My RED-S experience felt like a constant battle of trying to understand my body and failing, now I know less is more and that life isn’t all about cycling

To save you time and so you already have the idea in your head whilst you’re reading this article, the main thing I have learnt so far in a year and a half as a professional athlete is that less is more.

In 2024, I completed my final school exams, called A-levels in the UK, at my local sixth form. These exams normally lead you to start a university degree, an apprenticeship, or whatever journey you desire in post-compulsory education, which finishes at 18 in the UK. My schooling and formal education ended there, but of course, learning never stops; we learn new things every day. So what have I learnt over almost one and a half years in the professional cycling peloton, whilst also moving to, and living alone in, a different country at 18?

I chose to move to Andorra for many reasons, but mostly because I believe it’s a great place for training: the many high mountain passes and flat valley roads, an endless number of people to train with, and a great support system, from physios to personal trainers, thanks to Movistar. But also, the more practical adult reason was that due to Brexit, it was much easier to gain residency here than to obtain a Spanish visa, for example.

So, fresh from the days of balancing school with cycling, I’m now solely focused on living a life where the everyday goal is to be the best athlete I can be. Time and energy seemed to be in much greater abundance than my previous days, which were filled with full-time education and exam revision, alongside training towards a professional contract and, of course, racing. Naturally, the extra time was an utterly lovely and blissful thing: to wake up at will, fuel the day’s training, and leave for it whenever I felt like it. However, after some months of training and racing full-time, that extra energy became problematic.

I write this article in May, which has been a reflective month for me. Last year, just like this year, I focused the early part of the season on the Classics, took a few easy, restful days after that block, and then had a big, long period throughout May to train again for the next big goal. This year, it’s the Giro d’Italia at the start of June. Of course, the normal thing to do nowadays when granted a long training period focused on one competition is to go to altitude. However, unlike last year, there is no altitude for me this year.

Ferguson claimed victory on her last race day at Navarra Women’s Elite Classic earlier in May (Image credit: Szymon Gruchalski/Getty Images)

In 2025, I started my first-ever altitude block in Sierra Nevada, Spain, alone. I’m someone who loves the process – the day-to-day training – just as much or even sometimes more than the outcome, the racing. I’m the annoying athlete who is always pushing the coach’s limits to increase the amount of training set on TrainingPeaks. I think this is for two reasons: one, because I love to be busy, years of balancing school work and cycling always meant there wasn’t much time for sitting down on the sofa, and now with all this extra time, sometimes it feels strange not doing something productive with it, such as more training.

And the other thing, as I have alluded to, is that I just really enjoy riding my bike. Therefore, when the concept of simply waking up and focusing on training every day – still a fairly new and idyllic phenomenon to me – was combined with being in an environment such as sleeping at 2,400 metres to reach peak performance, the feeling of reaching that goal of being the best you can be looms as near as it will ever be. It is extremely motivating to do everything possible to better that possibility. Because, of course, we always want more.

My time in Sierra Nevada was amazing. I enjoyed carrying out the smaller extra processes that take place at altitude, the sole focus of waking up and completing that day’s training without any distractions and the heightened attention to fueling. However, I had been warned about how easy it was to overcook yourself or underfuel, or both. At altitude, the norm of my training became doing 20 to 30 minutes longer than my carefully planned TrainingPeaks session every day. For many reasons, mostly because I believed it was the appropriate thing to be ‘tough’ on myself to become better. But an additional factor became the boring concept of returning to my accommodation with nothing else to do that day other than eat and sleep.

Time is unimaginably in abundance when staying in the ‘centro de alto rendimiento’. Shortened to and commonly called the CAR, it is a surprisingly well-known building in the world of endurance sports. The translation of the CAR’s name into English is ‘the high performance centre’. You’d think the goal of a business’s name should be to make the product sound a bit more exciting than it is; however, the CAR is truly unique in that the brand name describes the only activities available at Sierra Nevada in May. Not even the lone 90m squared supermarket is open in between the winter and summer seasons, so there is very much nothing to do other than ‘high performance’.

On top of pushing the time to the boundaries of turning that session on TrainingPeaks yellow (an indicator on the platform that a training session has been completed to less than or more than 20% of the total time planned), most of the time, my power would be near the absolute highest watts it could be for zone two. Alongside those extra minutes and unnecessarily increased intensity, I continued to strictly follow the nutrition plan uploaded at the start of the week, and based on the week’s upcoming training, without thinking about increasing that intake due to the extra calories I was burning.

Therefore, as you can imagine, training up there was going relatively badly, but that was easy to put down to the fact that I was doing altitude for the first time. It’s expected to see much lower numbers; it’s normal to be finishing training every day completely wasted and empty, that is how peak performance will come. But, day-by-day, irrational choice by irrational choice, I was unknowingly digging myself into a big hole.

In the short term, there didn’t seem to be a sign of any problem. I had my first-ever WorldTour win in my first race post-altitude training, yet that month’s period still hadn’t come. The success post-altitude turned out to be very short-lived. For the rest of the season, I struggled with fatigue, rarely had a good or normal day in training, and found myself ill much more than usual, which impacted my big goals and hopes for the season.

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(Image credit: Getty Images/Shutterstock/Illustrations by Michael Rawley)

It felt like I was in a constant battle of trying to understand my body and failing. Sometimes fighting with logic, but most of the time, without logic, and in denial that the problem was so clear. I continued without menstruation for 10 months.

That point just made is why I wanted to share my experience of RED-S. Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport is a syndrome of poor health and declining athletic performance caused by an imbalance between food intake and exercise energy expenditure.

Thankfully, I can say my story with RED-S is quite short: after 10 months, in the off-season on holiday last year, I regained my period (the most telling sign for women), then followed more normal feelings in training and, in general, more normal sensations in my mood and overall energy for life.

I wouldn’t say I’m completely back to normal now. I still have an irregular menstrual cycle, still aim to get more healthy fats into my diet, and as I mentioned before, altitude is completely off the charts for me right now. With the general consensus that putting my body under that much stress again will do more harm than good, even if it is done in the opposite way to last year’s doings.

But what did I learn, and what do I put it down to? Those careless and unfueled extra 20 to 30 minutes of training I did at altitude every day? I would say no, although they were likely the start of the problem. The real cause was the lack of logic in my brain that allowed me to justify the decisions and actions made at the altitude camp, and seeing immediate short-term results made those decisions a habit after that solo altitude camp. Until, of course, it clicked in my brain that what I was doing was not a recipe for long-term success, which, of course, in my case as a 19-year-old athlete at the time, should always have been the priority.

In some ways, and because I have to look for some positives in this situation, I would argue that experiencing this very steep learning curve in the first year of turning professional may be the best way to hopefully instill healthy attitudes and thinking going forward. Of course, provided that the learning curve provides lessons, which, for me, it definitely did, as I can say that my experience with RED-S is one I truly hope and believe I will never repeat.

So I share this to hope that what I have learnt can be taught vicariously to anyone willing to listen. Going forward, I am prioritising listening to my body and being patient with progress. I have almost gone full circle back to the start, and I am now considering restarting my studies online. Not because I reminisce on the days of school work and training, but because life, and the world also, is not and cannot be all about cycling. I now realise that for me, it is very important not to be solely reliant on one thing, mainly for perspective on that thing, but also to learn to find happiness and fulfilment in other things that aren’t cycling, because there will come a time when I am not allowed to cycle that day or that month. Or maybe I’m just back in Sierra Nevada in May again. But most importantly, I will be remembering that more is not always more. Less is more.