Femmi’s Lydia O’Donnell has built the running tech women deserve

O’Donnell was told that in order to be a successful athlete, she had to be skinny, small and lean, which is an unfortunately prevalent narrative, all too often thrown around the running community.

“I got encouraged quite heavily when I was in my early 20s to lose weight and to be skinny and to restrict my diet in order to reach the performance goals that I had,” O’Donnell says, noting that her menstrual cycle and how it might impact performance wasn’t something that was discussed or considered.

She developed negative beliefs about herself, disordered eating, lost confidence in her body and stopped menstruating for about nine months.

When she finally slowed down and checked in with her body’s reaction to her training and restricted diet, O’Donnell realised that something needed to change. She read a book called ROAR by physiologist Dr Stacy Sims and says it made her realise the importance of her menstrual cycle on her overall health and wellbeing.

“At that point I started to fuel myself correctly,” O’Donnell says. “I started to see food as fuel in order to reach my goals, and then I started adapting all my training to the fluctuations of my cycle and how I am experiencing my cycle.”

“All of that was just mind blowing in itself, but then I started to perform, and I started to break every PB and run way faster than I'd ever run.”

“I was healthy, I was eating, and I just felt so different about my body.”

Changing lives

Looking back at her own journey, O’Donnell says she’s gutted that she lost so many years to underfueling and overtraining. However, it’s for this reason she decided to create Femmi, a running app that supports people to train in line with their menstrual cycles.

Hormones and energy change during a woman’s menstrual cycle, and generic running plans don’t tend to take this into account. Femmi offers personalised run training, expert women’s health support and access to women-led run communities.

Creating the app, O’Donnell worked together with her co-founder, Esther Keown, a fellow elite athlete who went through a similar experience of losing her period.

“Esther and I came together and [thought], we've gone through the challenges, [so] let's prevent other women from going through those challenges and actually help educate women who want to run and feel good in their bodies,” O’Donnell says.

Founded in July 2020, amid the Covid pandemic, Femmi has grown into an engaged community looking to build body confidence through movement.

As CEO of the company, O’Donnell says they receive feedback all the time from Femmi community members that helps affirm the startup is going in a positive direction.

“We get told quite regularly that we've changed lives, and I don’t think you can really do much more.”

Growth through capital

Among the life-changing impact Femmi is having, O’Donnell’s focus is on raising capital to continue growing the startup’s potential.

“That's always been a pretty big struggle for us as female founders,” she says. “It's been really tough to raise capital, not just because we're female founders, but we're building a women-led company for women only.”

Those in the venture capital industry know that it’s a very male-centric area, and O’Donnell has found that pitching the business to rooms full of men comes with its fair share of challenges.

“Pitching our business to mainly men has been really difficult for them to be able to relate to the problems we're talking about,” she says. “But our goal is to continue to grow and continue to raise in the future, and right now, we're just really focused on building the community.”

Femmi has launched two brand new running communities in the US, and they’ve created a community feature within the app which allows women to connect with each other. Around the world, the app now has 20 Femmi-owned run communities, which O’Donnell says is an exciting evolution, considering women’s safety running alone is a huge issue.

“Being able to connect women and allow women to take ownership of their own communities is really big,” says O’Donnell.

Alongside breaking down gender equality barriers in sport, O’Donnell’s leadership at Femmi extends to paving the way for women in the tech industry, venture capital industry and just business in general.

“Women deserve a much bigger voice,” she says. “It's definitely something we're really passionate about.”

“I hope for us, and for future generations of female founders, they are backed when they have something special.”

This article was written in partnership with and originally published by Women's Agenda.