Dear Women!

Sometimes I cry, when I read your comments in TrainingPeaks.

For more than a decade I have been coaching athletes all over the world. Everyone who comes to me has already done something remarkable before we ever speak - they found the inner motivation to change something about their life. Today I want to talk to 50% of my athletes. To the women I coach, and to every woman who ends up reading this. Please share this text.

Yours, Coach Katharina 🌺

Every morning I get up around 5 am. I make coffee in my beloved french press, mix greek yoghurt with pomegranate seeds, roasted pecans and pine nuts, put it all on a tray and go back to bed. The fresh air crawls into my room. I look out into an intense green park, I think about the day ahead - and then I open my laptop and go through every workout my athletes did the day before, and I read every comment they left me.

My day starts with your words.

• Yesterday I read this: "I already have an imposter syndrome, and this makes me feel like sh*."

• And this: "bin sowas von unzufrieden" — I am so incredibly dissatisfied.

• Then I had two calls. One with an athlete of mine, one with a woman thinking about starting to work with me. Same tone. Same shrinking.

Now let me tell you who wrote those sentences. Women who have gone under 11 hours at an Ironman. Women who have stood on a podium. Women who train for their first sprint triathlon while taking care of a toddler and a husband. And the sessions they were tearing themselves apart over were good sessions. Solid, well-executed, exactly-what-I-asked-for sessions.

Yesterday it happened again. I read those comments and I just started crying. I know every word - the pain, the 'lost-ness', that heavy bag of disappointment you drag from session to session. I had to walk the whole way through that myself before I could sit here and read your training with any distance at all. Learning to speak to myself with kindness and love took me years - longer than it ever took me to get fit. It is still the hardest thing I work on.

The pattern I cannot un-see → Why women are so hard on themselves

I am telling you what I observe, session after session, year after year: women are brutally hard on themselves. Not "a bit self-critical." Brutal. There is this permanent hum that says not enough, not fast enough, not disciplined enough, not really an athlete, too slow, too weak, too this, too that. It sits over good days and bad days alike. It survives podiums.

I am not asking you to lower your standards. I am not taking your ambition away. Ambition is beautiful. Wanting more is beautiful. And yes - I will still tell you when a session was sloppy, when the pacing was wrong, when you went out too hard again. That is my job, and honest feedback is a form of respect. I will not stop.

But there is a difference between standards and self-punishment, and somewhere along the line a lot of you stopped noticing where that line is. Ambition says: next time I hold the watts in the third interval. Self-punishment says: I am a fraud, I am an imposter, I am sh*. One of those makes you faster. The other one just makes you smaller.

You are high performing athletes

It does not matter what level you are at or how long you have been training. In your world, with your history, inside your possibilities and your limits, with your family, your job, your old injuries, your six hours of sleep - you are all incredible athletes. That sentence has no asterisk on it.

And I want to give you something concrete to hold onto, because I know that feelings alone will not convince you. So let us talk about the machine you are actually operating.

Your heart is smaller than a man's. Your blood carries roughly 10 to 15% less haemoglobin - less oxygen, every single beat. Your airways are narrower, so the simple act of breathing hard costs you more energy than it costs him. Your lungs are smaller. Your absolute oxygen uptake is lower, and it stays lower even after you account for your body size.

Smaller engine. Smaller fuel line. Higher cost just to breathe. And now look at what you do with it.

Across running, cycling and swimming, the gap between the best women in the world and the best men sits at around 10%. In the water it drops to something like 5 to 7%. Over an Ironman, roughly 11%. Read that again. The hardware differences are large. The output difference is small. You are not slower in proportion to your equipment - you are getting dramatically more out of less. Every woman who finishes an Ironman is running a smaller engine at a higher relative output than the man next to her. Nobody tells you this. Nobody puts it on the finisher certificate.

The quarter of the year nobody plans for

And then there is the part nobody puts in the training plan at all. Roughly one week in every month is harder. Sometimes it is cramping, sometimes it is a heart rate that makes no sense at an easy pace, sometimes it is the sleep, the mood, the heaviness. The science on whether your actual power output drops is honestly still messy and inconsistent - but ask the women themselves and the picture is not messy at all: around three quarters report period pain, around three quarters report premenstrual symptoms, and they consistently describe their training as feeling worse in those phases. One week a month. Twelve weeks a year. Three months. Nearly a quarter of your year is spent training through something your male training partner has literally never had to plan around. And you do it anyway.

Say thank you to this magical thing carrying you

Your toes. Your calves. Your knees. Your hips. Your gut. Your lungs. Your eyes. Your hands. Your skin. Go through it. Slowly. Part by part. Think about what each one is doing for you - while you are awake, and while you are asleep and think nothing is happening.

• Your feet, twenty-six bones each, catching your entire bodyweight and throwing it forward again, thousands of times, without you giving a single conscious instruction.

• Your achilles tendons and calves, storing and releasing energy like springs, carrying you up stairs and up trails.

• Your skin, holding you together, cooling you down through litres of sweat, protecting you from the sun, and then giving you the tan lines you are secretly proud of.

• Your eyes, letting you train in the dark of the early morning and the dark of the evening, when you are still half asleep or completely wrecked from a hard day at work.

• Your hands, your entire feel for the water - finding the pressure, holding it, pulling you forward through something you were never designed to move through.

• Your hips. Do not get me started on the hips. You could not get out of bed without that impossible collaboration of bone, tendon, nerve and muscle working together so smoothly that you never once notice it. Those hips carry you through every bike session and every run session of your life.

• Your abs and your back, quietly stabilising every ridiculous thing you do all day - and every thing I make you do ;-)

• Your heart, which has never once asked for a day off.

• That body has never betrayed you. It has been showing up for you, silently, every second, since the day you were born.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow morning, when you wake up - before the phone, before the list, before anything - breathe in consciously and smile. Step in front of a window, enjoy the view, smile again and then go through your body from head to toe. Every part. Smile at it. And say thank you.

I am not suggesting this. I am begging you. Do it every single morning for the next week. And then hug yourself. Mentally, and physically - arms actually around yourself. This body has carried you through everything you have ever survived. It has earned a hug.

My deepest goal as a coach has always been to see the person behind the athlete - the entire life, the whole context, the full human being, and to train that person, not a data field. You are all extraordinary.

Get in touch anytime. Book a 15 Minute free consultation or write an email to start@coachkatharina.com!

Yours, Coach Katharina 🌺