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

by Lauren Fleshman

I made a commitment to grow up and win and fail in public in my little world of running, because I wanted to provide at least one person’s accurate representation of chasing big goals for the next person who searched the internet during a low point. I hoped it would inspire other pro athletes to do the same, and it did. But the biggest winner in the...

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“No . . . I get to decide what the point is,” I said. “I can’t tell if you’re being wise or delusional.” “Me neither.” A chuckle ran through the room. “This isn’t the ending I dreamed of, sure. But when you realize failing doesn’t make you a failure, you give yourself permission to try all sorts of things.”

This could have been so different. It was hard to breathe. Somewhere, living in my body, was the alternate story where I won it all. I didn’t want this story.

“Okay, just for fun, tell me why you should do it.” “Because I hate that I felt good about it until everyone else showed up. I hate giving that power to anyone. I’ve spent so much time writing about how it’s all about the journey or whatever, and now I feel full of shit.” “It’s easy to say it’s all about the journey when you’re winning,” he said. “With the arena and all the excitement . . . I do it for me, but I’m also a performer, Jesse. I wanted to show them what I can do.” “You can still show them who you are.”

Everyone has this inner critic sabotaging them, but women especially experience this, as we are squeezed from all sides. We presented a concept for a product line that helped women shift their mindset away from negative chatter and anchor it back onto themselves. It was a way to stay with yourself rooted in elite sport, but applicable to everyone. We delivered a case for a woman-centered marketing approach that diverged significantly from the norm. Nike Brand loved it. The women’s category loved it. Girl Effect, the nonprofit affiliated with Nike that empowered girls through sport, loved it. Nobody seemed to know how we’d get paid, but the easiest business path would be if we were sponsored athletes on the roster. My contract with Nike was up in a couple of months. Ro’s New Balance contract was up soon, too. Feeling so much support for our idea within the company, I felt confident when I walked into Cap’s office that he would finally see the fullness of what I had to offer. I

Brand-new research, which Ro went on to help with years later, shows that elite female athlete performances are no worse post-baby than pre-baby when they are given time to recover from pregnancy and birth. Nothing can change until those in power see female-bodied experiences as deserving of their own norms.

Oiselle,

“Think of all the women in their early twenties who never find out how good they can be,” she said.

As much as I loved my son, I often struggled to feel at home as a mother, and I resented the way my life was disproportionately affected by our choice to have a child. Mothering put the fact of my womanhood front and center in my

The picture of me in my racing uniform spread through the larger women’s running community and created an unexpected reaction online. “I can’t believe she had a baby three months ago.” “This makes me feel like shit.” “How did she get her body back so fast?” “What’s wrong with my body?” Women face immense pressure to experience pregnancy like leave-no-trace camping, with the goal being zero evidence on the body that it occurred at all. I felt sick that my photo reinforced that ideal, which was the last thing I wanted.

It was a small victory, but a reminder that it was so much easier to resist with a flock of women behind you.

Readers I heard from were unwinding trauma from simply being women in the world, or their sport experiences, or their daughters’ sport experiences; almost none of these athletes were elite. It helped me see how broad the problem was, how predictable, and it increased the urgency I felt to make sports a more empowering environment for women and girls.

Unsure how to effect policy change, I tried to use honest storytelling as preventative medicine, and social media as zinc to stop a cold before it gets too bad.

Muse Camp, organized in Bend by Amanda Stuermer, the founder

I was able to hear these messages we tell ourselves for what they are: violence.

Ever since Title IX opened the doors to our participation, there have been countless women walking around carrying the wounds of their experiences in sport. When I thought about sports as one of the largest institutions in our culture, I saw the role it played in the bigger picture and knew we could and must do better.

What does it look like to center women in the creation of an alternative professional model? Can you do it that way and still be successful?

We need coach job descriptions to be compatible with having children so fewer women leave coaching, and so coaches of all genders have the ability to be active partners and parents. We need breast education and a free sports bra for every middle schooler who wants one. We need adults to deal with their own issues around food and body so they don’t pass them on to the children and young adults in their care. We need to comb through the rule books of all the sports and eliminate existing rules mandating uniform styles known to increase self-consciousness and lower body satisfaction, and explicitly permit alternative options designed around optimizing movement and body confidence.

Laurie Wagner’s “Wild Writing”

participation, University of Portsmouth’s 2016 comprehensive survey of more than two thousand schoolgirls from ages eleven to seventeen provided critical insights into breast development as a lived experience. Bras for Girls is a nonprofit providing breast education and sports bras to middle schoolers, a simple intervention you can support that has enormous impact. A free sports bra should be standard-issue equipment in middle school for every person who needs it. For comprehensive information about girls’ sports participation, the Women’s Sports Foundation is a great resource. They use research, advocacy, and community impact to maximize girls’ sports participation, and they identify what a lot of the barriers are.

Analysis of performance development for male and female athletes through puberty was presented in a digestible way by Espen Tønnessen et al.; their 2015 paper published by PLOS One, “Performance Development in Adolescent Track and Field Athletes According to Age, Sex and Sport Discipline,” provides data about when performance paths diverge, why they do, and for how long. The charts in this paper are the visual representation of my experiences in chapters two and three. The book Roar by Dr. Stacy Sims provides an incredible overview of female-specific performance variables. Emma Hilton and Tommy Lundberg’s 2021 paper called “Transgender Women in the Female Category of Sport: Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage” published in Sports Medicine is where I got the specific percentages for sex-based performance differences across sports and activities. While the science of sex-based differences as they relate to testosterone exposure throughout puberty is widely accepted as fact, this is not a justification for trans athlete exclusion. Rebecca Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis wrote a fantastic piece in Scientific American in 2019 called “4 Myths about Testosterone,” highlighting the ways testosterone is misinterpreted and misused in sport policy.

To bolster my understanding of support—or lack thereof—for athletes’ mental health, I referenced “The American College of Sports Medicine Statement on Mental Health Challenges for Athletes” from 2021. The NCAA’s failures were covered well by Wendell Barnhouse in the Global Sport Matters article “NCAA Faces Uphill Battle Getting Mental Health Care to Student-Athletes.” The NCAA’s website contains a statement of its mission as well as bylaws committing to athlete health, which holds them accountable. The NCAA includes an article on its website called “Mind, Body and Sport: Eating Disorders,” which is an excerpt from the Sport Science Institute’s guide to understanding and supporting student-athlete mental wellness; written by Ron Thompson, that guide is basically a starting point for what should become best practices and policies. The NCAA’s “Concussion Safety Protocol Checklist,” also available online, is a great reference for future health legislation for female athletes. See also NCAA Bylaw 3.2.4.17: Concussion Management Plan—Bylaw 16.4.2: Mental Health Services and Resources is the closest bylaw covering the issues in this book, and it is not being fulfilled adequately.

The influence of male bias on women’s lives is central to this book. Caroline Criado Perez’s book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men is useful in understanding just how much is built upon the default human in our modern society, how we got there, and how consequential this is for women’s lives. Unwell Women by Elinor Cleghorn dives into how this is playing out in the medical system and in women’s health. Neither of these books focuses on sports, but they clearly show that the assumption of sameness, once a key strategy in the women’s movement for gaining equal rights, has consequences. Thinkers who have contributed to my understanding of feminist history more broadly include Kate Manne, Kimberlé Crenshaw, bell hooks, Mary Beard, and Mikki Kendall, among others.

Burn It All Down podcast

The University of Minnesota’s Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport is the go-to resource for gender in coaching and administration. “What Gender Inequality Looks Like in Collegiate Sports” by Terrance Ross for The Atlantic in 2015 has great information on coaching inequality. On the theme of female athlete abuse, the documentary Athlete A about women’s gymnastics was incredible. Mary Cain’s short documentary for The New York Times, along with several published articles about Alberto Salazar and the Nike Oregon Project, were important sources. The United States Center for SafeSport is a critical resource for athlete safety and reporting abuse.

For an understanding of body image in sport, Peiling Kong and Lynne Harris’s 2015 article in the Journal of Psychology, “The Sporting Body: Body Image and Eating Disorder Symptomatology Among Female Athletes from Leanness Focused and Nonleanness Focused Sports,” shows that female athletes have worse body image than nonathletes, and it’s far more than leanness-focused sports.

When it comes to understanding the forces that impact women’s body confidence more broadly outside of sport, Sonya Renee Taylor’s book The Body Is Not an Apology and her interview on Brené Brown’s podcast Unlocking Us are a fantastic read and listen. Jean Kilbourne’s TED Talk “Killing Us Softly” does a brilliant job condensing the harmful gender differences in media representation into just a few minutes. Dr. Melody Moore and I had a great discussion on Julia Hanlon’s podcast Running on Om, which is useful for anyone trying to create a sport environment that reduces negative body image and disordered eating.

Other books I’d recommend that highlight the role of sports culture on mental health are Little Girls in Pretty Boxes by Joan Ryan, The Silence of Great Distance by Frank Murphy, What Made Maddy Run by Kate Fagan, and Running While Black by Alison Mariella Désir.