Good for a Girl: My Life Running in a Man's World

by Lauren Fleshman

There is something wrong with our sports systems, and deep down we know it. The sports environments we fought so hard to have equal access to were built by men, for men and boys. Our definition of gender equality has been “getting what men have, the way they have it,” and it’s backfiring.

He was the kind of dad who wanted sons, but he got two daughters and refused to adjust his parenting plan.

Like millions of women, she carried a treasure chest of undiscovered athletic potential.

While the girl power revolution of the 1990s was swirling all around, telling girls we could have it all if we worked hard, my mom’s daily reality was frozen in the 1950s. In our home, Dad got the best chair, the first serving, and the last word.

In many sports, sex-based performance differences can go relatively unnoticed by the athletes themselves because with different seasons and times of play, there is little opportunity for direct comparison. But in cross-country and track and field, girls’ and boys’ programs are typically combined, with athletes of all genders sharing coaches, facilities, practice times, and competition schedules.

We walked away from the jumble of blankets and duffel bags toward an open space under a tree and laid our track-suited backs onto the damp grass. I was instructed to close my eyes and simply “soak in the field”—no further explanation needed, apparently. “How long does it take?” I asked. “You’ll know when it’s time to get up,” the team captain replied.

Today women make up 40 percent of the athletes in the United States but receive only 4 percent of the sports coverage, about the same as it was thirty years ago.

Districts confuse a natural biological process with the sexualization of all things female and often encourage male coaches to hire female assistants to handle “girl things” that come up. This strategy leans on underpaid people in high-turnover positions with “also menstruates” as their primary qualification, and it creates bogus reasons to keep women in assistant positions.

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.

If every young person experienced a woman leading their sports team in a position of true authority, millions of people would grow up used to the idea of a woman leading their company, department, or nation.

I asked them questions about their lives, looking for the reasons why I already loved them.

When the music played, my eyes blurred with emotion, not just from the propulsive energy of the piano solo, but from the improbability that a space full of people could be silent enough to hear every single note.

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?

As a coach, I still use Vin’s basic definition of running with integrity as a tool for my athletes to develop trust in themselves. At the core, that’s what he wanted us to do. He knew that every time we said one thing and did another, a little part of us died. He preferred an athlete to say that her goal was to get fiftieth and then finish fiftieth than to say she wanted to get tenth and end up fiftieth.

COLLEGIATE SPORTS WERE built by men for men and boys in the early 1900s as an arena for promoting traditional ideas of masculinity. Competitive sports used battle terminology and focused on aggression to keep studious men from going soft; so many athletes died that an organization was created to protect the health and well-being of collegiate athletes. That organization is the NCAA, now a behemoth with over a billion dollars in annual revenue. Protecting student athletes is technically still its purpose, though I was about to learn how much it was failing to do this for women.

For males, ages eighteen through twenty-two are the years of peak testosterone, maximum training capacity, and robust recovery power. (These are the same years young men are recruited to be soldiers.) Men are in an unprecedented physiological prime for athletic improvement at exactly the years they are of age to be pursuing a collegiate degree. It makes sense that a sports industry built for eighteen- to twenty- two- year- old male bodies would have a body ideal of leanness—and an expected trajectory of steady performance improvement.

Meanwhile, the body of the eighteen- to twenty- two- year- old female is continuing the change into the body of a mother. We may not be focused on reproduction at this age, but our biology is investing in peak fertility. High circulating estrogen wants a woman’s body to be softer, to hold more body fat and fluids. The body builds and invests in tissue that has no direct value to sport, such as breasts and uterine lining that will shed after making us feel bloated, and our weight will fluctuate on a monthly cycle.

She would say herself that she wasn’t perfect, and that she would do some things differently, but watching her grow on the job was what later influenced me to coach before I felt ready and to have compassion for myself as I made mistakes.

“Is there any way to raise VO2max?” I asked. “Not really, genes play a huge role, and you’ve already been training at a high level for years. But the number is calculated as it relates to kilograms of body weight, so a person can change the number if they change their weight.”

the total loss of periods that could lead to osteoporosis and stress fractures: the dreaded condition known as the “female athlete triad.” I didn’t want that. But I could miss a few—four periods per year was the cusp of alarm, according to my ob-gyn (this has since become an outdated benchmark).

Most were now experiencing ageism from their sponsors, who offered them less money at contract negotiation time despite having just set personal bests. This seemed especially unjust for the women, whose physical prime was later than the men’s, but everyone was valued according to the male performance time-line.

Jon explained that it had gotten old seeing distance runners, who were mostly white, getting paid well to get knocked out in the first round, while sprinters, who were mostly Black, were being told to win or starve.

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.

During the small window of years through age twenty-six when women’s endocrine systems are responsible for building the entire bone bank we spend the rest of our lives drawing from, so many of us are creating an environment where we’re barely able to maintain what we have.

Restrictive eating habits and cross-training for weight management were—and still are—conflated with discipline. But they’ve also shown themselves to be killers of careers.

It was only two pounds, and it could have just been the time of day or time of month, but that level of obsession is the danger of the concept of “ideal race weight,” of hanging your confidence on appearance instead of function.

Others, like me, broke bones. Sometimes bones just break when you’re training hard, but stress fractures are four to five times more likely in athletes suffering from RED-S.

It was different working with a woman. Or at least this woman.

“Running shoes are made on a last, which is a mold that shoes are built around,” Josh explained. “That last that running shoes are made on is designed around the male foot, so women’s shoes are really just men’s shoes in different colors. ‘Shrink it and pink it’ is the industry joke.

That poster isn’t about fame or athletic accomplishments to me. Its existence is a reminder that speaking up is scary, and when you have a lot to lose by doing so, you are likely to deliver your message imperfectly, or overcompensate with anger or rage that you need to speak up at all.

Back then I thought those who succeeded deserved it, and those who didn’t messed up. Now I knew better than ever. I deserved nothing. None of us do.

We ended our summer in Switzerland to finally celebrate our honeymoon—two years late, but right on time.

Growing Picky Bars served as an excellent distraction while I waited for my knee to improve. IT band syndrome, or “runner’s knee,” has no standard recovery timeline. A common injury for beginner runners with poor glute strength, it generally heals quickly through rest, massage, and physical therapy. Swimming didn’t hurt, so I learned the crawl stroke, did my Jane Fonda leg lifts, and waited for it to turn around. Weeks turned to months.

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.

Who gets the benefit of the doubt at Nike? The most powerful sports brand in the world was saying cheating can be overlooked, but the fundamental realities of womanhood seemed insurmountable. For the first time, I felt the courage to leave it behind.

My racing life and my work life were finally in alignment when I partnered with Oiselle. I was in alignment. I had traded my obsession with being “the best” for being good. And I’m not talking about “good” in the normal sports term—“good” meaning “okay, but not great.” I’m talking about goodness. I wanted more goodness in sport, in running. Not just in the recreational world where that idea was more naturally embraced, but in the professional world, too.

I wanted to coach women to be the best in the world, but without subscribing to the dominant paradigm that athletes are disposable and that winning was worth just about any price. Success to me looked like developing the empowered athlete, not just the winning athlete.

As we sat in one big circle on the wood floor, Melody led us through a hands-on examination of popular magazines, asking us to rip out every page we came across that had images of those who were BIPOC and/or had visible disabilities, scars, acne, or larger bodies and put them in the center of the room. The collection was painfully small. And all of the photos of bodies larger than about a size 6 were accompanied by weight loss copy. Melody taught us about the economics of the global beauty industry, currently worth $511 billion, which depends entirely on women feeling that our bodies are wrong and must be fixed through consumer goods and services.

I understood now that the sports system itself was causing enormous harm to women by devaluing or denying their essential physiological experiences and emphasizing the wrong priorities at the wrong times. Every high school runner who starved herself to avoid puberty. Every woman who restricted her diet to reach an arbitrary weight her body didn’t want to be. Every woman who lost time to broken bones and torn tendons. Every woman who lost confidence and self-worth for “failing” to progress. Every woman who couldn’t eat without having “earned it” and turned to exercise as punishment to atone for indulgence.

All the athletes and coaches were cramming together under tiny tents, and soon I was even closer to Alberto and Mary. He lit into her for her poor performance, blaming her weight. Nobody under the tent stood up for her. Nobody challenged Alberto’s power. I felt too frightened to say something while Alberto was there—a shameful weakness of resolve I still regret to this day. In 2019, when Mary came forward in an opinion documentary for the New York Times, I would learn, along with the rest of the world, how dark that moment had been for her. Afterward, she had contemplated suicide and cut herself. It wasn’t the first time she was verbally or emotionally abused by NOP coaches, but it was a highly visible moment, and the silence that followed was an industry endorsement of her treatment.

We need policies like those created around concussions that specifically protect the health of the female body in sport. We need to create a formal certification to work with female athletes that mandates education on female physiology, puberty, breast development, menstrual health, and the female performance wave. We need to be able to monitor menstrual health and educate people about RED-S. We need to draw boundaries preventing race weight and body composition from being emphasized in high school or college, or any time before it is developmentally appropriate. We need eating disorder literacy, so we know how to identify, prevent, and talk about them. And we need eating disorders to be treated like self-harm, requiring coaches to immediately report and refer someone suffering to a specialist, because the likelihood of making a full recovery is strongly correlated to the length of time before intervention.

We need to require the measuring of things that actually matter in school programs, such as menstrual health, injury and mental health statistics, athlete satisfaction, and attrition rates, and use these values to create an alternate ranking system for college sports programs that would hold schools accountable and empower recruits with information that’s imperative to their future well-being.

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-...