England Athletics coach raising awareness of puberty's impact on young female athletes' performance.

Working with young women at an age where they typically drop out of sport has made her passionate about increasing education and awareness around the impact of puberty on female athletic performance, Wilkinson explained: “18 to 21 is often the age when young women drop out of sport”.

“I dropped out of competitive sport at university, and I always wish I'd kept in touch with it a bit more”.

Wilkinson believes keeping more young women in sport is about recognising how their bodies and minds development: “I think it’s about talking more openly about the physiological development of young women which is very different to young men, and the impact on endurance running which is very different between women and men too”.

“What happens is, at that transition from teenager in twenties, performance tends to plateau or dip for women. I know myself from my own experience, that then you stop winning, you stop doing well, and it becomes hard work”.

Wilkinson wants to be the coach that she never had during her own running career, she said: “Nobody said to me, ‘look, just stay in touch with it, and you will turn into this fully grown adult woman, and you will get strong again and run fast again”.

She added: “I often see girls who are outstanding, then as they go through puberty, their performance plateaus and they lose heart with the sport”.

“That's why I feel really passionate about increasing understanding around female physiology and menstruation which is something I didn't have as an athlete”.

Wilkinson says this is something that needs to be spoken about much more openly: “We need to try and talk a bit more openly about female development so that we can get our female athletes through that really tricky period of life, still faithfully enjoying and getting all the social benefits and health benefits from sport”.

Professionally, Wilkinson is a social worker, which she says helps her as a coach through transferable skills: “Social work is all about engaging with people, knowing how to ask questions, knowing how to encourage and motivate people to change their life circumstances”.

“All of those skills are very transferable across to coaching, so I think it’s really useful to have that as my professional background”.

“I was a mental health social worker, and we used to do a lot of work on psychological interventions and strategies which are particularly transferable to sport”.

With endurance running experiencing a surge in popularity, especially with younger women, Wilkinson thinks it’s a “great time” for the sport. She said: “So many more women are getting into competitive running and are wanting to push themselves to achieve great things, all while being less apologetic about it”.

“More and more races are more and more deliberately and consciously targeting women too. For example, a few years ago, The London Marathon changed its ‘good for age’ qualification to give an equal number of places to men and women”.

Wilkinson is excited for the future of women’s running and explained: “The standard of women's running is improving and the number of women actually taking part in running events is going up. It’s a great time for the sport”.

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