World champion rower Zoe McBride tells Sarah Cowley Ross she now wants to help young female athletes, having ended her career after a battle with RED-S.
Zoe McBride would often call her parents in Dunedin in tears, “desperate and low.”
“But in the past few weeks, I’ve been calling them just wanting to know how they are, and it’s like they’re waiting for me to start crying,” she says.
But things are different now, six weeks after McBride made the difficult call to end her elite rowing career, and give up a shot at an Olympic medal. Happier and healthier, she's relishing catching up with friends and family and just generally having more energy and zest for life.
She’s reflecting on how structured her life had been from an early age immersed in the Rowing New Zealand elite squad, knowing her week was planned meticulously around training.
And she’s remembering the feeling of being “hangry [hungry and angry] all the time”, and the guilt of eating in social situations.
“I thought rowing and going to the Olympic Games was going to make me happy. Like if I cracked the Olympics, I would be happy,” says McBride, the current world champion in the lightweight double sculls.
“But I know that wouldn’t have been the case.”
After years of under-fuelling and over-training, McBride admits the pressure of making weight was too much - citing her own wellbeing as the major factor in her decision to retire.
For years she’s weighed herself religiously with the hope she stands on the scales and sees 57kg.
That’s the critical number McBride needed to ‘make weight’ to row with her partner Jackie Kiddle in the lightweight double.
When 25 year-old McBride stood on the scales a few months ago and was 7kg over the required weight for the boat, she knew her torment couldn’t continue any longer.
Knowing the dark places she would have to put herself through, McBride decided her only option was out.
“It was a moment when I could really see myself – how good I was feeling mentally - and I realised that in order to get down to weight to go to Tokyo, it was going to be way too much of an ask,” she says.
“In the past I did it, but this time I knew I wasn’t okay with doing it.”
The fine line of high performance sport
The toll on McBride’s health from what she describes as anorexic eating behaviours affected her menstrual cycle, bone density and her mental health.
Making weight, says McBride, is part of being a lightweight rower and to do so McBride would diet and do extra training. “It never started off too badly. Over the years it got more and more,” she says.
“As I got older it got harder - because I’d dieted the year before and so each year you have to go harder.”
The prolonged consequence of McBride’s under-fuelling really hit home last year in lockdown when she went jogging as part of training from home and developed a stress fracture in her femur after a handful of runs.
The severity of lack of nutrition combined with extra training on top of her normal training week had finally caught up with her. McBride was diagnosed with RED-S - or Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport - a syndrome affecting athletes, in particular females, around the world.
RED-S is essentially where the energy put out through training load overrides the energy restored to the body through nutrition.
“I hid a lot of how much I was struggling. I didn’t want people to know because I didn’t want to raise a red flag,” McBride admits.
One of the symptoms of RED-S is amenorrhea – having no periods - something McBride thought was normal for an athlete training hard.
“When I was younger, I thought missing my period was a sign that I was working hard and was totally normal for a female athlete,” she says. “It’s not and it has totally affected my hormonal balance.”
Her mental health has taken a battering over the years too, and McBride was diagnosed with depression last year. She thinks a lot of her headspace issue was to do with a lack of energy totally ruling her life.
Finding a way out
Realising how deep the hole she was in, McBride started seeing a psychologist last year, which she says has been a huge help in getting a really clear understanding of who she was.
“I’d lost a little bit of myself and what my values are. So much of my identity was wrapped up being a rower,” she says.
With the support of her doctor, psychologist, coach, family and friends - and Rowing New Zealand – McBride’s decision to retire has brought a huge realisation that she is more than a rower.
“I realised everyone around me just loves me for me – they just want me to be happy,” she says.
Telling her longtime rowing partner Kiddle was “really hard”, McBride admits, and she’s felt guilty about ‘abandoning ship’.
“Jackie's been really supportive and we were a partnership on a mission to do something special in Tokyo,” she says. “At the end of the day, she didn’t want me to race unhealthy.”
Since McBride’s retirement announcement, Kiddle has had to withdraw from the Tokyo Olympics because Rowing NZ couldn’t find a suitable replacement for McBride. But she wants to keep rowing towards the 2024 Paris Olympics.
But for Tokyo 2021, the hopes of a medal boat in the lightweight double – the last lightweight class in the Olympic Games - has come crashing down.
A new healthy new chapter
A healthy Zoe is something McBride is still figuring out.
For so long, food has been a massive trigger for her health and a huge control on her life. But she’s now enjoying the opportunity to not feel shame and guilt in social eating situations.
“The fear of being in social situations eating food and feeling like everyone’s judging what I’m eating was awful,” she says.
“Exercise will always be a big part of my life – except I won’t be exercising for food.”
McBride feels a weight has been lifted off her shoulders with her decision and also in sharing her story.
When asked if she should have just been an open-weight rower, McBride says that for so much of her life, she has been a lightweight rower and during her career, which included three world championship titles, she couldn’t get her mind around anything else.
“I definitely think I could have done it now,” she says.
“I’ve always been very strongminded, but I didn’t know how to give myself a break and I never could tell myself ‘It’s okay it you don’t do it.’ I just saw myself as a failure.”
She’s been touched by the number of athletes reaching out who are also dealing with similar issues navigating the fine line of elite sport.
McBride says she’s keen to use her experiences to share her story so others don’t have to go through want she has.
“I’m passionate about women’s health and mindset. I definitely see myself progressing down that path,” she says.
McBride holds a Bachelor of Business and is in the process of completing a nutrition diploma and her yoga teaching certification.
For now, though, she knows that sport will always be a big part of her life.
“I have loved so much of it,” she says. “All the success has been great, but the people and the places I’ve been to are incredible.”
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