How Phaes was born.

My athletes kept hitting a wall

I started coaching endurance athletes, and some of them were struggling with perimenopause. There was not much information available, so I did my best to research how to train through that phase of life. When Stacy Sims released her book in 2022, I bought it immediately.

I thought I was doing really well with those athletes. Many of them still struggled to make progress. So I kept trying, and I kept listening to them. I found they needed more recovery and more easy days. I encouraged more strength training. But disrupted sleep made recovery almost impossible.

Then it happened to me

Fitness had never been a struggle for me. Then one day I was just really tired. I could barely get through my run. My body hurt everywhere and I could not sleep for months. I never had hot flashes or vaginal dryness, so hormonal changes were not on my radar. Seriously, that is what I thought menopause was.

Anxiety worsened and I had terrible ringing in my ears. My body hurt so badly I could barely get through an easy workout. In five months I lost 2 lbs of muscle and gained 7 lbs of fat, visibly in my midsection, while eating healthy, lifting heavy, and doing cardio six days a week. Then my annual bloodwork came back with dangerously high cholesterol. I thought I was dying.

The answer came from my esthetician

When I started getting severe acne on my chin, the woman who does my facials told me to call my doctor and ask whether I was in perimenopause. I went in for a visit. We had a long conversation about what was happening, and she gave me resources to educate myself, including Mary Claire Haver's books. I came back to my doctor with a plan.

We started MHT (HRT), and within 48 hours I began to feel like myself again. I still had a lot of work to do if I wanted to lower my cholesterol and get my fitness back.

Then women started finding me

I changed my workout routines and began working with a nutritionist. As I started to figure out my own journey, I also began to understand what other women were going through. I reached out to friends and family to talk about their experiences with perimenopause and menopause. The biggest struggle is losing your ability to do your sport, especially when that sport is your social time.

I began sharing my knowledge and experience, and I was flooded with women asking me to help them. Many of them came to me injured, from training plans that trained them like 20 year old men.

So we built something better

When I work with someone one on one, we combine subjective and objective data to create a training experience that flows with your life and your hormones. Not everybody can afford one on one coaching, and some women do not want it. I also have to cap my intake of athletes so I can give each of them the best experience I can. I felt a need to create something better for people.

My partner is a software programmer, and we were talking about how I wanted to help women train smarter but also track their symptoms, bloodwork, medications, cycle, and more. That became Phaes: strength and cardio workouts that adjust to your symptoms and your fatigue, with a place to keep the rest of the picture alongside them.

The app will keep evolving as the research does, and your feedback will help shape what it becomes. This is for all the women out there who want to track their perimenopause journey, sign up for the dynamic training plan, or both. Thank you for hearing my story.