, despite the fact that this cyclical nature of progress has been my experience for my whole menstruating life, I’ve realised that I still cling onto a fantasy that I should be improving in a constant, linear way, with no troughs or setbacks, ever. On the basis of that fantasy, I berate myself during the late luteal week when the progress temporarily stops.

Where does the fantasy that we should continually be improving come from? In the eighteenth century, the philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet wrote about the idea of ‘perfectibility’, the notion that humanity has the potential to attain continual progress towards perfection in terms of faculties, powers, achievements, and morals. ‘The progress of this perfectibility,’ he wrote, ‘has no other limits than the duration of the globe...This progress will doubtless vary in speed, but it will never be reversed.’ The value placed on constant striving was cemented in the idea of the Protestant work ethic, and also in what Marxist scholars Paul Sweezy, Fred Magdoff, and John Foster term the ‘growth imperative’ of capitalism: the notion that the capitalist economic system depends for its survival on the continual accumulation of capital. These imperatives shape our individual psyches by making many of us feel that our value, as humans, lies in what business bloggers call a ‘continual improvement process’. Technologies of quantification - the plethora of apps and devices to monitor and chart every aspect of our lives - allow us to assess whether we’re improving, and whether we’re improving swiftly enough, to a more minute degree than at any point in history. In my experience, it can be hard to feel valuable as a person if we’re simply treading water or even regressing. Like, what is the point of such a life?

But continual improvement is a pernicious fantasy. Huskies are the only mammal whose bodies are capable of recovering and rebuilding whilst still moving. Everyone else has to regularly stop and rest in order to recover enough to resume forward motion. This rest can be voluntary - we can schedule regular slots - or it can be compelled, when we’re forced to stop moving through exhaustion and burnout.

These periods of rest, in which progress temporarily halts or reverses, are non-negotiable. Anyone who’s ever been on a diet knows that the fantasy of continual ‘improvement’ is always impeded by periods in which, even though calorific intake may continue to be limited, the weight temporarily plateaus and the body conserves its resources. In the 1840s, workers started agitating for weekly half-days off work (which gradually expanded into two-day ‘week-ends’), to allow them to recover from their ‘humdrum toil’, and be able to return with renewed energy the following day. The late-eighteenth-century philosopher Thomas Malthus did not believe that economic perfectibility and continual growth were possible. He brought the relentless optimism of the Enlightenment to a close by pointing out that there are always limits placed on growth by the finite nature of natural resources: population cannot keep increasing indefinitely, because earth cannot sustain an unlimited number of people, and so famine and wars are natural regulatory mechanisms that allow the earth and everyone on it to recover.

Even male athletes abandoned the fantasy of continual improvement in the early twentieth century, and started adopting cyclical training programmes mandating regular periods of rest. Essentially, these programmes mimicked the menstrual cycles of their female counterparts. Women know that one week out of every four needs to be spent doing different types of athletic work than during the previous three - doing slower runs, recovering and temporarily setting to one side the ambition to improve - because our bodies enforce it upon us with pre-menstrual symptoms. It was only with the advent of sports periodisation, and macro- meso- and micro-cycles, that male athletes caught up with what women have always known. Statistically, male runners are still more prone today than women to be in thrall to the fantasy of linear progress: to not take enough rest, to over-train, and to pace themselves badly in long-distance events (setting off too fast, and being unable to maintain it). In 2023, the ultra-runner Meg Mackenzie spoke to me for an interview for On Running’s website, and she eloquently described how running

cannot be linear. You can’t just keep chasing the same thing over over and over again, and expecting to get better and better at it. That’s something that’s quite lost in the sporting world. The competitive environment is made for for a linear progression. And when there’s a blip, it’s like everyone’s saying, ‘What happened? Why are you not progressing? It’s a year down the line. You should be better than you were.’ But I think women’s natures and lives are so cyclical and so circular that I imagine it like a spiral, and we keep growing outwards, and not necessarily getting better in the linear sense. But being different: an enlarging spiral.

In this light, it is rather ironic that sports scientists only started consciously acknowledging the way that women’s menstrual cycles shape our athletic aptitudes in the 1990s, and that, still, the majority of trainers and coaches unwittingly impose onto female athletes training schedules that do not map onto our cyclical hormonal fluctuations (ie. in which the scheduled rest week doesn’t coincide with our late luteal period). That is to say that, over time, sports scientists, coaches and trainers of male athletes have unwittingly come to a realisation that women’s cycles hold the key to successful training; but, until recently, this hasn’t led to any conscious recognition or resources being bestowed on the science of women’s sport and training.

The cyclical nature of life and progress applies, inescapably, to everyone and everything (although perhaps less so to huskies). Have men been more prone to ignoring this, and pressing for the fantasy of continual linear progress in fields such as productivity, business, economic growth and self-improvement, because they do not have women’s monthly reminders in which the need for regular rest and recovery is made undeniable? How do we re-imagine what a meaningful life might look like, if we jettison the misguided concept of continuous improvement? This doesn’t mean getting rid of the idea of all progress, but simply of the notion that progress should be continual and relentless.

I love Meg Mackenzie’s image of life lived as an enlarging spiral in which, with each cycle, we stretch ourselves, step slightly outside of our comfort zones, and do different things, expanding ourselves with new experiences, instead of trying to retread old ground over and over again, each time faster and stronger. One of my daughters was bought a Spirograph by her godfather (who accompanied us to Endure24), and this image of life as an enlarging spiral makes me think of her drawings when she shifts the inner cog one tooth to the right, or the pencil one hole to the left, to build up pictures of increasing complexity, richness and beauty. Perhaps that’s a more interesting metaphor for change over time than the ambition that each cycle, each lap, will be completed faster and better than its forerunners, ad infinitum.