For most women, there comes a time when they realize they’ve hit middle age with a bang.
She could be experiencing a menopausal breakdown and throwing her husband’s dinner against the wall, as Rod Stewart’s wife Penny Lancaster recently admitted.
For sports presenter Gabby Logan, it was looking at her face in the mirror at age 46. Seeing her wrinkled cheeks, she saw that despite feeling young and energetic, “the juiciness of youth had all but disappeared” from her complexion.
Shortly after that, Gabby launched her podcast The Mid.Point, where she speaks with celebrity guests and experts about the challenges and dilemmas faced at this stage of life.
It means that women approach her on the street to talk about their own midlife problems.
On her podcast The Mid.Point, sportscaster Gabby Logan speaks with celebrity guests and experts about the challenges and dilemmas faced in midlife.
Gabby with her husband, retired rugby player Kenny Logan. They met 25 years ago on a night out with friends in west London and Kenny proposed a year later.
“Before the podcast, I always had men wanting to talk to me about sports,” she says. “These women love hearing the conversations and people they’ve seen on TV, who may seem like they have a wonderful, glamorous life, but are going through the same things as them. It’s that common experience that’s so reassuring.”
“If you’re Rod Stewart’s wife and you’re talking about throwing dinner against the wall because you’re in a menopausal rage, then it can happen to anyone.”
Four years after the podcast launched, Gabby, 51, has published a book, The Midpoint Plan, which compiles the best insights from the podcast, divided into chapters covering everything from mental health and fitness to beauty and finances.
There are also episodes that speak directly about love, sex and relationships, and it’s here that Gabby, best known for being a presenter of major sporting events (she now presents the BBC’s coverage of the Paris Olympics), is surprisingly frank.
She talks about her own loss of libido in middle age and how her husband’s devastating prostate cancer diagnosis could have had a serious impact on her sex life.
In 2021, retired rugby player and devoted husband Kenny Logan was listening to his wife’s podcast with guest Davina McCall, where they discussed falling hormone levels.
Concerned that his own testosterone levels might be declining, he decided to request a blood test. The results revealed that while his hormones were fine, he had an elevated PSA (prostate-specific antigen) level. Further tests revealed prostate cancer.
The decision was made to remove the prostate to prevent a recurrence, but the radical procedure carried the risk of Kenny losing erectile function.
Thankfully that turned out not to be the case and once Kenny was out of the woods, the couple did a brutally frank episode of the Mid.Point podcast about their experience.
On the show, they joke about their rather comical first attempt at sex after surgery, with Gabby impatiently telling Kenny, “It’s not working!” and him complaining, “You’re not giving me a chance!”
Gabby wants to point out that sometimes the simplest and most practical gesture can be just as romantic as flowers. The key is to keep working on the relationship.
“Kenny totally guided me in that regard,” Gabby says. “I wanted to be open and honest because that’s the best way to connect with other men and help them. He was lucky that his functionality (my kids hate me using that word) came back in about nine months, but there were times when he was afraid he would never get it back. I could see a lot of dark thoughts in him. That surprised him.”
Shortly before her diagnosis, Gabby had been experiencing her own issues in the form of a sudden loss of libido. At the time, she had no idea that this was a classic symptom of perimenopause.
‘Before I started HRT, we’d always had a very healthy relationship… and then it just wasn’t as important. I didn’t feel the same excitement about things. I had no idea it was perimenopause; I didn’t even notice that my periods had started to slow down.’
Gabby has started a regimen of hormone replacement therapy that includes testosterone, the hormone she believes has restored her charm but scares many women.
“We have a lot more testosterone in our bodies than women realize,” she says. “After talking to several doctors, I didn’t feel uncomfortable about it at all. You have to have a lot of testosterone circulating in your body before you start growing a beard and speaking in a baritone voice! I put some gel on the inside of my arm and now I’m getting some dark hairs that I never had before, but I’m just getting rid of them.”
With Kenny’s parts back in working order and Gabby’s libido restored, much as it may embarrass her 19-year-old twins, Reuben and Lois, it appears normal service has been restored.
“Having sex has many positive health benefits,” says Gabby.
“The message the experts on the podcast conveyed was ‘use it or lose it’. There are some long-term relationships where people are happy to let the physical side go, but I always wonder if one person is as happy with it as the other.”
Gabby and Kenny met 25 years ago during a night out with friends in West London. The attraction was instant and less than a year later he proposed to her atop the Wallace Monument in Stirling. The couple have tried to keep those bold romantic gestures present in their relationship ever since.
“I hope Kenny says I’m a romantic,” says Gabby. “For his 50th birthday, the kids and I made a piece of art. We created about 30 A4 canvases and each one featured something that was meaningful to him. Some were montages, some painted by us, some were written words.
‘It didn’t cost much, but it took a lot of time and dedication and a lot of secret sessions at my artist friend’s studio and Kenny was really moved.’
Kenny isn’t a bad actor either. Two years ago, on their wedding anniversary, he was on top form. Gabby says: ‘We were going out for dinner and when we got to the end of the street, my daughter called me to say she had to come home because one of the dogs was sick.
“We went back to the house, where there is a small grove of trees. Kenny had set up a table. He planned everything with the kids and they cooked for us and acted as waiters. It was one of the most beautiful evenings of my life, very romantic and very thoughtful.”
Gabby insists that sometimes the simplest and most practical gesture can be just as romantic as flowers. The key is to keep working on the relationship.
‘You wouldn’t pull a rusty old lawnmower out of the garage that you haven’t used in a decade and expect it to work perfectly, would you? The same goes for a relationship if you don’t put your energy into maintaining it.
‘A lot of people get divorced at this stage in life, once the kids and all the things that kept them together as a team start to fall away.
“Most people who have been married for a long time go through ups and downs. Getting married and everything being perfect for the next 30 years? I don’t think so!”
There’s something distinctly relatable about Logan, whether she’s analyzing athletic performance in track and field or, ahem, in a more domestic realm. Maybe it’s the bracing honesty of the middle-aged woman at the top of her game.
“It doesn’t mean you don’t care or that you can go around being a complete asshole to people,” he agrees. “I think it’s the realization that you can’t please everyone and you can’t live your life trying.”
Gabby Logan’s Midpoint Plan is now available.