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
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