Eat. Sweat. Play

by Anna Kessel

  I need to ask a female athlete if this is folklore, or whether there’s any truth at all in it. But how many sportswomen are going to talk to a journalist about their sex lives? Hmm. If there’s one woman you can ask anything it’s Kelly Sotherton, Olympic bronze-medal-winning heptathlete and famous for having bold opinions. I relay the anonymous sprinter’s story to Kelly and she laughs her head off. ‘Those sprinters are lying!’ she roars. ‘Honestly! I think the media has made the Olympics out to be an orgy. People get a little bit drunk and some people might have sex, of course they do, but not everyone goes to the Olympics, gets ten condoms and uses them!’

  However Kelly does admit that sex talk is more common among athletes than we might think. She says one of her coaches used to give practical advice to the group on ensuring that sex did not get in the way of athletic performance. ‘We do have these open conversations, we talk about it down the track. If you were a fly on the wall you’d write about twenty books,’ she cackles. ‘It’s stuff like if the guy’s standing up then he’s using his legs more so he’ll be fatigued; you wouldn’t want to do that ahead of a competition, so my coach would just say which positions to avoid and that sort of thing. But I think it all depends on the person, their make-up, physiology and mindset.’

  Kelly suggests that many male athletes are less sexually active between April and September, during the outdoor competitive season, though she admits that much of this is down to superstition, rather than scientific fact. ‘If you are in the shape of your life and you’ve trained hard the only thing that’s going to be detrimental to your performance is if you’ve had no sleep. But if you’re home with your partner and you’ve done it and it’s not very long, you’re probably OK,’ she laughs. Which chimes with some of the advice doled out to national teams ahead of the recent men’s World Cup in Brazil, where French players were permitted to have sex only if they didn’t stay up all night, or the Nigerian team who were allegedly told only to have sex with their wives (because, some say, it’s the looking for sex and lack of sleep that’s the problematic part, not the act itself).

  I want to know: does the same apply to female athletes? ‘I don’t really know,’ says Kelly. ‘I think some female athletes probably would abstain a little bit before a competition. Saying that, if you told them they would throw 10m further in the javelin or one tenth of a second faster over 100m if they had sex the night before, I’m sure they would all be doing it to win a few more medals!’ One athlete who believes it definitely has an impact is Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) star Ronda Rousey. ‘For girls, it raises your testosterone,’ she says, ‘so I try to have as much sex as possible before I fight actually. Not with everybody. I don’t put out like a Craigslist ad or anything, but if I got a steady, I’m going to be like, “Yo, fight time’s coming up.”’20

  I ask Kelly, and others, if it works the other way around – if women exercise more, does it actually increase their libido? The consensus seems to be that, psychologically, working out helps women to feel more confident about their bodies, and that in turn makes them more inclined to want to have sex. It’s all about being connected to your physicality, and feeling positive about that connection.

  But what if there’s something more? I mean, what physical effect does exercise have on a woman’s body when it comes to sex, and vice versa? Scouring the Internet for solutions brought up scant evidence, until Michael mentioned in passing something he had read in The Times. Suzi Godson, the newspaper’s resident Q&A expert, answered a letter from a forty-five-year-old woman who had recently got into fitness and running marathons and discovered an increased libido. The only problem was her husband couldn’t keep up with her. Suzi cited a number of studies that show exercise for men increases their levels of testosterone and stamina in the bedroom – from as young as eighteen right through to middle age. So far, so familiar. But what interested me most about Suzi’s answer was her reference to the changes for women when they exercised. ‘A lot of fascinating studies have shown that exercise has significant sexual benefits for women,’ she wrote. ‘One study showed that female athletes have better sexual function and more efficient clitoral blood flow than healthy sedentary females — but you don’t need to be an Olympian to experience the sexual rewards of exercise.’21

  This last point is really important. If exercise can boost a woman’s sex drive then we may have stumbled on a significant breakthrough for women who are currently struggling with libido, whether through medical or hormonal conditions such as the menopause, psychosexual problems, or just being stressed out and not having the time or the energy. At a time when the world is racing towards a chemical solution in the form of the controversial pill – female Viagra – perhaps there is an easier, healthier, safer option right under our noses? After all, isn’t sex just about connecting mind to body? But in western society, where we are led by our brains all day – from work to social media and technology – we are surely in need of more ‘body time’? I know when I exercise after a period of being sedentary, I feel like my body is waking up. I suddenly remember all these parts of myself – my feet! My neck! My spine! We use our bodies all day long, of course, but we do it in a very disconnected way. I can’t help feeling that someone should be researching this.

  In recent years there has, at least, been more interest in trying to solve the ‘mystery’ of the female orgasm. Some of these studies have made incidental discoveries that relate to female athletes and physically active women. In a famous case, the American distance runner Lynn Jennings broke an age-old taboo after winning the US 10km title in 1993. Lynn reportedly attributed her victory to having had sex the night before, saying it ‘solidifies my core feeling of happiness’. A few years later the Israeli scientist Alexander Olshanietzky confirmed this notion, hitting the headlines with his conclusion that female athletes performed better at sporting events when they had orgasmed the night before. ‘We believe that a woman gets better results in sports competition after orgasm,’ he said at the time. ‘Generally, it’s true of high jumpers and runners. The more orgasms, the more chances of winning a medal. Coaches generally tell their athletes to abstain before competition. In the case of women, that’s the wrong advice.’22

  Meanwhile, in 2006, psychology professor Barry Komisaruk and sex therapist Beverley Whittle teamed up for a groundbreaking scientific experiment at Rutgers University to measure how pain thresholds were altered by vaginal self-stimulation in women. Incredibly, they found that masturbation doubled the pain threshold of women. In a subsequent study the academics went on to look at pain thresholds during childbirth and found a correlation between the baby emerging through the birth canal, around the area of the G-spot, better enabling the birth process and ultimately helping mothers to bond with their newborn babies. Spurred on, they began to study women with spinal cord injuries who had been told by doctors they would never again experience sensation from vaginal or clitoral stimulation. Whittle and Komisaruk proved this theory wrong, mapping out the pathways between female genitalia and the brain.

  What does all of this mean for athletes, or for women who exercise? It’s still pretty unclear, unfortunately. But the concept of orgasm or vaginal stimulation reducing physical pain in women is an interesting one and, if further explored, could completely change the way we talk about sex and exercise to women of all levels of physical activity. Already some running magazines and exercise publications are interpreting the research as significant to women’s physical activity – speculating that those painful long runs could be relieved by an orgasm or two. Whether that’s a true interpretation of the research or not, the developments underline why science must pursue greater knowledge of women’s bodies across the board as opposed to relying on male bodies for a default conclusion on the human race. And if exercise and sport can really boost a woman’s libido then what a brilliant, health-inducing method to adopt. Give me an aerobics class over a pill any day! Focusing on these avenues could provide the kind of research that might prove life-changin
g for women everywhere.

  Whenever we talk about sport and exercise for women, we habitually talk about girls, or young women in their twenties and thirties. But what about everyone else? Have we already given up on women over forty? Over fifty? What about women like my mum, now in her seventies? One of the most moving moments in my research was meeting Sport England CEO Jennie Price. I have to be honest and say that the idea of interviewing a CEO doesn’t usually fill me with much interest. But as Jennie sits down, Star Wars notebook in hand, there is something different about her; she has a life story to tell.

  Jennie grew up with a professional sportsman for a dad (a footballer for Wolverhampton Wanderers) but she never really played any organized team sport. In fact, she wasn’t very physically active at all until one day, in her thirties, when she was experiencing a lot of stress in her job and a male friend suggested she start going to the gym. This scenario rings true for many women, who so often only find exercise later in their lives. Ten happy years followed working out at the gym (a place she had previously been terrified of, until the young man doing the induction told her to ignore all the intimidating-looking people in Lycra: ‘They’re only really looking at themselves.’) But on relocating to a new area, Jennie suddenly found that her exercise routine went out of the window. She couldn’t find another gym that she liked, or the facilities weren’t convenient to her new life. Hers is a familiar tale to many women who so easily fall off – and then struggle to get back on – the exercise wagon. Eventually, though, Jennie discovered power walking and soon fell in love with exercising all over again.

  Until, one day, something horrible happened that threatened to shatter her confidence completely, and almost stopped her from exercising in public altogether. ‘After all those years in the gym I got very used to wrapping a cloak around me thinking no one’s looking at me,’ says Jennie. ‘So I wasn’t expecting anybody to take any notice anytime I went out. On this particular occasion, for some stupid reason, I’d left my phone at home and I happened to be the furthest distance from home in my walk. And as I powered along this man came to the front of his shop – a fast-food joint – opened the door and shouted at me. Well, I won’t say what he shouted, but it had a lot of swear words. He waved and gestured and shouted. And I suddenly realized, “Oh my God, he’s shouting at me! Maybe I look terrible. Maybe I shouldn’t be out here, maybe everyone is thinking, my God, what’s she doing?” And it was horrible. I walked home and burst into tears when I got in.’ Jennie was so embarrassed she didn’t tell her husband for two weeks. ‘Isn’t that awful?’ she says. ‘I felt ashamed.’ Why ashamed? ‘Because I thought maybe I do look awful, maybe I shouldn’t be exercising in public. Maybe I do look ridiculous – I must look ridiculous if somebody did that. I thought maybe I won’t do it any more. Then I thought, for God’s sake, Jennie, you’re raising thousands of pounds for breast cancer, get over yourself. So I went back out, but I was nervous.’

  Jennie’s experience took place before the launch of Sport England’s groundbreaking This Girl Can campaign, encouraging women and girls to be physically active. But it was during the research and creative process for the campaign that the message being put out there suddenly hit home. This wasn’t just a campaign, this was relevant to Jennie’s own personal life. ‘When we did the judgement research [a Sport England survey found that 75 per cent of women wanted to take part in sport but were worried about being judged] and they brought the picture of the man staring at the woman running . . .’ Jennie takes a sharp breath, ‘well, I thought, oh yes, I recognize that.’

  At the official launch of the campaign, Jennie decided to tell her story to a packed roomful of people. ‘I didn’t intend to,’ she says now. ‘I had a script and that story wasn’t in it. But I looked at that audience and I suddenly thought: I know what this feels like and I probably need to admit that. I want them to connect to this emotionally so I’m going to take the risk. I think it kind of sealed people’s connection and made them realize I was doing this for the right reasons, not just because it’s my job. And This Girl Can is the thing I’ve done professionally that I feel most emotionally connected to. If you didn’t pay me I’d still want to work on this campaign because I really recognize this stuff. I’ve been that chubby girl, I’ve been the woman at the treadmill standing there thinking, “Oh my God.” I’ve been through all of that stuff and I’ve always felt very inadequate because of it. And that stuff really matters to me.’

  As I listen to Jennie’s story I think about the fact that she’s a woman in her fifties. I hadn’t really considered what it is like to be in your fifties and facing these challenges. Even This Girl Can’s target audience doesn’t extend beyond women in their early forties. And then, quite unexpectedly, we find ourselves talking about a taboo that, as a woman in my thirties, I hadn’t planned on writing about at all. That taboo is the menopause.

  It’s Jennie who is first to bring it up. ‘I don’t talk about this normally,’ she says carefully, ‘but it is quite scary, particularly when you edge towards things like the menopause, because your body changes as much as it changes in adolescence but people don’t talk about it very much, and so you shove it aside in your daily life. You know, I sit in meetings and have hot flushes and we all pretend it’s not happening,’ she laughs. I laugh. But I don’t really know what she is talking about. Yes, I’ve heard of hot flushes – but not really. Not really like I know anything much about them.

  ‘Put that in an exercise context, and you’re not quite as resilient as you were, it’s not as easy to control your weight, there’s stuff going on in your body that you’re worried about, and you do have another raft of things to cope with. It’s really tempting to think, oh, [exercise] is not relevant to me any more, all the stuff about the excitement and the fun side of exercise, that’s not for me any more, I think that’s a really strongly held view. And if I sit through another sports seminar where people say, “Oh, I think we should give bowling to the over-fifties” . . . I’m fifty-five, for God’s sake, I do not want to bowl just yet! I can still do plenty of other things! And I think we need more women standing up and saying that kind of stuff.’

  We do. I tell Jennie that I hope the next phase of the campaign embraces older women (the current campaign is aimed at fourteen- to forty-year-olds). Later I contact a precursor of This Girl Can, a pilot project called ‘I Will If You Will’, an experiment in how to get an entire town of women and girls physically active, based in Bury. I hear about the case studies, such as seventy-one-year-old Anne who’s taken up boxing and loves it, and about Boogie Bounce, where the instructors are open about what happens to postnatal women, or women of a certain age, who jump about on trampolines. They have a giggle about it. A we’re-all-in-this-together type camaraderie. They remind women to go to the toilet before the class starts, or make sure their Tena Lady pads are in.

  I’m so grateful to have been put on the right track by Jennie, to be thinking about women over forty. If the average life expectancy of a woman in the UK is eighty-one years, then why on earth are we ignoring half of our lifespan? Is age really that much of a taboo? And if we’re failing girls and women in their twenties and thirties when it comes to getting them physically active, then surely we need to capture the women who got away – those in their forties, fifties, sixties and beyond, who might yet adopt the kind of lifestyle that would bring them happiness and greater health.

  For a lot of women, like Jennie Price, the reality is that women often find exercise later in life. And sometimes, that’s precisely when they need it most. I recently read the life story of Emma Bridgewater, the British ceramicist mogul whose crockery adorns pretty much every dresser in middle England. Now in her fifties, Emma eulogizes over the importance of exercise for women – often juggling a career and a family – who desperately need an outlet for such full and demanding lives. ‘If you don’t look after yourself, very simply, and definitely, you will get ill,’ she wrote in her autobiography. ‘I hammered on without heeding the
distress signals until my immune system suffered, after which I developed a mild form of rheumatoid arthritis, which I still ignored and soon I found I was pretty much immobilized.’ Emma now exercises every day, and has become evangelical about the benefits. ‘Roughly speaking you need to feel normal again by the end of every day, and don’t let the pressure build up. A swim, a run or, really best of all, a walk, is a good way to shake off the stress which accumulates during the day.’23

  I phone Michael – what does he know about the menopause and exercise? ‘I’ve written a book about it!’ he practically yells down the phone. ‘Exercise is good for age. For men and women. But for women the added risk of the menopause is osteoporosis, there are dreadful stats – it’s a killer.’ I frown. A killer? My grandmother had it, and began to hunch over in her eighties. It was horrible to see, but I didn’t think it had killed her. Isn’t osteoporosis the deterioration of the bones? ‘Yes, but it’s a silent killer because once you have had an osteoporotic fracture there is a significant increased risk of death rate. This can be associated with complications following the fracture and increased immobility.’ Michael says weight-bearing exercise is best for supporting bone density – running, tennis, the gym, but not swimming (although that’s good aerobic exercise), while anything cardiovascular will help with preventing cardiovascular problems, such as weight gain and type 2 diabetes. ‘Exercise isn’t enough to prevent osteoporosis on its own. But because you’re fitter with stronger muscles you’re less likely to fall, and therefore less likely to suffer an osteoporotic fracture. I once asked a patient if she did much exercise and she looked at me and said, “I don’t do movement, Michael.” She’s eighty-nine now and bright as a button, but totally immobilized due to loss of height and severe spinal curvature. It’s dreadful.’