The Longest Race: Inside the Secret World of Abuse, Doping, and Deception on Nike's Elite Running Team

by Kara Goucher

“shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.”

So much of the art of running is the ability to calm oneself at a moment of extreme pressure.

There are rare moments in life when you know that a turning point is taking place while you’re in

Don’t let the slogans or glossy advertisements, including those I appeared in, fool you—we are woefully behind in America when it comes to supporting mothers. Of the world’s wealthiest countries, the U.S. is the only one that still doesn’t require paid parental leave. We need that, plus affordable child care, and maternal and pediatric health care that is safe and accessible. We also need to address the startling fact that Black women are three times as likely as white women to die from a pregnancy-related cause, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

I couldn’t help but wonder if things would have turned out differently had I finished with that better result. Pauline Boss, PhD, has coined the term “ambiguous loss,” which may come closest to capturing the sentiment. It’s a complicated sort of loss that begs unanswerable questions.

Race day is fun, but training gives you moments of the extraordinary in the ordinary.

There’s still a lot of change we need to make in sports, and in our culture more broadly, when it comes to supporting those who want to tell the truth, to ending doping and sexual abuse, and to weeding out subtler forms of manipulation by the powerful of the less powerful. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that change starts when good people refuse to stay quiet.

Running has been my source of inspiration, my religious practice, my way of interfacing with the world. It has taught me how to move and how to be in my body. It has nearly killed me. It has saved my life. It’s made me who I am. It’s made me happy. I’m still in love with it. I always will be.