Lucy Charles-Barclay knows a thing or two about endurance. A professional triathlete specialising in long-distance events, she won the Ironman 70.3 World Championship back in 2021. For the uninitiated, that's a 1.2-mile swim, 56-mile bike, and 13.1 run. It took her just over four hours.
Earlier this year, Lucy sustained a potentially “career-ending injury,” which forced her onto the sidelines for the first time in her triathlon career. Facing an indefinite period of rest and recovery was difficult, to say the least:
“I didn't know how I could fix it,” Lucy tells GLAMOUR. “It meant a lot of rest, to begin with, and not being able to do anything. And that quickly became probably the hardest time because I'm not used to doing nothing, and it really felt like my purpose of being an athlete was taken away.”
“I definitely felt quite empty,” she adds. If that wasn't serious enough, the injury prompted unsolicited ‘advice’ from those commenting on Lucy's social media.
Plus, all the beauty hacks from the changing room.
“Obviously, when I was injured, I wasn't training,” explains Lucy. "So I gained quite a lot of weight. And there weren't many comments about it, but there were some, and it's hard to ignore them in the world that we live in, where you are constantly criticized, and people have their opinion of you.
"Everyone said, 'She tried to get too skinny, she's not eating, that's why she's got this injury'.”
"There was quite a lot of noise going on when I got injured, and people blamed it on the fact that I'd gotten too lean and too skinny, and I tried to get like that, whereas I'd never tried to do that. It was just something that happened as a result of my training. I'd actually gotten quite sick last year, and that meant I lost a lot of weight because I had a sickness bug. So none of that was on purpose, but everyone said, “She tried to get too skinny, she's not eating, that's why she's got this injury.”
Whether they're in entertainment, politics, or – as in Charles-Barclay's case – sports, women are consistently subject to higher levels of body-shaming than their male counterparts. It's something Charles-Barclay has been aware of for a long time: “I've always viewed my body as kind of my machine for sports,” she explains.
“So it has to look a certain way, and that's not me trying to make it look that way; it's just going to look how it looks doing what I'm doing. But I was a slightly abnormal shape growing up because I'd always been a swimmer, so my shoulders are incredibly wide for my frame, and I always feel like I can't fit into normal clothes because my shoulders are so wide.”
Charles-Barclay describes her body shape as something she's “had to navigate” rather than something she's “gotten down about.”
After Charles-Barclay picked up a hip fracture during training in 2021, she was forced to reckon with a long stretch of rest and recuperation, which – it's fair to say – was not exactly what she had in mind.
“I'm not used to doing nothing, and it really felt like my purpose of being an athlete was taken away. So I definitely felt quite empty,” explains Charles-Barclay.
She continues, “It's a slight depression, I guess because my coping mechanism with anything in life is go and run, go and exercise. I love to go and run if I'm stressed because I can clear my mind and feel so much better for it. So to have that taken away was really, really difficult.”
“I was really lucky because Red Bull flew me out to their performance centre in Austria where we not only dived into why the injury happened but we also looked to other elements to being an athlete. So we dived into my nutrition, my psychology, and my biomechanics. And the ultimate goal was to not just come back stronger in terms of fixing the injury, but come back stronger as an athlete.”
"It's so much harder now with social media to feel confident in your body and not be looking at other people and reading those critics that always have their negative opinions on you.”
After spending time in Red Bull's performance centre, Charles-Barclay's team were able to confirm the cause of her injury, and it wasn't her weight.
“I loved that we actually got the complete confirmation at Red Bull of why the injury happened. It had nothing to do with my body weight… it was a lot to do with my swimming background and my biomechanics.”
She adds: “I think it's so much harder now with social media to feel confident in your body and not be looking at other people and reading those critics that always have their negative opinions on you.”
As well as heightened scrutiny of their bodies, female athletes must often deal with additional complications regarding their periods. As someone who races for eight hours at a time, it's something Charles-Barclay has also learned to navigate.
She explains, “It's extremely hard when things like periods come in because it does make it more difficult. And even now, as an elite athlete it's something I have to deal with. And obviously there's going to come a time where my race is at the wrong time in the month and I've got to manage that.”
She's found comfort from other female athletes in the same boat, saying, “As female athletes, we're all on that journey. It's not like we've got to compete against people that aren't having these struggles. So actually, we're all in the same boat, and if we could speak about it more, I think maybe that would help more female athletes stay in the sport, or in sport in general.”
While being a woman in sport has its challenges, it's also brimming with potential rewards. The Ironman Triathalon, for example, sees women get closer and closer to records set by male athletes.
As Charles-Barclay explains, "Something that I've loved about the longer distance triathlon is that the gap [between men's and women's times] is smaller. The thing I love the most is with my swim background, I normally can overtake quite a lot of the men in the swim, and one of my favourite things to do is think, ‘How many of the men can I catch in the swim’?
“And they always know I'm coming.”
To find out more about Lucy Charles-Barclay, head to her Red Bull athlete profile page: https://www.redbull.com/gb-en/athlete/lucy-charles-barclay
For more from Glamour UK's Lucy Morgan, follow her on Instagram @lucyalexxandra.
