«I have fallen many times, I have scars all over my body, but nothing matches that suffering. I remember a stage of the tour. It hurt so much that I couldn’t even pedal, my tears skipped. ANE SANTESTEBAN (Rentería, 1990) Relive his 2024, which was the year of the return home after a decade running in foreign teams, being one of the best Spanish cyclists always, two Olympic, world games, Top 10 in turns and tours … a pain as unbearable as mysterious, a mental torture also, until in the most unlikely place the solution found. A routine gynecological review was going to find the problem. “You have a large cyst in the ovary and an endometriosis,” they announced. “Thank God. What a release, ”he replied.
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Luisa, an endometriosis patient, a silenced disease: “I don’t want to spend again two days a month in bed for rule pain”
Luisa, an endometriosis patient, a silenced disease: “I don’t want to spend again two days a month in bed for rule pain”
Ane tells what many others shut up, “by shame or fear”, because they are female health. He does, once surpassed, to “normalize, give visibility and help other women.” Those who write in private confessing that his case is the same, asking for advice. He details his experience, which is that of so many athletes, a taboo that now escapes and feels full on top of the bike. With the colors of Laboral Box – Fundación Basque Countrylast weekend the first edition of La Milan-San remote female ran. Ended 35 (at 1:25 of the winner, Lorena Wiebes), but left a flavor. As Pogacar In the masculine, the Basque cyclist marked the best usual time in the emblematic climb to the Cipressa, the 5.6 kilometers in 11 minutes and 37 seconds (A of 29.1 km/h). “This year I want to do the three big, return, turn and tour,” he announces in conversation with the world from Rentería.
It is a rebirth of the small Errenteriarra broker. Because, such pain caused the gynecological problem, which he thought even to leave it: “In the end you doubt everything.” Even herself, whether what was happening to her would not be the product of her own imagination, because no test detected anything. «I said to Pablo (Rodríguezalso professional cyclist, by Mountain Bike), my partner: ‘Let’s see if I’m going crazy and I’m inventing pain?’ I entered a fairly complicated loop ».
The season did not start like those of yesteryear. Not only was the discomfort, nor did the numbers come out. Both in training and competitions, its performance had dropped “between 20 and 30 watts.” «I started last year without finding myself well on the bike. I was always with pains, in the lumbar, towards my back, I lowered me to one leg. At no time did I relate it to the ovaries, of course. And the Tour was a beekery of pain. I talked to the team doctor and told him the symptoms. That did not find posture on the bike. We did a resonance on the back and there was nothing. I said: ‘Something has to be.’ I was on the couch, without training, and I couldn’t even move, I had a lot of pain, ”describes Ane.
There, in the great Boucle, where in 2023 he had ended eighth of the general (he was seventh in the Tourmalet in the queen stage), where everything became unbearable. «I remember a very hard moment. Day after day, the pain was accumulating. In the last three stages … Above all, there was one, which came out up a port, where I better defend myself. I cried. He asked for analgesics to compete. By my experience, I wanted to be next to Pigeon ostolazacontribute to the team. For trying to finish, it was a rather agonized suffering, ”he recalls.
The terrible thing for Anne was, above all, not knowing where that came from. «You can’t start treatment because you don’t know what it is. Our doctors are more accustomed to working with colds, clavicles, muscle aches … », he explains. The Calvary ended on October 31 at the most unsuspected site, the gynecologist, “in the routine review of all the years.” He had a cyst in the ovary and suffered endometriosis, a disease that is defined by the presence of endometrium (mucous tissue that covers the interior of the uterus) out of the uterine cavity and muscles and that affects 10% of women of reproductive age. «They told me that the best thing I could do was take the pill. The problem was going to continue, but I was going to have ‘quality of life’. Since I started, soon I started to feel much better, ”he reveals, relieved.
But it was not until last month that Ane wanted to make known what had happened to him. He did it with a sincere post on his social networks in which he spoke of “despair”, but also that “good feelings” had returned. «I did not think he would have so much impact. He had been giving him many laps for a while. I had been keeping for me everything I was suffering. I was a little scared or shame. I decided that, as an athlete, with the speaker we have, I wanted to talk about something that many women suffer in silence. Giving visibility and telling my experience in case I could help others, ”he proclaims. And so much. She was written by companions, cyclists and other sports. Also gynecologists and nutritionists “to offer me your help.”
«It is something that is not spoken in the platoon or in women’s sport in general. Just as you talk about a breakage of fibers, a clavicle breakage or any other injury or disease. Why is the ovary or the uterus is not going to speak? It is a taboo subject, it gives as shame or respect to treat it, ”says Ane the climber, that girl to which his father, professor of cycling in the schools of the town, injected in vein the passion. And to which the ports, in which from an early age it developed easily, made it professional.
Ane, which in December turned 34, feels now reborn. Willing to take advantage of this second opportunity that cycling has given him, to achieve his first victory after so many good positions. «I think he will arrive, because I see things differently, because I come from having a bad time. I have changed the way of running. I enjoy more and I am not afraid to lose. Other years cost me more risky, I was more conservative, ”he explains, taking a look at a career in which he traveled the path of” brutal change “in female cycling. «Now there are more teams, more money, the races are broadcast … In my beginnings, I ended and I had to write to my parents to tell them that it was fine. Now there are wages that are good quantities, it has been possible to have a minimum salary. Very great advances, “he had sincere who would have liked to be born” a little later “:” My career would have been different. It would have been easier. When I started it was very difficult to have a reference. You could hardly dream of being professional, because there were no structures. You had to go abroad … ».