Clara Hughes is done being hot and bothered | Canada Voices

Canadian Clara Hughes is the only athlete in history to win multiple medals at both the Summer and Winter Olympic Games. She has powered through pain, climbed mountains, hiked 4,600 kilometres from Canada to Mexico, and ridden her bicycle 11,000 kilometres across Canada to raise awareness about mental health.

None of that, however, prepared her for the bewildering onslaught of menopause symptoms she started to feel in her forties.

Brain fog, night sweats, stress. Difficulty sleeping, low mood, body aches. She would show up for a speaking engagement, wearing a blazer, “dripping more sweat than I would have after an Olympic race . . . like I’m a walking sauna.”

“I thought that I had a really good connection with my body,” after decades of competitive sports and gruelling hiking and biking, Hughes said in an interview from her home on Vancouver Island. “And I now know, it started in perimenopause, that I was completely ignorant of.”

When she was 47, she hit a wall when it came to work, she said. “I’ve worked in broadcasting and all sorts of public, outwardly facing things, and I just felt like I didn’t know who I was any more. I felt like I was on this runaway train, and I didn’t know who was driving it, but I knew it was going to go off the rails.”

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Now 54, her second memoir, Learning to Breathe, which went on sale on Tuesday, traces her two-year journey that begins with finding help for her menopause symptoms, before embarking on psychedelic-assisted therapy in search of relief from inner pain.

Born in Winnipeg, her achievements are well known: As a cyclist, she competed in the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, where she won two bronze medals. As a long track speed skater, she won four Olympic medals, including a gold at Turin in 2006.

She became a broadcaster, public speaker, humanitarian and a national spokesperson for the Bell Let’s Talk mental health campaign. She was made an officer in the Order of Canada. And she hiked, more than 20,000 kilometres – the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, the Continental Divide Trail and others, on some of the most trying trails in Canada and the U.S.

Movement is medicine, was her mantra. She was used to powering through discomfort. It worked (albeit at a cost of some searing injuries), until it didn’t. As a former elite athlete, she writes, she felt menopause as an extra betrayal. She could not simply push herself to improve, like she had in sport.

Slayed by hot flashes, mood swings, insomnia and exhaustion, she sought relief from perimenopause symptoms, which often start in a woman’s forties.

Initially misdiagnosed – a doctor gave her a prescription for antidepressants instead of the hormone therapy she asked for, she eventually saw a women’s health specialist. Hughes was prescribed menopause hormone therapy, which helped alleviate many of the symptoms.

That experience, however, set her on new path, nudging her to confront feelings she had held at bay for decades. She realized it wasn’t just menopause that was holding her back.

Menopause “set me out on really digging into the feelings and the deep-rooted sense of ‘not enough,’ that I felt my whole life,” she said, despite all the Olympic successes, accolades, and tributes.

“In so many ways, I’m grateful for menopause because it shook me up, it cracked me open, and allowed for this journey of self-discovery and recovery.”

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And what a journey. She turned to psychedelic-assisted therapy, in retreats and guided experiences. She took MDMA and 5-MeO-DMT, a psychedelic that is found in the glands of the Sonoran Desert toad. She ingested golden halo mushrooms, 3-MMC (a designer drug) and LSD. (Psychedelics are largely illegal in Canada, with narrow exceptions such as for clinical trials). She drank San Pedro cactus tea and snorted ketamine.

She also did other forms of therapy. She practised meditation, somatic work and breathwork. She tried regression therapy, family constellation therapy, craniosacral therapy, cold water plunges, saunas and fasting. She kept journals and painted. She did TRE (tension and trauma release exercises). She tried out microdosing. And she kept hiking, often alone, at her usual strenuous pace.

In one astonishing tale, she was hiking the West Coast Trail in August, 2025, when she slipped and dropped her shoe in a creek, where it was carried out to sea. By chance, a stranger passing by happened to have some old Crocs, one size too small. She hiked the rest of the trail with the borrowed Croc – 53 kilometres.

Along the way, painful memories surfaced, of childhood trauma that included abuse from her father. She had been disconnected from her body; over time, she started to feel whole. She still thinks that movement is medicine, but, she says, she learned that stillness heals too.

She is – emphatically – not suggesting that others jump on her path. But she hopes her story will help people forge their own journey.

“I’m that athlete that’s going to overturn every rock and stone, and see what’s underneath, and see what can help,” she said. But, “I did not want to present myself as an expert in any of these fields. I’m only a person with individual, independent experiences in it that have helped and helped shift and shape me.”

She hopes that, in sharing her story in all its rawness and vulnerability, it will inspire others to embrace this stage of life and find the support they need to thrive.

“I hope, if anything, my story can be a little stimulation and impetus for women to be able to look at themselves – not as ‘Who am I,’ but, ‘Who do I want to be? Who do I get to be?’ And to stimulate those ideas and the conversation of – instead of closing up in this season of life – that actually, it’s a point of blossoming.”

That blossoming, in the book, includes gratitude to her steadfast, calm and supportive husband, Peter, and to the wonders of nature as part of her healing.

She figures that menopause – which kick-started her two-year odyssey – could use some reframing, as a phase of life worth celebrating, a stage that brings with it empathy and wisdom, exploration and strength.

“Menopause birthed this story,” she said.