What happens when the story you've been telling yourself for ten years unravels over a single glass of wine on the other side of the world?

Annie Elmendorf is a mother of two, a cyclist, an athlete, and a sister. She's also — as she'll tell you herself — someone who has spent most of her life trying to feel at home in her own body. This is a solo episode with Emily; Courtney couldn't make it. And the story Annie tells is one Annie has never told publicly before.

It starts on a Tuesday morning in March, on a Wi-Fi scale that has sixteen years of her data on it, in the middle of a separation, at the end of a couple of dark months. Fifteen pounds gone. All muscle. And a voice on NPR that morning talking about becoming a bodybuilder — Elizabeth Smart, of all people.

To understand how Annie got to that scale, we have to go back. Way back. To a childhood spent gaining and losing more than two hundred pounds. To a gastric bypass in 2010 that changed her life, and then — a year later — introduced her to the specific way alcohol hits a body that no longer has a stomach. "It's like shooting alcohol into your vein," she says. Most people hate that feeling. Annie loved it.

We walk through ten years of sobriety built on fear. The MS bike ride. The triathlons. The Iron Mans. The 200-mile weeks. The Rafa 500. And a single glass of Rioja at a paella dinner in the Canary Islands where — as Annie put it — nobody there knew her. Two weeks later, on a movie theater bathroom floor with her fifteen-year-old son in the theater, her intestine twisted. Three weeks after that, a piece of her small intestine died inside her body. Two weeks in the hospital. And four months later, on blood thinners, she rode across the Pyrenees. On the flight to Barcelona, she ordered a glass of white wine.

Her mother died in June 2023. Annie went to the grocery store that day and bought a twelve-pack of ranch water. What followed was a year and a half of nightly drinking, "controlled" in the way addicts mean when they say the word. Then, in December 2023, a morning she can only describe as divine intervention. Thirty days of treatment in January 2024. Ninety meetings in ninety days. Now — three to five meetings a week, a bodybuilding coach in California, and the possibility of competing in the over-fifty division next fall.

This is an episode about the still quiet voice you spend decades ignoring, about what it costs to finally stop performing wellness, and about the difference between fear-quitting and actually doing the work. Also: why post-gastric-bypass alcohol nearly killed her, why "transfer addiction" is a phrase she can now name out loud, and a stranger in a Texas pickup truck who reminded her that people are also good.

Resources mentioned:
🩷 If you or someone you love is struggling with alcohol — AA has a meeting near you: aa.org

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🌐 https://thatwasnttheplan.com
🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5RNnSi4FzNM3HbTpFErYgP
🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/that-wasnt-the-plan/id1868758889
▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@That_Wasnt_The_Plan
📱 Instagram: @thatwasnttheplan_podcast
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#ThatWasntThePlan #TWTPPodcast #Recovery #Sobriety #Alcoholism #GastricBypass #WomensHealth #Midlife #Perimenopause #Menopause #Bodybuilding #WomensBodybuilding #ElizabethSmart #EnduranceAthlete #Cycling #IronMan #AAmeetings #TransferAddiction #StoryDrivenPodcast

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"Send me all the genitals" ft. Dr. Patty Brennan

What do you do when the wildest sentence of your career is "I was sure it was a worm"?

Dr. Patty Brennan is a Colombian-born, Cornell-trained evolutionary biologist, a full Professor of Biological Sciences at Mount Holyoke College, and the world's leading expert on vertebrate genital coevolution. She's been featured in The New York Times, National Geographic, Scientific American, The Guardian, Slate, and NPR — and she's a featured scientist in the upcoming documentary Second Nature, narrated by Elliot Page. Before all of that, she was one of five sisters in Bogotá who became a biologist because she figured out she could scare her sisters off with bugs.

Patty wrote us a line before we ever spoke that could be the tagline of this entire podcast: "The title of your podcast could be the byline for my scientific career." And she wasn't kidding.

This episode is the whole arc — the girl who talked her way onto a research ketch in the Galapagos to scuba dive around the world (and got no further than the Galapagos, and married the American man she was never going to marry, thirty years ago). The moment she and her crew photographed the first live sighting of a whale that had only ever been known from a skull. The pivot to Cornell for marine mammals, the switch to birds, and the day in the Costa Rican rainforest when she thought she'd found a parasite and instead discovered a career. In 2013, Fox News, Sean Hannity, and Sarah Palin came for her NSF-funded research. She hid under her desk for a week — and then wrote back. What happened next was not the plan.

Also: why females across the animal kingdom have weapons nobody was looking at, why 3% of birds have penises and the rest don't, why the full three-dimensional structure of the human clitoris wasn't mapped until the mid-1990s, dolphins as sexual harassers, Elliot Page's production company, and the Harlequin duck — the one duck that is not, in Patty's words, a "rapist duck."

Watch or request a screening of Second Nature:
🎬 secondnaturedocumentary.com

Books Patty mentioned:
📖 Vagina Obscura by Rachel Gross
📖 Bitch by Lucy Cooke
📖 Poking the Squid by Perry Ireland

Follow the show:
📧 thatwasnttheplanpod@gmail.com
🌐 www.thatwasnttheplan.com
📱 Instagram: @thatwasnttheplan_podcast
🎵 TikTok: @that_wasnt_the_plan
▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@That_Wasnt_The_Plan

If today's episode made you laugh, made you think, or made you text a science-curious friend — please rate, review, and share. It's the single biggest thing that helps us grow.

#ThatWasntThePlan #TWTPPodcast #DuckPenises #EvolutionaryBiology #WomenInSTEM #WomenInScience #MountHolyoke #Cornell #BasicScience #ScienceCommunication #SecondNatureDoc #ElliotPage #ColombianScientist #Galapagos #Genitalia #Vagina #DolphinSex #EvolutionaryBiology #StoryDrivenPodcast

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What happens when the paperwork for your son's college applications cracks open something you thought you'd buried 35 years ago?

Lucas Smith is a Colorado-native-turned-Seattleite, a software engineer of 15+ years working at the intersection of AI and tech, a multi-instrumentalist, an avid cyclist, a master of the smoker (the grill kind), and the host of the Not Retired Yet podcast. And in about a month, he and his wife are driving their only son six hours south and dropping him off at college.

What was supposed to be college paperwork became something else entirely. Somewhere between forms and financial aid, Lucas started losing sleep, getting angry at nothing, and couldn't figure out why. Until he traced it back to being 18 himself — the year his parents split, the family disintegrated, and a version of him was left to raise himself on his friend Dave's floor. This is an episode about handing your kid every single thing you never got. About Gen X and the eye of the hurricane between launching kids and aging parents. About unreliable memory, the sandwich generation, marriages that survive the empty nest (and the ones that don't), and Lucas's very honest admission that it was never part of the plan to live this long.

Also: a 1984 drum machine, why our brains don't remember the diapers, and what a "pack horse" does when he finally has to plan.

Follow Lucas & check out his podcast:
🎧 Not Retired Yet — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/not-retired-yet/id1823048074

Follow the show:
📧 thatwasnttheplanpod@gmail.com
🌐 www.thatwasnttheplan.com
📱 Instagram: @thatwasnttheplan_podcast
🎵 TikTok: @that_wasnt_the_plan
▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@That_Wasnt_The_Plan

If today's episode moved you, made you laugh, or made you text a Gen X friend — please rate, review, and share. It's the single biggest thing that helps us grow.

#ThatWasntThePlan #TWTPPodcast #NotRetiredYet #GenX #EmptyNest #LatchkeyKids #MidlifePivots #SandwichGeneration #FatherAndSon #CollegeDropOff #SeattlePodcast #Memory #Fatherhood #GenXParents

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