Hit Play Not Pause

Artist, author, and gravel racer Lisa Congdon is back for the first time in more than three years, and a lot has happened. She had both knees replaced seven weeks apart, raced the Unbound 50 five months later, and got her power numbers back. Then she decided to stop chasing them. Lisa talks about her 2026 goals, "chase adventure instead of power numbers" and "stop hating your body," and about the five-day, 270-mile Tour of the Giants bikepacking trip that put both goals to the test. Lisa opens up about the years she spent restricting carbs to stay small, gaining weight once she started fueling properly, and the secret fight with her body that followed. She also shares what it's like to manage hot flashes without hormone therapy after estrogen-receptor-positive breast cancer, why cycling pulls her out of hormonal low points, and why saying your shame out loud is the first step to letting it go. Finally, we dive into the menopause industrial complex, GLP-1 pressure, and the joy of having a body that can do more at 58 than it ever has.

Lisa Congdon is an internationally known, award-winning fine artist, illustrator, and writer based in Portland, Oregon. She is self-taught, started making art in her thirties, and has written ten books, including Art, Inc. and Find Your Artistic Voice. Her clients include the Library of Congress, the U.S. Postal Service, MoMA, REI Co-op, Brooks Running, and Velocio Cycling Apparel. She found cycling in her fifties and now races gravel as a masters athlete, rides centuries, and bikepacks, and much of her art work is in the cycling industry. A breast cancer survivor, Lisa writes candidly on her Substack about being a menopausal endurance athlete, fueling, and making peace with her body.

Resources:

What if my body isn’t something I need to fix? Lisa Congdon’s Substack

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In this special Hit Play Not Pause bonus episode, Selene introduces some of the expert educators behind Feisty Winter Training, a 16-week program designed to help women build fitness, strength, and knowledge through the winter months.

Through highlights from Feisty's Hit Play Not Pause, The Women's Performance Podcast, and Another Mother Runner, you'll hear conversations about athletic burnout, perfectionism, menopause, injury prevention, fueling, and why more training isn't always better.

Meet the featured experts:

• Dr. Erin Ayala – Licensed psychologist, certified mental performance consultant, and host of The Women's Performance Podcast, specializing in athlete mental health, motivation, performance, and burnout.
• Dr. Carla DiGirolamo – Double board-certified OB/GYN and reproductive endocrinologist specializing in the health and performance of active women across the lifespan, including perimenopause and menopause.
• Dr. Kim Hollingdale – Licensed psychotherapist and certified mental performance consultant who helps athletes navigate performance anxiety, injury recovery, and the mental challenges of training and competition.
• Dr. Kate Mihevic Edwards – Physical therapist and board-certified orthopedic specialist specializing in running medicine, injury prevention, rehabilitation, and the unique needs of female runners.

The big takeaway? A great training plan isn't just about checking boxes. It's about understanding when to push, when to recover, how to fuel, and how to adapt your training to your body and your life.

Feisty Winter Training kicks off November 16, with four 16-week programs: Running, Cycling, Strength, and Hybrid. Each includes progressive training, expert coaching, live educational sessions, and a supportive community of women.

$349 for coach written plans, live training sessions, a robust community of like-minded women, and access to expert-led education sessions.

Don't just follow a plan this winter. Learn how to OWN your training.

Register for Feisty Winter Training: https://livefeisty.com/training/feisty-winter-training/

Does it feel like your back is always cranky or your hips are chronically tight? Your problem might not be where it hurts…or what it seems. As Dr. Heidi Prather, a sports medicine and hip preservation physiatrist at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS), explains this week, back pain can start in the hips, and “tight” hips can be a sign of instability—which stretching can make worse. We also cover estrogen and inflammation in the menopause transition, plus fascia, angry nerves, frozen shoulder, how sleep and anxiety affect pain, and her best advice for staying out of her office.

Dr. Heidi Prather is a Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS)/Weill Cornell Medicine and the Founder and Medical Director of the HSS Lifestyle Medicine Program. The program helps people with musculoskeletal pain reduce pain and function better through behavior change. Before HSS, she spent more than 20 years at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, where she founded the Living Well Center, the first standardized musculoskeletal health program of its kind built on lifestyle medicine. She is board-certified in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Sports Medicine, and Lifestyle Medicine. She was the first female president of both the North American Spine Society and the Physiatric Association of Spine, Sports and Occupational Rehabilitation. Her research focuses on hip and spine disorders, sex differences in musculoskeletal injuries, and lifestyle medicine, and she has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers.

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You run (or bike or swim or hike…), you lift, you've got the training logs to prove nothing has changed. You eat the same as you always have. And you’ve still gained 10 pounds…or more. Obesity medicine physician Dr. Michelle Gordon is here this week to explain why. She covers the metabolic slowdown of perimenopause, the drop in fat burning, why the new fat lands around your middle, and why "calories in, calories out" doesn't cover it. She also talks about her own experience with tirzepatide as a lifelong athlete: losing 30-plus pounds, running out of motivation to run, and figuring out what exercise means to her now.

Michelle E. Gordon, DO, DABOM, DACLM, FACS, FACOS, is board certified in obesity medicine, lifestyle medicine, and general surgery, and is a fellow of both the American College of Surgeons and the American College of Osteopathic Surgeons. She spent 15 years as a surgeon before switching to women's metabolic health, because she kept seeing the downstream complications of disease that had started years earlier. Today she runs a telehealth practice to help high performing midlife women feel like themselves again. Her approach is rooted in physiology and incremental behavior change. She treats obesity as a chronic, relapsing disease that calls for long-term care from a physician. You can learn more about her at drgordon.me and on her Substack.

Resources

Trajectory of weight regain after cessation of GLP-1 receptor agonists: a systematic review and nonlinear meta-regression here

Continued Treatment With Tirzepatide for Maintenance of Weight Reduction in Adults With Obesity: The SURMOUNT-4 Randomized Clinical Trial here

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Cozy Earth: Use Code HITPLAY at https://cozyearth.com/ for up to 35% off

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Recorded live at FeistyFest, the week Hit Play Not Pause turned six, this bonus episode hands the mic to you.

Selene starts with how the show began, including her own experiences with 2 a.m. wake-ups and sleepless nights, performance decline, anxiety, the urge to pull back from people, and the changes she didn't see coming. She and longtime producer Carrie walk through their hormone therapy journeys and where they are today. Then they hand the mic to the crowd for a wide-ranging discussion including managing menopause after breast cancer, the cost of HRT, symptoms that don’t seem to stop, getting brushed off by doctors, GLP-1s, and much more.

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Feisty Menopause: @feistymenopause

Hit Play Not Pause Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/807943973376099

Support our Partners:

Cozy Earth: Use Code HITPLAY at https://cozyearth.com/ for up to 35% off

Previnex: Get 15% off your order with code HITPLAY at https://www.previnex.com/

Wahoo: Use the code FEISTY2026 to get a free Headwind Smart Fan (value $300) with the purchase of a Wahoo KICKR RUN at https://shorturl.at/WVhdr

Iron is one of the most-requested topics in the Hit Play Not Pause community, and it's one of the most confusing. Sports dietitian Kristen Arnold, who works with pro teams and everyday athletes, returns to explain what iron does and why you can have symptoms from low iron long before you're anemic. She also covers how our needs change after menopause and how new ferritin thresholds from the American Society of Hematology reset the old, far-too-low targets. We get into the full iron panel, hepcidin, heme vs. non-heme foods, every-other-day supplementing, when an IV makes sense, and why altitude calls for a bigger buffer. We also look at what the popular Iron Protocol gets right and where it goes beyond the evidence.

Kristen Arnold, MS, RDN, CSSD, is a board-certified sports dietitian, cycling coach, and retired professional athlete. She has practiced sports dietetics since 2015 through her private practice, Sports Nutrition for Women, where she and her team of qualified, compassionate practitioners work with athletes and teams ranging from recreational to professional and Olympic-level. Kristen’s work centers on empowering active women across the lifespan through evidence-based sports nutrition education and individualized coaching. She has worked with hundreds of athletes and teams and currently serves as a team nutritionist for EF Pro Cycling, a UCI WorldTour team. She is also a first author on peer-reviewed research examining targeted nutrition strategies to support the health of postmenopausal women. Kristen regularly speaks on podcasts and contributes to publications on sports nutrition, with a particular focus on women’s health, endurance performance, and nutrition across the lifespan.

Resources:

New guidelines for iron deficiency

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As an Olympic cyclist and speed skater with scores of medals, Clara Hughes thought she knew how to breathe. Then came menopause, along with a catastrophic knee injury, COVID, and months stuck in stillness. All of it broke open what she'd spent a lifetime outrunning. In this conversation about her new memoir, Learning to Breathe, Clara opens up about her dark journey through the menopause transition, being offered antidepressants instead of hormone therapy, finally getting care from a women's health specialist, and how somatic therapy, psychedelic-assisted therapy, breathwork, and long days on trail helped her face childhood trauma she had pushed down for decades. We also cover why menopause can feel like a betrayal to athletes, how her relationship with movement has changed from punishment to love, and the two questions she hopes every woman will ask herself.

Six-time Olympic medalist Clara Hughes became the only athlete to win multiple medals in both the Summer and Winter Games. She is a member of the Order of Manitoba and an officer of the Order of Canada, has received a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame, and was inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame. Clara was Canada’s flag bearer for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. She was the founding spokesperson for Bell Canada’s Let’s Talk initiative, a campaign dedicated to breaking down the stigma of mental health. In 2014, she was awarded the Meritorious Service Cross, which recognizes those whose outstanding personal commitment has brought honour to Canada. In 2022, she was named an Olympian for Life in recognition of her making the world a better place by promoting the Olympic Values at every stage of her life. Clara lives with her husband, Peter, on Vancouver Island, and continues to enjoy bike touring and hiking.

Resources

Learning to Breathe by Clara Hughes

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Cozy Earth: Use Code HITPLAY at https://cozyearth.com/ for up to 35% off

Previnex: Get 15% off your order with code HITPLAY at https://www.previnex.com/

Wahoo: Use the code FEISTY2026 to get a free Headwind Smart Fan (value $300) with the purchase of a Wahoo KICKR RUN at https://shorturl.at/WVhdr

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. So, this week breast oncologist and lifestyle medicine physician Dr. Amy Comander returns to explain what comes after a diagnosis: why breast cancer isn't one disease, how treatment decisions get made, and why cancer guidelines tell oncologists to talk about exercise. We cover training through treatment (including when to postpone the race), how chemo and aromatase inhibitors can bring on "menopause 2.0," and the non-hormonal options for hot flashes and aching joints. We also get into the harder question of hormone therapy after hormone-sensitive breast cancer, why "estrogen doesn't cause breast cancer" leaves a lot out, and what the research on vaginal estrogen, Duavee, and women with BRCA mutations shows so far.

Amy Comander, MD, DipABLM, FACLM, MSCP, is a breast oncologist and Medical Director of the Mass General Brigham Cancer Institute in Waltham. She also directs the Cancer Institute's Lifestyle Medicine Program and is an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. With Dr. Beth Frates, she launched the PAVING the Path to Wellness program for breast cancer survivors and co-authored "PAVING Your Path Through Breast Cancer and Beyond." She was the first oncologist to serve on the Board of Directors of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine and the first oncologist named a Fellow of the College. She's also a marathoner who has run 13 consecutive Boston Marathons.

Resources

Link to the PAVING workbook

Menopausal hormone therapy for breast cancer patients: what is the current evidence? Here

Menopausal Hormone Therapy After Breast Cancer: Personalization, Not Prohibition Here

Menopausal hormone therapy and the risk of breast cancer in women with a pathogenic variant in BRCA1 or BRCA2 Here

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Hit Play Not Pause Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/807943973376099

Support our Partners:

Cozy Earth: Use Code HITPLAY at https://cozyearth.com/ for up to 35% off

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Wahoo: Use the code FEISTY2026 to get a free Headwind Smart Fan (value $300) with the purchase of a Wahoo KICKR RUN at https://shorturl.at/WVhdr

It's been three years since Leka Fineman last joined the show — and in that time she won the CrossFit Games at 56, retired from competition, took up surfing for the first time in her 50s, started menopause hormone therapy (including testosterone), and lost her partner to cancer just seven months ago. Leka pulls back the curtain on the “identity grief” she experienced after working so hard to meet her goals and so hard to take care of her partner that she no longer knew who she was when it was all over. Physically and emotionally drained, Leka looked past her usual pursuits and turned to yoga, equine therapy, and a community of surfer women to pull her through. She shares what her hormone therapy journey has looked like, how she fuels and trains now compared to her competitive days, and how turning 60 this October is inspiring her to quiet her mind, connect with her inner self, and embrace what comes next.

Leka Fineman is a health, wellness, and mindset coach, CrossFit Games champion, and lifelong athlete based in Southern California. A three-time CrossFit competitor turned five-time CrossFit Games athlete, she won the world title at age 56 before retiring from competition to focus on coaching, surfing, and yoga. Leka works with clients on strength, nutrition, and mindset — building personalized plans that help people identify their motivation and values, and using meditation, visualization, and breathwork to help them show up from a strong, calm center in any part of life. Since stepping away from competitive CrossFit, she's become an avid surfer, a certified yoga teacher, and an equine-therapy volunteer, and she continues to coach women on strength training, hormone health, and midlife reinvention. Learn more about Leka and her coaching at lekafineman.com.

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Feisty Menopause: @feistymenopause

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Support our Partners:

Cozy Earth: Use Code HITPLAY at https://cozyearth.com/ for up to 35% off

Previnex: Get 15% off your order with code HITPLAY at https://www.previnex.com/

Wahoo: Use the code FEISTY2026 to get a free Headwind Smart Fan (value $300) with the purchase of a Wahoo KICKR RUN at https://shorturl.at/WVhdr

When people go on GLP-1 medications, part of the treatment plan is to encourage them to exercise. But what about all the already active–even athletic–women who are layering them onto serious training? That’s less clear…and far less researched. Performance nutritionist Heidi Skolnik, author of the new book Your GLP-1 Game Plan, returns to break down how these medications really work, the side effects you may be prepared for (as well as some important ones nobody warns you about), and how to protect your muscles and bones and build a fueling strategy that actually works. We also get into hydration, supplements, eating-disorder red flags, and whether serious performance and GLP-1s can coexist. This one is filled with real talk, no shame, and no easy answers.

Considered a thought leader in nutrition, Heidi Skolnik, MS, CDN, is a NY Times best-selling co author, part of The Women’s Sports Medicine Center at Hospital for Special Surgery in NYC and oversees the Performance Nutrition program at The Juilliard School. She started the Performance Nutrition program at the School of American Ballet and worked as team nutritionist for the WNBA NY Liberty, NBA Knicks, NFL Giants and MLB Mets. Heidi sits on the medical advisory board of the National Menopause Foundation and The NYRR (New York Road Runners) and sat on the board of The National Bone Health and Osteoporosis Foundation for 10 years. Heidi has earned two Master’s degrees (exercise physiology and human nutrition) and is a Fellow with the American College of Sports Medicine. Heidi began her career in corporate fitness and wellness at Morgan Stanley for the Sports Training Institute. As a realist, Heidi believes M&M’s can fit into a healthy eating style along with red peppers, red meat, broccoli, and fresh fruit. You can learn more about her work and get the book at www.heidiskolnik.com

https://livefeisty.com/training/

Courses and Coaching: https://livefeisty.com/courses/

Sign up for our FREE Feisty 40+ newsletter: https://livefeisty.com/newsletters/feisty-40/

Follow Us on Instagram:

Feisty Menopause: @feistymenopause

Hit Play Not Pause Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/807943973376099

Support our Partners:

Cozy Earth: Use Code HITPLAY at https://cozyearth.com/ for up to 35% off

Previnex: Get 15% off your order with code HITPLAY at https://www.previnex.com/

Wahoo: Use the code FEISTY2026 to get a free Headwind Smart Fan (value $300) with the purchase of a Wahoo KICKR RUN at https://shorturl.at/WVhdr