'Good For a Girl' explores the hazardous lives of young women track athletes in North America
Author Lauren Fleshman describes the dangers facing 'a woman running in a man's world'
Good For a Girl: A woman running in a man's world.
by Lauren Fleshman
Too many publishers include "I could not put this down," among their jacket quotes.
This memoir/manifesto for women and girl runners turns the time-worn praise on its head: I kept putting this book down.
The message is urgent, the story telling is vivid, but whenever Lauren Fleshman describes a good day of running, the reader is overpowered by the urge to get outside and stretch their legs for the sheer joy of it.
If Good For a Girl makes weekend runners try harder, that's a bonus. The book's purpose though, is less "just do it," and more persuading elite runners to take their foot off the gas, strategically.
Fleshman might be best known for her fierce image in Nike's celebrated "Objectify Me" advertisements, but for the sporting record, she was the 5,000-metre U.S. national champion in 2006 and 2010, and a great cross-country and 10,000m athlete.
She is also a serial entrepreneur, coach, mentor and advocate for women's sport. So she's an accomplished all-rounder, but when Fleshman describes her own life, it becomes a cautionary tale. Her story is mostly about the brushes with disaster she encountered as a female competitor.
Good For a Girl tackles a foundational problem in athletics: competitive track and field was developed by men, for men. But this is no doctrinaire "men are the problem," rant. Fleshman is thoughtfully guiding men and women readers through detailed and specific missteps and misunderstandings in her sport. She chisels the monolithic problem of sexism into a series of manageable boulders.
Fleshman excelled at a young age. Her descriptions of cross-country meets at 13 conjured up delightful flashbacks for this aging, middle-of-the-pack runner. But at the advent of puberty, her own story expands to include her teammates and competitors. As Fleshman advances into young womanhood, the perils of "running while female" multiply.
Psychological, cultural, and physiological challenges beset good young women athletes. Let this stat sink in: Three quarters of 17 year-old female distance runners have disordered eating. Fleshman uses personal stories to breathe life into the appalling statistics.
Unhealthy compulsion
She struggles terribly with an unhealthy compulsion to cut weight. Most of her competitors fare even worse, nutritionally. According to Fleshman, problems nestle within one another: The idealized female sexual body doesn't resemble a healthy running physique. Every mirror invites dysmorphia. The male gaze demands skimpy running outfits for girls. The coded language of looking "fit" repeats at every practice. There's side-eye at team dinners for any girl who dares beyond nibbling salad. There's also a tendency within groups to mimic the most successful member. When a race winner barfs every night in her dorm, sickness is normalized.
Fleshman does not ignore the problematic fact that near-starvation diets can produce temporary success for distance runners. A skeletal girl may win races for a season, but inevitably, sickness, fatigue and stress will doom that skinny star to an early crash and burn. Worse, her disappearance from the running team creates a vacancy for the next undernourished girl to occupy before her health collapses, too.
Nearly 20 years ago, Fleshman googled Paula Radcliffe. She and the phenomenal marathoner were the same height, but Radcliffe was 10 pounds lighter. That discovery sent Fleshman onto a ruinous quest to shed more weight. A terrible irony is revealed years later, when she and Radciffe befriended one another. Over a substantial dinner, Fleshman confesses that she went off the rails trying to match Radcliffe's weight — and when Fleshman mentions the actual number — Radcliffe says, "I never weighed that in my life."
From Good For a Girl:
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 for indulgence.
Disordered eating is a huge health problem for female athletes, but as Fleshman points out, the NCAA has no policies on the matter. The absence stands in harsh contrast to comprehensive NCAA concussion protocols, which she upholds as a model to be followed for eating disorders.
Four years in the life of every athlete make up the core of Fleshman's research attention. Between the ages of 18 and 22, there is a big fork in the road for men and women. In those years, men experience peak testosterone, maximum training ability, and the most robust capacity for recovery they will ever enjoy. Ideal athletic performance for men coincides with the college sport years, and the system is designed to make the most of them.
At the exact same time, female bodies go into peak fertility. Higher estrogen programs a woman's body to be softer, fattier and holding more fluids from age 18 to 22. The female body invests in breasts and uterine lining, tissue that has "no sport value." This brings monthly performance plateaus and dips, but sport hasn't been taught to see this as normal, healthy fluctuation. Female athletes' best years come later, in their mid-20s. But since the pressure to perform for scholarships and pro contracts lands before that peak, woman athletes often suffer relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S) which manifests in disordered eating, irregular menstruation, and a life-long decrease in bone mineral density.
Skipped periods are a clear and reliable warning, but 87 per cent of female athletes never discuss the topic with their coaches, probably in part because 80 per cent of coaches are male. To Fleshman's great credit — when she lists these saddening stats, she usually also presents practicable remedies for them.
Richard Nixon signed Title IX in 1972, granting women an equal chance to participate in sports. Fleshman was born in 1981, three months after the first NCAA women's track and field championships. Toward the conclusion of Good For a Girl, she offers a compact summary of ways to level the playing field for female athletes. In two pages, she names a dozen highly doable ways to fulfil the promise of Title IX.
Fifty years later, it's high time.
Good For a Girl, A Woman Running in a Man's World. Penguin Press. 288 pages. cloth $37.99
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