Karianne Kraaijestein spent years building resilience through sport, from gymnastics to indoor climbing to yoga, before starting triathlons at 47. Now she’s the founder of Adaptive, a coaching platform for female endurance athletes navigating a different kind of endurance test: the hormonal transition.
In this episode, we talk about her own journey in endurance sports, why she is focusing on women who are in a hormonal transition, and what data is needed to enable peak performance for women at this stage of their lives.
If you’re an endurance athlete in perimenopause or postmenopause, or you coach one, and training has stopped working for reasons nobody can quite explain, this episode has pointers on where to look for strategies that improve performance.
For female founders and women in tech building trust-dependent products in spaces where the data doesn’t exist yet, Karianne provides insights that can help you navigate the early stages.
What you’ll learn in this episode:
* Why standard training plans, built for a generic body, fail women in the hormonal transition
* Why tracking sleep, heat regulation, and training load matters more than tracking hormones directly
* How Karianne finished part of the S’GRAIL in Girona on a torn ACL, and what that taught her about risk
* Why “too much heart and not enough mind” bankrupted her previous yoga studio, and what she’s doing differently with Adaptive
* Why she considers a scientific advisory board the biggest de-risking factor for investors in a trust-dependent product
* How letting the community “almost be part of the building” shapes Adaptive’s product developmentMore
