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Lauren Fleshman’s memoir, Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World, is a memoir and a critique of how the sports activities world treats feminine athletes.
Ryan Warner/Oiselle
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Ryan Warner/Oiselle
Lauren Fleshman’s memoir, Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World, is a memoir and a critique of how the sports activities world treats feminine athletes.
Ryan Warner/Oiselle
Champion distance runner Lauren Fleshman nonetheless remembers the primary time she misplaced a race to a boy. She was in center college, and had developed a status because the quickest general runner, the one who constantly received the mile. Until someday, she wasn’t quickest.
“When I first bought beat by one in all my male friends … it was as a result of he hit puberty and form of skyrocketed his efficiency within the mile in a really quick time frame,” she says. “It was very disorienting to search out out that puberty was going to create two totally different paths for my male friends and my feminine friends, and that I used to be on the one which I wasn’t so positive I needed to be on.”
Growing up in what she calls the “woman energy revolution of the ’90s,” Fleshman had been led to consider that she might do something that her male friends might do. But as an athlete, puberty hit exhausting. She describes getting her interval as an obstacle, an “added burden that my male friends did not should take care of.” The improvement of breasts and hips, she says, felt “scary, like they threatened the long run that I needed in sport.”
Nevertheless, Fleshman went on to have a really profitable working profession, breaking the American junior document within the 5,000 meters race the primary time she ran it, which certified her for the Olympic trials. She was a five-time NCAA champion at Stanford University, and later, as knowledgeable athlete, she received two nationwide championships.
But, alongside the best way, she seen a stunning variety of her feminine teammates leaving the game. Many who did keep it up developed consuming problems or different bodily or psychological well being issues. Fleshman says too many coaches appeared to imagine — falsely — that what labored for male our bodies would additionally profit feminine our bodies.
“The male physique, between 18 and 22, is getting extra juice out of each squeeze with regards to coaching. Their hormonal profile is such that their restoration time is faster,” she says. Meanwhile, Fleshman notes, enchancment instances for feminine runners are likely to decelerate between those self same ages.
“That’s the place a variety of stress is created for feminine athletes round their physique,” Fleshman says. “There’s a fundamental stage of schooling that coaches must get, not simply in physiology, but additionally in understanding socially what they’re doing, culturally, the atmosphere they’re creating, that’s working towards their objectives of getting a wholesome, constant staff that performs at their greatest.”
Fleshman turned a coach and is now an activist working to advertise fairness in sports activities by recognizing the variations in female and male our bodies. Her new e book, Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World, is a memoir and a critique of how the sports activities world treats feminine athletes.
Interview highlights
On why she loves working
I liked working the best way a variety of little youngsters do, after they would simply burst into run naturally. It felt like flying. It felt like freedom. … I joined [the team] in highschool, and by then what it meant to me was belonging, exploring. We would take off on these runs as a gaggle into the foothills round our city and get to see vistas of my city from a brand new perspective, get to discover totally different neighborhoods. My world bought quite a bit larger by the game of working. And I additionally liked that once you run alongside any individual, you possibly can have a extra weak, sincere dialog than you possibly can once you’re sitting throughout the desk from each other. There’s one thing that simply opens you up with the motion. And so I simply developed these deep bonds and in addition these deeper understandings of myself. It simply felt like a pure match.
On how menstruation is usually invisible and considered negatively
When I bought my interval, it was later than most of my friends, it was round age 17 and I did not need it. … It felt like one thing I needed to navigate alone, and the results that it might have on my temper or my physique composition, bloating, all these issues felt like this curler coaster that I needed to navigate … and my male friends did not. And I felt resentful of that, particularly because it was invisible to my coaches and to the well being professionals round me. It was form of like, “Oh, simply determine the right way to take care of it.” So it is comprehensible why so many ladies do not have a optimistic view of their interval, which is actually unlucky, as a result of our menstrual cycle is so important to the wholesome functioning of our our bodies.
On how breast improvement in women impacts their participation in sports activities
All of the analysis presently reveals that that is extraordinarily widespread, it extends nicely past runners. Seventy-three % of ladies reported at the very least one breast-related concern associated to sports activities in middle-school age, and half of them felt that breasts affected their participation. But the best way that we discuss breasts could be very sexualized or we do not discuss them. They’re slightly little bit of a troublesome topic after they actually ought to simply be a factual, fundamental lived expertise of half the inhabitants. Eighty-seven % of ladies needed to know extra about breasts and sports activities bras particularly. So we all know that the shortage of sports activities bras is without doubt one of the the reason why we’re dropping women in sport.
On teaching methods associated to weight which might be damaging
One of the most typical ones is simply having an “very best” athlete physique in thoughts that you simply anticipate your staff to work their approach towards. When you contemplate the entire variety in our genetics and our individuality, that is an absurd thought that everybody ought to mildew themselves into some explicit mannequin. There are public weigh-ins that occur usually in packages, or body-fat exams constant sufficient to have athletes develop into fixated on it. Athletes are given very small ranges of acceptable physique fats for an elite athlete which might be primarily based on 28-year-old Olympian our bodies and never 20-year-old adolescent our bodies which might be within the thick of growing.
There’s additionally meals policing — the place coaches, won’t enable sure varieties of meals for his or her athletes. They will make physique feedback on athletes in entrance of their teammates. Another factor they’re going to do is level out when somebody appears to be like “match” and provides a variety of private consideration to athletes that attain this physique very best after which withhold optimistic interplay from athletes that do not. And these are refined methods of constantly telling athletes that as a way to be invested in and cared about, they need to change who they’re. And it is not even primarily based on actual science. That’s the factor. It could be improper even when it was, as a result of it creates such an unhealthy atmosphere for athletes.
On each acknowledging sex-based variations in sports activities whereas additionally being inclusive of transgender athletes
It’s clearly a really contentious, difficult subject that we’re wrestling with in tradition proper now. And I’ve developed my perspective quite a bit on this topic from a spot of defensiveness of what I seen as ladies’s sports activities from a sex-based perspective to being very pro-inclusion of trans athletes in each facet of life, together with sports activities. But that took slightly little bit of a journey as a result of I’m so aware of sex-based variations in sport. I’ve lived it. I’ve watched it. They exist — to have some trans-rights activists on this area denying that these exist, or being afraid of that science or trying to debunk it created a variety of resistance to me, and I see it in a variety of the athletes that I’ve raced towards over time. It’s a factor that we’ve to acknowledge — that sex-based distinction exists and maintain that in a single hand and maintain within the different hand that inclusion is extraordinarily necessary and that our definition of equity is so slim.
If we’re solely equity as who’s competing within the Olympic Games and who has skilled what sort of puberty and no matter, you are able to do that if you wish to. You can spend all of your time centered on that, however equity is about much more than that. And we will maintain the intercourse, these variations and nonetheless be for inclusion. And I believe that is really important to the inclusion of trans folks –not denying the science that we all know, not denying the lived experiences of female-bodied folks, however simply deciding that even given a few of these issues, we nonetheless select to compete collectively to be an inclusive area and expertise all the advantages of getting trans folks on our groups in our lives and competing alongside us.
On ladies’s working uniforms
Male runners typically put on looser becoming shorts and a jersey that covers your entire torso. In some occasions in working, particularly the quicker dash occasions, the male outfit might be a decent becoming shirt that additionally covers the torso. Female athlete uniforms are like slightly bathing swimsuit backside that your butt cheeks hang around of or a really, very quick quick that they name cheeky bottoms or one thing like that. And then a crop high that exposes your midriff, that is additionally kind becoming and tight.
If there was a real sports activities benefit to sporting the outfit that feminine athletes are sure, by guidelines even, to put on in sport, male athletes would do it, too. The greatest athletes on this planet will wish to do what the most important efficiency benefit is. The historical past of feminine uniforms being designed as they’re now began within the wake of Title IX, when there was a variety of worry that sports activities was masculinizing women, that it was making them homosexual — all of those homophobic fears round collaborating in actions that had been historically seen as males’s areas.
On refusing to be bare for a Nike advert marketing campaign — and as a substitute utilizing the advert to touch upon objectification of feminine athletes
My first large shot at an advert marketing campaign with Nike, I used to be so excited. I simply could not consider that I used to be going to get this opportunity for use in a industrial and poster marketing campaign, media discover round it. But then after I bought the appear and feel from the inventive company, it was an image of Brandi Chastain, the soccer participant, from an previous advert the place she was bent over bare with a soccer ball. It was very provocative. … And I simply felt crestfallen after I noticed that. … [Just like] being in Playboy journal as a feminine athlete was form of an indication you’ve got made it, or being on the quilt of one other journal depicted in a robe or lingerie or feminized not directly. And I simply thought, why are we doing this? Why? That has nothing to do with the excellence that bought you the chance within the first place. And so I bought the braveness to ask them to do it otherwise, to not be depicted in that approach.
I got here up with an advert the place I used to be standing in my working garments that I prepare in on daily basis with my arms crossed, trying straight on the digital camera. And the advert was within the first particular person voice, so I used to be very a lot answerable for how I used to be being seen and which added a variety of energy to the advert, and it made it a really profitable marketing campaign. … [The caption was] “objectify me,” … and it was meant to form of seize your consideration. … And then beneath it was the positive print of, “We research the feminine physique in order that we will make them one of the best trainers.”
Sam Briger and Seth Kelley produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Deborah Franklin tailored it for the online.