Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man's World

by Lauren Fleshman

A culture of compliance leads to disassociation from yourself, from your body’s signals of hunger, fatigue, and pain.

A culture of compliance and coachability muted the alarm bells going off inside the minds of countless parents and other adults who could have intervened.

The message to me at fourteen was that compliance, coachability, and even beauty might be more important than health and safety. As I watched the gymnastics team hold their bouquets, medals draped around their necks, it became clear what it took to be beloved.

Anyone and everyone working with female athletes must be able to talk about puberty and periods. They are a fact, an embodied experience shaping the daily lives of half the squad. And frankly, the stakes are too high not to.

Now that we can follow female athletes into older age for the first time in history, the data shows that former athletes are going on to experience higher rates of osteoporosis and bone fractures than their non-athlete peers. Monitoring menstrual health is the first line of defense against all of this harm. And again, nobody talks about it.

I looked at Kim’s smile in the oversized poster on the Foot Locker course, and then I looked at her clavicles. I looked at the long line of posters of champions and wondered how many of them hurt themselves to win. DeLong had said, “There are no shortcuts without consequences. Keep your eye on the big picture. Get a little better every year. Consistency will put you on the top eventually.” I wanted to believe him.

I lost consciousness of my body, my breathing, my collapsing running form, and became nothing but atoms directed forward. I inched ahead in the final meters and held her off across the line.

Erin’s confidence as she pulled up alongside me was quiet, like a smirk.

I was becoming the best by putting myself among the best. I was competitive;

Kicking acorns on the way back to my dorm, I thought about all the examples of men accomplishing things, and the women behind them in supporting roles. I thought of my parents. I thought about Vin working long hours and traveling most weekends while his wife, Betty, raised their children and managed the household. I thought about how nearly all the famous coaches and top professors I knew of were men in similar positions. Women made great men possible. What made great women possible? Avoiding the vortex of a man’s ambition? Being alone?

In the home I’d come from, there was only room for one person’s needs in a relationship; I worried if I set the expectation of prioritizing Jesse’s, I would get swallowed up.

“Excellence benefits from working alongside excellence. That matters more than any specialized workout at this point.” They’d take turns using their unique strengths to pull the others along, and it left me buzzing in their wake.

I was thriving in ways I now understand were related to adequate food intake through female developmental changes. My

Before long, people stopped trying to connect with her. She was there but not there, cautiously observed, but mostly ignored, like so many people exhibiting signs of mental illness in view of others.

People loved Pre not because of what he did, but how he did it. He famously said, “A lot of people run a race to see who is fastest. I run to see who has the most guts.”

It was a resolve to execute the plan without attachment to the result. It was about valuing the guts more than the win.

The oversized image of Steve Prefontaine hung there with the quote, “To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.” A Nike swoosh dashed below it.

“Integrity is doing the things you say you’re going to do.”

What makes me cringe now is Vin’s—and my—inclination to place blame on the women, without any acknowledgment of the forces at play for us. The outcomes he described—eating disorders, self-harm, self-sabotage—predictably show up on teams all over the world. But instead of asking why, we shake our heads in frustration and continue to blame the women. These behaviors look like personal choices, but they are choices made within a particular sporting environment that women had to fight to get access to but did not get a chance to create.

He knew that every time we said one thing and did another, a little part of us died.

Caroline Criado Perez discusses this ubiquitous cultural pattern in her prizewinning book Invisible Women,

They also make the idea of an ideal race weight totally absurd. As female athletes allow their tendons, ligaments, muscles, and bones to adjust to their new strength-to-weight ratio, they are likely to experience what I was experiencing: a performance plateau or dip. This is normal and healthy, but sport hasn’t been taught to see and respect difference.

Nobody has told them that the record holders and medal winners are grown-ass women, not girls, all of whom had tough years once upon

What my team needed was to be seen. We needed our coaches to be educated on female physiology, to affirm our body changes as normal, and to safeguard our healthy menstrual cycles. We needed them to identify the predictable landmines of negative body image and eating disorder culture. We needed language to talk openly about these issues without stigma. We needed athletic departments to be armed with official policies for preventing and treating eating disorders to maximize full recoveries. We needed staff to be measured and rewarded based on the mental and physical health of the athletes in their care, and the number of women who graduated college still loving to run. Instead, we were told that we lacked integrity.

I had no idea she’d never had her period, leaving her exposed to the forces of running without the estrogen levels needed to build bone density. I wondered if anyone had ever asked her about it or cared.

What kind of legacy do you want to leave behind on this team?” Dena asked us at the season kickoff meeting at my

“Okay. There’s no secret to the training we do. Keep doing what you’re doing there, and I’ll push you a little more. But you’re going to have to do the right things when nobody is looking. Stay focused. No distractions. You need to eat healthy, sleep nine hours, take naps, stretch, do all the little things.”

It was the kind of control you see modeled in sports movies, the boxer swallowing raw eggs, the noble removal of pleasure, intuition, and community from the act of eating.

It was more than the expected decreased energy from eating less. I felt more sensitive to the discomfort of the intervals, and unable to catch my breath between repetitions. New research shows that decreased pain tolerance and compromised recovery are hallmark effects of menstrual dysfunction.

you can’t determine someone’s health by what she looks like, and I wasn’t out of the woods yet. In a state of low energy availability, there is so much going on below the surface that nobody can see: bones are losing density, muscle tissue isn’t healing as quickly, the reproductive axis is being suppressed, metabolism is slowing. . . . I thought I’d pulled back in time, but it wasn’t that simple. That last national title would come at a cost, but nobody knew it yet.

One definition of privilege is who gets to make mistakes, and Jon and I would be treated very differently for not qualifying out of the rounds. I had been so upset about being paid less than the men, but now I knew there were people who had it worse than white women in pro sports.

What you choose to pay attention to changes your behavior, and I gradually found myself obsessing over the things I recorded, moving workout days or times around the weather, adhering to a strict sleeping schedule that isolated me, and eating perfectly measured portions of the “right” foods. If I was unable to achieve the prescribed paces of an important workout, it would create so much stress that my chest would tighten, flaring up my asthma.

If there was one thing I should have been recording and obsessing over, it was my menstrual cycle. I no longer trusted the medical recommendations given to women now that I knew how little research was done on them.

It never dawned on me that the weight listed on athlete profiles could be inaccurate, or experienced once for a couple weeks, or recorded during a year that ended in injury. I didn’t know that a woman’s body could perform at a world-class level at a diverse weight range. I wish someone had told me, but I don’t think anyone knew.

I ignored my hunger and called it discipline. I ignored my lost period and called it adaptation. I ignored my loneliness and called it independence.

In that critical moment about two-thirds of the way through the race when you’re hurting more than you’ve ever hurt before, your job is simple: You say yes. You don’t worry if you can maintain it. You say yes and extend the game a little longer, and a little longer, giving yourself a shot. At that critical moment with a mile to go, my confidence was preoccupied with a heated debate as to whether I belonged there at all. It sucked all the power out of my legs, leaving me shuffling along toward a distant last.

“If you let me develop . . .” There could be a “Just Don’t Do It” for sacrificing your health in the name of short-term success.

Having managed to tap back into who I was for that final lap, I quickly grew furious that I had ever lost her and was determined to never do so again.

The idea of all of this was that repeated thoughts become beliefs, beliefs inform actions, and actions repeated over time create an identity. To change your identity, you must start by changing your thoughts.

the simple pleasure of mastering a skill . . . any pursuit of excellence had to center these moments of joy, or it wasn’t worth doing.

myself. “I want to tell a sports story in a different, more human, more honest way, in real time, and not wait for someone else to tell it. “I want to tell it as I go, and not wait to see if I’m ‘successful’ or not, because I want to expand the definition of success beyond traditional outcomes. “I want to put my experience to good use with an advice column where I answer people’s running questions, filling the chasm between professional and recreational runners. “I want to see if my theory is correct that we are underestimating sports audiences. That humanizing elite athletes is the path to deeper engagement and investment. “I want to leave the sport better than I found it.”

Sometimes comebacks don’t line up with the industry timeline. Normal people not brainwashed by elite sport culture understood that. That’s life. I was on my own timeline, keeping my eyes on my own lane.

I dug into my bag, pulled out my regular running shorts, and changed into them. Looking in the mirror again, the negative voice disappeared. For so many years, if I felt self-conscious in my uniform, I thought I was the problem. A real pro wore buns, the logic went.

there were only four women in the world between a medal and me. I wanted it, but I didn’t need it, which made the thought of chasing after it all the more fun.

There were so many young female athletes struggling with the same old issues: body image, eating disorders, depression, lost periods, stress fractures, mysterious injury cycles, anxiety.

It seemed that things were only getting worse with social media. There were so many coaches and parents complicit in the harm, most of them well meaning. I felt

powerless. I partnered up with my friend Ro McGettigan, an Olympic steeplechaser from Ireland, and together we self-published a training diary for girls. Our template encouraged users to record not only the usual measurables like mileage, but also things girls are often taught to ignore, such as their menstrual cycles and moods. We included sports psychology te...

The professional sports industry was still stuck on the traditional masculine ideals of aggression and competition that drove the creation of organized sports in the late nineteenth century, long before women were allowed to participate. Winning still mattered, of course, but it wasn’t the only thing that mattered to sports fans. Being a whole person was powerful, but the economics of sports (defined and maintained by men) didn’t leave much space for that. Contracts penalized the rocky road inherent to life, especially the one commonly traveled by women.

What do you do when things fall apart? How do you continue trying when the likelihood of success is so slim? How do you make yourself vulnerable after heartache?

I found these stories in literature, in the lives of fictional characters, but I couldn’t find these real-time stories in sports. Athletes weren’t telling them. They weren’t talking unless they were winning, reflecting back on rough times long gone. I needed material that would help me take one more step forward without the promise of a happy ending. So I wrote it myself.