Twenty years after racing to two gold medals at the Olympics, Dame Kelly Holmes is facing another daunting, yet far more mundane, challenge – coping with ageing.
Now aged 54, the former middle-distance runner has been battling with aching joints, as well as insomnia, that she thinks is linked to the perimenopause and generally getting older.
But while she knows the battle against ageing is one neither she or anyone else can ultimately win, Holmes’ innate fighting spirit means she’s having an impressive go at keeping the effects of ageing at bay, at least for the moment.
“Getting old is a privilege, but ageing, I don’t like,” she declares. “I heard someone the other day saying ageing is a privilege, and I’m like ‘No, it’s not a privilege, getting old is the privilege’. The aches are coming, the wrinkles are coming – no-one likes that!
“But what I know is if my brain can stay alert, and I go with the flow, why can’t I still be the strongest, fittest person in my age group? And that’s what I want to do.”
The former athlete, who won gold in the 800m and 1500m at the 2004 Athens Olympics, still keeps fit, although she retired from competitive running in 2005. Yet despite still exercising nearly every day – she does one long run of eight to 10 miles and two shorter runs of three to six miles per week, plus a few weight-training sessions – in recent years she’s been troubled by aches and pains, and reveals: “I wasn’t able at one stage to even do a press-up, I had so much pain going through my body, my wrists and hands. It just felt so painful.”
She says the aches and pains were mainly in her wrists, knees and back, and although she didn’t have hot sweats, she had insomnia and linked her physical problems to the perimenopause.
“I just knew,” she says. “I’ve been into sport and fitness all my life, I know what pain is when you get an injury, and I also know when my body doesn’t feel right. It was a weird feeling, that pain.
“When you get more anxious and things like that, I knew it was my hormones. I was aware my hormones were changing, so I related the body pains to that.”
She started taking HRT, but didn’t see benefits on her symptoms, so she explored other options, and started taking Ancient + Brave collagen around a year ago. “I really do feel that has supported me – I don’t get the body pains, and I’m feeling stronger generally, in everything I do,” she says.
“Now I don’t know if it’s just that, because I also exercise anyway, and I’ve tried to keep myself fit and started doing more weight training. So for me now it’s more around using nutritional supplements to support what I do on a day-to-day basis, and that is to keep fit and healthy.”
And while part of that keeping fit involves regular runs, including park runs, and Holmes ran the London Marathon eight years ago in an impressive three hours 11 minutes, she has no immediate plans to run a marathon again, exclaiming: “I ran it in 2016 and I surprised myself with the time I ran, because I’m not a distance runner whatsoever.”
She was, however, “honoured” to be the starter for this year’s men’s elite London Marathon, but insists it didn’t whet her appetite to run the distance again herself.
“I wasn’t tempted, no, not at all,” she says with a laugh. “Hats off to everybody who did it, no matter if you did five-and-a-half hours or whether you’re an elite athlete. But it’s the training and the commitment for that training – months and months of it.
“People forget – you see the outcome and the tears of joy at the end of the race, and the elation of everybody that gets a medal, but it’s that commitment, and you have to support your body the whole way through. It’s more than just the sign up and the challenge, it’s everything around it.
“Will I do it again one day? Possibly. But I was very honoured to start the elite men’s and cheer everybody on.”
While a marathon isn’t on the cards at the moment, Holmes sets herself a daily target of 12,500 steps, although she stresses she doesn’t worry if she misses her target. “I’ve set myself 12,500 steps as a marker – but some days, I just can’t do it, no way, so I don’t get over hung-up if I don’t,” she says. “That’s my aim in a day, but some days, like most people, you’re doing so many other things – I do a lot of travelling, and sitting around.
“But sometimes I’m really conscious about it, and then I’ll just think actually, the weather’s half-decent, instead of getting the car back to the station I’ll walk for 20 or 30 minutes. I think it’s about having habits – I’ve made a conscious decision to walk more, so it’s more about that, rather than the numbers.”
Holmes now spends much of her time travelling the world as a global motivational speaker, and although she’s had mental health struggles in the past, admitting the pressures of being an elite sportswoman led to depression and self-harming, she now says very happily that her mental health is “really good”, admitting that she feels much more freedom since she came out as gay in June 2022.
“It’s 20 years since I won my two golds, and I’m really motivated, really on a high of life and manifesting positive energies and attitudes around me. And by me doing that, it’s really making me feel great,” she says.
“You go through different life situations and different stages of life, and things happen for a reason. I’m in a really good place at the moment and I want to keep that. You never know what’s around the corner, but there’s no point pre-empting worse.
“My thing now is to keep as healthy as I can, to keep fit as I can, still challenge myself, still be really energised and be very alert. I’ve already been through ups and downs in life, I’m just going to keep going forward with a positive attitude.”
Dame Kelly Holmes is an ambassador for Ancient + Brave and its new once-a-day collagen capsule Noble Collagen, designed to aid healthy ageing and ease menopausal joint issues.
