Jo Moseley wants to offer hope to those going through their menopause years

The author of Stand-Up Paddleboarding in Great Britain may seem an unlikely interviewee for this Menopause Focus. But Jo Moseley, 57, encapsulates the new horizons that can lie beyond the sometimes hellish menopause years.

Moseley, who lives in Skipton, North Yorkshire, published the title, her first, last year. She tells me via Zoom that it would never have happened if she hadn’t put herself on what she calls “The Priority List”. She experienced severe perimenopause symptoms, including extreme anxiety, brain fog and sleeplessness, for the best part of a decade, at a time when she was already facing other challenges. “The perimenopause broke me when I was already down: I was a single mother of teenage sons, and both my parents were going through chemotherapy—my mum subsequently died in 2013.” When she hit rock-bottom—crying in the supermarket—she realised she had to think about “how I was looking after me”.

After a friend gave her an indoor rowing machine, Moseley rowed a million metres and raised £10,000 for Macmillan Cancer Support. “I realised that the exercise was helping me both with my grief and my perimenopause symptoms.” While recovering from a knee injury in 2016, she resolved to spend at least half an hour exercising outdoors every day; on 24th September of that year, she tried stand-up paddleboarding for the first time in the Lake District. “And I just loved it.” In the introduction to her book—an engagingly written and richly illustrated guide to the best places to paddleboard in the UK—she writes: “Yes I fell, and yes, I doubted myself as we made our way across the water, but I also smiled and laughed more than I had in months.”

Anyone going through menopause needs someone to say: ‘It gets better.’ I really want to offer that hope, because I don’t see it in the conversation at all

Still, it was a while before Moseley found the confidence to really push the boat out. She hatched a plan to paddleboard 128 miles through the 21 locks of the Leeds & Liverpool Canal: the responses of people she told about it varied from, “That sounds really boring”, to, “Sounds a bit much for a woman of your age”. Moseley says: “I was just shy of my 52nd birthday and my confidence level still wasn’t very high. So I went, ‘Yeah, you’re probably right, maybe it’s just too difficult.’ For three years I put that dream away. But I kept feeding it.”

Fast-forward three years, and Moseley became the first woman to stand-up paddleboard coast to coast across Northern England, picking up litter as she went (her book has a strong environmental thread) and raising money for surf therapy charity The Wave Project and environmental charity The 2 Minute Foundation. A film about her journey, “Brave Enough: A Journey Home to Joy”, has been screened at various film festivals and online to critical acclaim.

What changed in those three years? “In the interim, I’d lost five girlfriends in the space of six months—four to cancer and one to a heart condition. They were all such vibrant, creative women. I just thought, life’s too short to care what other people say. So I set myself the goal not just of paddleboarding from Liverpool to Leeds, but to the other side of the country”. Moseley, who reached menopause around a month after completing her journey, subsequently launched her podcast, “The Joy of SUP: The Paddleboarding Sunshine Podcast”. She has also spoken at the Royal Geographical Society, and to numerous Women’s Institute groups to try and get more women into paddleboarding.

“I’m really proud of that because paddleboarding is bringing a whole new demographic into watersports

The latest staging post on this life renaissance is the publication of Stand-Up Paddleboarding in Great Britain. “Having had the idea for the book, I just kept thinking: ‘If I don’t pitch it, somebody else is going to write it, and they might not celebrate the paddleboarding community in the way that I want to’.” So, spurred on by one of her sons, Moseley approached Nibbie-winning publisher Vertebrate, who got on board after she convinced them to do a guide solely to paddleboarding, rather than one also including kayaking and canoeing, as it had initially envisaged. “I’m really proud of that because paddleboarding is bringing a whole new demographic into watersports,”

As well as being passionate about paddleboarding, Moseley is also a huge advocate for the possibilities of life post-menopause. “My post-menopause years have become a time of creativity, courage and a renewed sense of self and purpose. Anyone going through menopause needs someone to say: ‘It gets better.’ I really want to offer that hope, because I don’t see it in the conversation at all.”