Alexi Pappas’ Decision to Freeze Her Eggs Was a Gift to Herself

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As an Olympic hopeful, I was trained to seek out no insurance for my career. I committed to trying hard at all costs, believing in the impossible, and never giving up. This mindset took me all the way to the Olympics, where I ran a Greek national record and personal best in the 10,000 meters in 2016. It was and still is a dream come true. I love my Olympic family. I don’t regret my pursuit. But I do regret applying the same tactics I used to get to the Olympics to other parts of my life. This approach gave me everything when it came to athletics, but it nearly cost me my life outside of sports.

Shortly after the Olympics, when I should have slowed down and let myself decompress from the years-long chase of what I wanted to be when I grew up, I ignored my unease and pushed through the natural sense of loss anyone might feel after achieving a lifelong dream. I tried to grit through my post-Olympic depression; my accomplishment was proof that I could grit through anything. It didn’t work. I began to experience high-risk suicidal thoughts and ideation. It was the first time in my life that grit was not the solution to my problem.

“Grit is what’s left when nothing’s left” is a quote I came up with that is printed on hundreds of inspirational posters that adorn the bedroom walls of my young followers. It’s a beautiful idea when applied to a high schooler muscling through a cross-country race in the pouring rain for the sake of her team, but when misapplied, it can be harmful. What about the areas of life where I don’t want nothing left?

There are a lot of things I don’t want to completely run out of: Hope. Bone density. Olive oil. Money. And eggs, for my one-day babies. I want those to be left when I want them.

For female Olympic athletes, our lives are dictated by four-year cycles, a timeline we can’t control. Every decision is guided by this cycle. Sometimes, athletes manage to fit having children and other non-athletic milestones within the confines of this calendar. This choice comes with its beauties, benefits, and challenges. This choice was not for me. For many other women in my cohort, when our Olympic days are done, we orient ourselves around a new timeline: the biological clock. And luckily, science now allows women a little more control over their biological clocks.

I decided to freeze my eggs in my early thirties because I want kids—someday, but not right now. I know many women relate to this situation. But very few women are talking about it, publicly at least. I felt uncomfortable sharing my choice to freeze my eggs beyond my closest circle. No one had confided in me about their experiences with the process, so why would I be the first to share? Talking about egg freezing means that I am investing in insurance for myself, and insurance is far from sexy! Insurance is insurance!

Last year, my life took a turn I did not anticipate. I chose to no longer be married. I’d always thought of family planning as a team sport, but at the end of the day, I walk this earth by myself. I want that insurance I never thought I’d need. And I encourage any woman, whether you’re single or partnered, whether you think you know what you want in the next five years or you have no idea, to consider freezing your eggs.

I worried that publicly sharing my decision about freezing my eggs might shift my outward-facing identity for fans, sponsors, and even myself. Instead of chasing an Olympic dream—the foundation upon which I built my life up until recently—I’m chasing what a lot of people want: kids.

My unique, compelling public-facing image is critical to my livelihood and identity. Part of me was concerned that what I wanted next would seem like just a regular-sized dream. My personality—the constructed identity I present to the world—is built on chasing momentous dreams, and falling hard but always getting back up. I wrote a whole book about this subject, called Bravey. But my true self, who I am when I am not performing, protecting, or filtering myself, has big dreams and also wants to participate in the whole human experience, including possibly being a mother one day. 

I lost my own mother to suicide when I was four years old. I survived that experience by cultivating a belief that I had some kind of superhero origin story. I pushed myself to become exceptional. But deep inside, I want to stand out and fit in all in the same lifetime. I still need to get comfortable with the idea of my own regular-sized dreams.

I decided to talk about this experience openly and publicly because freezing my eggs is a gift I gave myself. By freezing my eggs, I am doing the one thing I could never do as an athlete but that I can do as a woman: buy time.

All athletes have stories of lost time. For runners, lost time is baked into the DNA of our sport. The one who wastes the least time—who runs the fastest—wins. It’s also baked into training. I lost time after the 2016 Olympics when I had to take a step away from the sport to recover from my post-Olympic depression. While I am grateful for the perspective and skills that I gained in that period, it was also a loss. It is always a loss to step away from your momentous life in order to save it. You do it because you have to.

And while athletes must become champions of rewriting lost time in our own favor, of figuring out our silver lining tucked in each story of loss, we are always losing time. We are always battling the feeling of being behind.

For now, buying time by freezing my eggs is the best thing I can do to love myself.

I started the process last year, in 2023, and learned from my doctor that I was very fertile. Mostly, I was relieved to hear this. I ran intense, 120-plus-mile weeks for years with no injuries, but I did not know the long-term effects of Olympic-level distance running. There have been so few generations of female elite runners that we can’t say definitively whether running is good or bad for our egg count. But some female runners have openly shared about struggling with fertility.

At the same time, I also felt what I call a “phantom thought”—a thought I no longer believe to be valid—that my fertility was an indication that I must not have pushed my body as far as it could have gone in training. I’ve known coaches who celebrated missed periods, low body fat, and late puberty. This planted an unreasonable, untrue, antiquated idea, deep in the back of my mind: that baby-making capabilities meant I had not reached my athletic potential. I thought I’d chased that idea out a long time ago, because it’s ridiculous. But there it was, poking me in the doctor’s office. I shooed it away.

I finally decided to share the journey publicly with a selfie from a fertility check-up. I was wearing a checkered mini skirt and a leopard print jacket instead of my usual sweatpants. I took the selfie when I was in the stirrups and it looked exactly how I felt: confident. I was doing exactly the right thing for me.

When I posted the photo on Instagram, none of my fears came true. I received overwhelming support. Jane Smith, the head of digital marketing at my new sponsor, Merrell, even shared her own intimate experiences with the process with me. I took her disclosure to mean that she supports me in achieving my professional and personal goals on my own timeline. She embraced me as a whole person, which isn’t always the case with athlete-brand relationships.

For me, talking about egg freezing does more than just spread awareness—it can also open the door to celebrating something with a community that is usually celebrated completely alone, or not celebrated at all. If you do freeze your eggs, I encourage you to tell your community. If you’re thinking about freezing your eggs, please reach out to someone for more information. I wish you all the time in the world to become who you are and to get the things you desire. Freezing eggs is like canning fruit or preserving lemons, grown this year to be enjoyed another year.

As for what I desire, I am not exactly sure where my life is going. I feel like I made it to one of my north stars, the Olympics, and now I am seeing what else there is in the big, vast sky. I am still an athlete, it just looks different. I will be at the Paris Olympics this summer as the “Olympian mentor,” running in the Marathon Pour Tous on the Olympic Marathon course, making content, and supporting my fellow Olympians. This year, I started my own company, a creative studio also called Bravey, and I am launching a podcast about mentorship called Mentor Buffet, within Rich Roll’s new media network. The show is called Mentor Buffet. I am writing a new book and a play. I am still running, just in different ways.

One thing is definitely true: I no longer equate depletion with success. I operate differently now, emphasizing my safety and well-being over delayed gratification and struggle. That also means taking care of my future self as a whole woman with more than one goal.

For some goals, like making it to the Olympics, we need to suspend our disbelief. We must literally ignore the impracticality and the implausibility. It is beautiful to live in a wishland like this until the dream becomes real—to believe anything is possible if we just hang on long enough. That is how many sports miracles come true. But for other goals, we need to live in reality.

My own mom, as I understand it, was one of the first and only working mothers in her community, a task that grew even more difficult when her physical and mental health dipped beyond the manageable. She was a mother of two, a self-taught computer programmer, bipolar with manic depression. She tried to keep going at the same pace when her severe scoliosis led to an addiction to painkillers and drug abuse. She did not have time for pain, so she bought time with drugs. She felt pressure to be it all, all at once. And then she chose to be nothing.

I miss her. Maybe she just needed a bit more time. I want to be and do it all, but I don’t want to do it all at once. I want to do some things now and some things later. Most of all, if I want to be a mother, I want to do it on my own time. I don’t know a better way to honor myself than that.

If You’re Considering Freezing Your Eggs, Here’s What I Wish I Knew Before I Began:

It is expensive. I found a clinic running a 30th-anniversary special, and the procedure was half-off. Often, in the United States, it costs about $15,000. Most health insurance doesn’t cover the process, but a small handful of companies will now cover it for their employees. Try to find a program whose costs are included in a one-time flat rate, so that you don’t need to pull out a credit card every time you visit the doctor. It’s draining to feel uncertain about what it will ultimately cost.

You’ll want to avoid travel. The process, not including recovery, took six weeks for me. I found that I wanted the comfort of my own bed when my ovaries grew from the size of almonds to the size of grapefruits in a matter of weeks. Some of the hormones needed refrigeration, and I needed to report to many doctor appointments for blood work and ultrasounds to make sure I was on track for my retrieval.

A helpful assistant makes injections easier. I recommend finding someone to help you mix the various hormones with their powders, load them into the needles, and help inject you every night during the twelve days leading into your surgery. There’s also one shot I needed to inject into my belly at exactly 12:30 A.M. to trigger ovulation. My boyfriend did all of this for me. Also: use ice before and after shots!

You’ll recover faster if you drink a ton of fluids. A friend advised me to load up on coconut water and electrolytes and to avoid simple sugars for a few days after the procedure to avoid additional bloating.

But you should still plan to rest afterward. My body hurt more after the procedure than before, which is common. I should not have tried to go to a rave the day after because it actually hurt to stand, since the inflammation and pressure below my belly was so intense. My doctor told me I would know when I could run, which I thought meant a week. But my nerves ended up freaking out and took me out for months afterward. Maybe you will feel great and I hope you do, but I took this recovery time as a much-needed break from running and leaned into more creative things. Also: consider finding a pelvic floor PT to help you recover more quickly.

It’s normal to feel a little down. I felt depressed after the retrieval, likely due in part to a sudden crash in hormones. This is something I shared on social media, then deleted, then reshared, because I am trying to stop reinforcing for myself that mental pain and challenges are something to be ashamed of and suppress. I wish I had been more aware of and prepared for this reality before I went into the process. But like all marshmallows, we can reinflate in time.