“My Olympic dream started when I was nine years old,” track athlete Phylicia George tells me one cloudy afternoon a few weeks before she makes her way to the Olympic games in Paris.
She recalls marveling at the superhuman abilities of the athletes on her TV screen as a kid—“I decided I wanted to become a superhero that day and fell in love with running.” In her teens, she scored a full athletic scholarship to the University of Connecticut, competing at her first world championship in 2011.
It was a breakout year for the burgeoning track star, who went on to be a three-time Olympic finalist. Intrigued by the possibility of doing something new, she also joined Canada’s bobsled team—officially adding dual season athlete to her already impressive resume.
When she’s not at the track, you’ll find her harnessing her creative energy on social media, where footage of her athletic feats are often accompanied by soothing, poetic voice overs. To her, the convergence of sports and poetry lies in feelings of freedom and self-expression.
It’s this same freedom of expression that has inspired Phylicia to join the growing chorus of athletes who are calling to end period stigma in sports as part of the Sport Your Period movement.
According to a survey powered by CAN Fund #150Women, 75% of athletes have a fear of leaking while competing, while over 64% have felt uncomfortable talking about their periods with their coaches.
It’s more abundantly clear than ever, then, that change needs to happen in order for athletes to receive the support and resources they need to feel and perform their best.
Ahead, catch us in conversation with the world-class athlete as we explore her perspective on athletics as a creative outlet, empowering young athletes, and destigmatizing periods in sports.
As a writer and poet, how do you find that your creative side intersects with your athletic career?
I actually found my creative side through my athletic career. I've always been creative with the way I dress, but I started realizing that running was a creative act in and of itself. I started finding all of these different aspects of being flexible and trying to find a different perspective.
Even if I was having a bad day on the track, I would try to find metaphors to help me find the cue that I wanted—or I would try to find the imagery I needed to help me be better in this moment.
That's poetry. I was literally writing poems in my head to help me run better.
Photography, poetry, and writing, for me, always felt like this space of freedom and a really pure aspect of self-expression. To me, art and running, they're all just forms of expression of what you feel inside of yourself.
One thing you've spoken about is encouraging women not to live in silence and to be more outspoken about their needs and desires. I'm curious to know how this fits into normalizing and destigmatizing the conversation around periods in sports?
Audrey Lorde is a poet I really look up to—she wrote this book called Your Silence Will Not Protect You. And I just really took that to heart. I have this quote I just wrote down, she says:
“And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.”
This understanding of self-expression is knowing the fullness of yourself. Anytime we have to hide a part of ourselves behind something, it restricts all of us. For me, speaking about our periods and destigmatizing it is an aspect of who I am.
This is who I am as a woman. This is something that I go through every single month. This is a huge part of my life. If I have to hide this behind a wall, that's going to affect every aspect of my life without me even realizing it.
How can we create freedom in our voice? How can we create freedom in our expression? Periods are a beautiful part of who we are, so we need to be speaking about it openly and freely.
How do you think more open dialogue around menstruation in athletics stands to improve the sports landscape for burgeoning female athletes?
Again, it's this understanding that my period is something that happens for a week once a month. If it's something that I'm ashamed of, that's something that's going to be very restricting for me.
My period is what links me to my ability to create and to make something new in this world. It’s a matter of shifting the idea around periods as something to be celebrated, something to speak openly about.
To me, it really is about creating a space where people feel free to speak about it so they can get the information they need.
There’s increasing mainstream discourse around period tracking and syncing. Athlete or not, it can be helpful to know what foods, nutrients, and exercise are conducive to your wellbeing throughout your cycle—it’s unfortunate that this isn’t generally part of what women and folks are taught about their bodies.
Even just coming to the understanding that the world we live in is typically someone else’s vision—and we happen to live in a world that has been crafted by the vision of men.
For men, their experience of their body is very stable in a lot of ways. A woman’s experience in her body is very cyclical. But when I think about it, the way a coach will prepare a program is in cycles.
Why can’t it be a situation where we're understanding how your female athlete’s cycle is working? So, we’re lining things up better so she’s operating at her best at certain times, and having those harder workouts on the days when she’s not menstruating?
Those are all things that could be put into place. But again, that’s why it’s important to speak about it. We have this opportunity to craft a world within the vision of women’s voices.
It’s so alarming to know that 1 in 2 teens skip sports due to their periods. In your opinion, what are the major barriers these young athletes face, and how can we address them?
When I hear that statistic, I think about young women being in spaces where they're afraid of leakage, where they're afraid they might be humiliated in a public sphere.
In the same way, when I think about being an athlete, one of the quotes my coach used to work with was “get really good at being injured.” It's almost like, how do I prepare for something that might happen?
To me, it's about speaking out and putting young women in spaces where we're addressing this is something that could happen when you're menstruating. How can we ensure that you can be free on the court, and doing what you need to do without thinking in the back of your mind I might be leaking into my shorts.
It’s this understanding of providing knowledge and tools to understand your cycle. I think just creating that dialogue so girls are more excited to speak about their period.
Do you find you’ve had to shift your own personal narrative around periods? The messaging around periods is so often around pain and discomfort. As an athlete, I can imagine you don’t necessarily want to arrive at the track thinking “I’m on my period, that’s a hindrance to my performance.”
In life, the way I try to operate is: how can I find the most empowering mindset around something? Being an athlete has taught me that there's always going to be something in front of me—and it's my job to see how this is an empowering aspect for me.
That's why I spoke about celebrating, because you can look at it as a hindrance. But if I go into a race thinking I'm at a deficit as opposed to thinking, I have this thing that is helping to make me more powerful, I have this thing that helps me to create, it feels more empowering.
How do you hope initiatives, like Knix’s Sport Your Period, can make a difference in the lives of young athletes?
It's really empowering to have somebody you look up to speaking about something. I think about when I was young and the impact people had on me—and it's interesting because they were all men. But now, it's so cool because Knix is doing the Sport Your Period campaign, and it's going to have prominent athletes speaking about their period.
So it's this aspect of like, I'm already inspired by you. I already look up to you. I think you're super superhuman—and you're also showing me how we are similar, how we are connected, how what you go through is what I go through, and that you are thriving.
It's really beautiful because it is this opportunity to empower young girls. If someone I looked up to was speaking about it more openly when I was young, it would have encouraged me to do the same. I really believe in the value of inspiration.
As someone who has excelled in sports, how can we empower young girls who may feel discouraged or limited by their periods to stay engaged and confident in their athletic pursuits?
I have a 4-year-old niece, so keeping young girls in sports is something that's been playing in my head a lot. Having young girls feel more comfortable in their bodies, learning how to celebrate their bodies—this campaign is normalizing speaking about things we have traditionally been told are a hindrance or something we should be ashamed of.
If you're ashamed of something, it's hard to be curious about it—and curiosity is such a powerful thing. How can we make young girls more curious about their bodies, more excited and wanting to celebrate what they have?
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