It was not until her second year of university that Bobby Clay learnt how to insert a tampon – via a YouTube video. “I was a 19-year-old woman. I felt pathetic,” she says now. Yet Clay had never had the need to learn before.
A former middle-distance runner who won the 1,500m at the Junior European Championships in 2015, Clay had been tipped to reach the very top in athletics, but her promising career ended before it had truly begun when she was diagnosed with osteoporosis aged 18. Years of under-eating and over-training also meant she had never had a period.
“I’d never had a period, so I’d never even needed to say the word,” Clay tells the latest episode of the Telegraph Women’s Sport Podcast. “Periods stopping in sport, unfortunately, was seen as the norm, but I just never started.”
Hormone replacement therapy later kick-started her body and she has since had natural periods – hence the tampon video – and now Clay wants her story to help other women. After all, rather than being seen as the norm in sport, missing periods should be seen as a concern.
As Dr Emma Ross, a women’s health and performance expert at The Well HQ, says on the podcast: “You don’t have to look very far back to see a time when it was considered normal for athletes to lose their periods when they were training really hard. And actually some athletes saw it as a badge of honour. They’re like, ‘Yes, I’m training so hard and I’m so light that I’ve lost my periods’.
“Fundamentally our period arrives because it’s saying that our body is healthy. So our period is a vital side of health and it absolutely should be celebrated. The reason we don’t have periods or we don’t start our periods during puberty is a sign that something’s going wrong. And in active women, in athletes, it can often be because we’re not fuelling well enough. We don’t want athletes to get to that point. We need to re-educate the whole system about how vital a healthy menstrual cycle is.”
