Lydia O'Donnell is a professional distance runner from New Zealand and the co-founder and CEO of Femmi, a running app built around the female body. She was Nike's Head Run Coach, has been running marathons for over ten years and coaching athletes for more than five. Femmi came out of something she and her co-founder Esther Keown both went through: they lost their periods training the way they had been taught to. I'm grateful she came in and talked about it this openly.

In this episode Lydia and I discuss why less than 6% of sports science research is conducted exclusively on females, and what that means for every coach you have ever had. She takes me through running 160 kilometres a week at 25, cutting carbs out entirely because a fad told her to, and ending up in hospital with her body shutting down. We get into RED-S, why losing your period was treated as a badge of honour, and the graph she saw for the first time at 27 that changed how she trains. She thinks cycle syncing is faddy, and she explains what she does instead. Femmi was built while less than 1% of venture capital was going to women, and she tells me what pitching close to 200 investors did to her running. Her dad was diagnosed with cancer in 2021. She talks about the six weeks in hospice, and the signs she believes he has been sending her since.

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