When I used to be a high-school runner within the late Nineties, slogans equivalent to Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body embellished the T-shirts offered at our championship races. Once, on the bus to the Connecticut state meet, my coach, who was legendary for the many years of New England titles he’d gained, informed us the story of an athlete collapsing on the course and crawling throughout the end line. The coach visited him within the hospital afterward, he assured us; he had “a policy” to take action. That sufficient athletes wanted medical consideration for my coach to have a private creed about it didn’t strike me as darkish. I used to be caught up within the story’s message about willpower and sacrifice—and impressed to run laborious sufficient that I actually would possibly find yourself within the hospital.
During the years I used to be dreaming of martyrdom, the longer term nationwide champion Lauren Fleshman was a high-school athlete as properly, on her strategy to changing into one of the vital achieved American distance runners in historical past. I knew her title from problems with Race Results Weekly, and I favored her due to her real smile and uncovered freckles. I additionally favored that her legs regarded sturdy and her cheeks full—traits we shared. I’d heard mine referenced with undisguised shock many occasions: You don’t appear to be a runner.
Those feedback exemplified the tradition of ladies’ sports activities on the time. I used to be embarrassed that I’d by no means misplaced my interval, and I noticed accidents not as indicators of long-term injury and even as short-term limitations however as badges of tenacity and toughness. In 1996, Fleshman and I each watched 18-year-old Kerri Strug land her gold-medal-clinching vault on her already badly sprained ankle on the Atlanta Olympics, and we noticed her coach carry her, childlike and unable to stroll, away. For an athlete, this type of ache, as Fleshman writes in her new memoir, Good for a Girl, was merely “what it took to be beloved.”
Fleshman went on to win 5 NCAA Division I titles at Stanford; I went on to barely make varsity at my Division III faculty. Still, Good for a Girl feels deeply acquainted. It is partly a memoir of Fleshman’s failures and successes, however it’s additionally a name to motion for the coaches, mother and father, and younger ladies of future athletic generations. Fleshman argues convincingly that it’s important for the sports activities world to disentangle bodily affected by self-worth. In 288 humorous, sincere, and sometimes-wrenching pages, she makes clear that empowering ladies to raised perceive the necessity for stability between ache and elite efficiency isn’t solely the moral factor to do—it’s important to their well being and profession longevity.
Fleshman writes in regards to the out-of-body sensation of most effort in a approach that no different writer I’ve encountered has managed. She recollects the expertise of being “in that part of the race where the pain accumulates and bulges and threatens to spill over at any moment,” and the satisfaction of discovering a “new level” of damage earlier than asking herself if she may persist simply “a little longer.” This form of instant-to-instant self-evaluation and motivation is essential in high-level athletic efficiency, however it additionally poses a dilemma. It’s simple for athletes to confuse the arrogance and energy that come from the flexibility to briefly push by means of for the kind of self-erasure that may result in harm.
Personally, I combined up the 2 for years. When I ultimately did collapse in faculty, simply shy of the end line in a championship 10,000-meter race, I ended up in a medical tent as an alternative of a hospital. It was not till I informed this story, which nonetheless impressed in me an odd satisfaction nearly twenty years later, that I spotted that my race had actually been a failure. I had not completed.
Fleshman has plainly reconsidered the function of ache and overexertion in sports activities too. In components, her e-book is devoted to outlining what she sees as vital reforms, equivalent to insurance policies that “specifically protect the health of the female body in sport … [including] formal certification to work with female athletes that mandate[s] education in female physiology, puberty, breast development, [and] menstrual health.” She is evident in her perception each that younger ladies want extra ladies coaches and that merely having a girl on a training employees isn’t an inoculation in opposition to a system that ignores the wants of women and girls at nice price.
One of probably the most prevalent and harmful methods sports activities tradition deprioritizes athletes’ wellness is by willfully overlooking, and even outright encouraging, disordered consuming, Fleshman writes. I noticed and skilled this firsthand: Friends—ones who ran for feminine coaches—had been publicly weighed or requested to write down down and scrutinize all the things they ate in a day. Even on my faculty workforce, the place my coach by no means commented on dimension, the glorification of thinness was all over the place. Once, I heard one other coach reward an athlete for trying as if she’d misplaced “a pound or a pound and a half.” Like Fleshman, I typically felt defensive and ashamed of being informed I regarded “healthy,” as a result of “healthy was code for fat; fit was the compliment everyone valued most,” she writes. I’d figured if I wasn’t the fittest, I may very well be the hardest, or probably the most prepared to endure a sure form of agony.
Despite my grownup perspective and the knowledge of Fleshman’s e-book, untangling the connection between ache and athletic success is complicated. I’ve learn earlier than that restoration from consuming issues will be difficult by the impossibility of going chilly turkey, as with a substance habit—all of us have to have a relationship of some sort with meals, in any case. And perhaps there’s one thing of this within the relationship that severe athletes should develop with ache. Where is the road between willingness to be in discomfort and eagerness to be in it? What separates the choice to hold on within the last minutes of a race and what Fleshman calls “a culture of compliance [that] leads to disassociation from yourself, from your body’s signals of hunger, fatigue, and pain”?
Becoming a runner modified my life as a result of it made me perceive that I may do laborious issues. I believe I’d have been a decided and cussed particular person it doesn’t matter what ardour I fell into, however my achievements felt so concrete out on the monitor. Running moreover paved a approach into among the biggest friendships of my life. Although a lot of distance coaching is solitary, there’s an intimacy in contrast to another I’ve recognized in matching a companion stride for stride within the late levels of a frightening exercise or lengthy, hilly run. Some of the magic of operating friendships little doubt comes from the fraught function of struggling within the sport: We have shared the weak expertise of pushing our physique to its restrict, typically in a really public approach, and generally developing brief.
Fleshman ultimately realized that any “pursuit of excellence had to center … moments of joy, or it wasn’t worth doing,” she writes. For me, operating has been a present not as a result of of the methods its tradition has so typically glorified struggling however regardless of it. Competing and training have taught me {that a} sure form of ache is inevitable to be able to succeed as an elite athlete, however we ought not chase it. Instead, we should always run towards the delight.