Lauren Fleshman - Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Mans World

The young women are getting ready to run: flexing their knees, clearing their watches, and bouncing a few times to get the feel of the track. As I approach my standard position by the start, the group of five sorts itself into a single file line.

Are we ready? I ask, more as a signal than a question.

Yep! pipes Sadi from the back. Shes grinning like a kid, and I like what I see.

Okay, how are we doing this? I ask the group; but Im really asking Mel, our most veteran athlete, standing in the front.

Im taking the first mile, then Rebecca is taking over. To Mel, a distance runner with a huge aerobic engine, this two-mile interval to kick off the track workout is cake, and everyone trusts her to set an even pace. I notice Mel is wearing her lucky top with the superhero women print on it today, which means its go time. Ill push her a little harder at the end of the workout.

Keep it smooth and relaxed, I say to the group. Stay together. Mel looks at me, left foot on the line and her finger ready to press start. I nod.

Ready... go, she says quietly, and the group leans forward and starts in unison, a smattering of beeping watches as they fly past me. I study them as they round the first curve onto the straightaway, Rebecca a little too close on Mels heels. Once Im satisfied that everyone is safely in lockstep, I walk over to the retaining wall that borders lane eight, fluff someones sports bag like a throw pillow, and lean my back against it. I stretch out my legs in front of me and take a deep breath, letting the sunshine bathe my body. The line of women whizzes by.

Good! I say simply, not bothering to check the split on my watch. So much of my job as a coach is about noticing things. I can tell that the team is on pace by how evenly spaced they are, how serene Mels face is. I adjust the bag to get more comfortable. Ill be here for at least ten minutes, and I want to relish it. The Olympic Trials are around the corner, and everyone is running lifetime bests. Their bodies are as strong as theyre going to get before race day, so now is the time to coach them inward: group intervals to remind them theyre not alone in their dreaming, followed by a few solo intervals to remind them of their individual power.

I love watching them runthat metronomic pop-pop-pop-pop-pop that lets each of their minds spread outand after a few minutes of enjoying their rhythm, I look down at my own legs. I retired from professional racing in 2016. I dont miss itI had my turn. But my body remembers the feelings of capacity and possibility that competitive sport gave me for over twenty years. I reach forward and place my hands on my thighs and give them a gentle shake, maybe in gratitude, and see that the insides of my ankles are still striped with dirt from my run among the juniper and sagebrush this morning. Even though I no longer race professionally, running will always be home for my body and mind. If I do my job well as their coach, these women will have that, too.

The synchronized footsteps get louder, and I look up to see the women approaching again. Rebecca is in the lead now, looking incredible. She is such a gamer; her desire to race oozes out of her. Like Mel and most of the others, she could have quit this sport so many times, but she didnt. Many people counted these athletes out before they were recruited to Littlewing Athletics, the professional womens running group I coach in Bend, Oregon. But I know better than to count a female athlete out based on what she hasnt accomplished by age twenty, or even thirty. I know women, and I know how poorly our sports systems nurture their talent.

I am continually amazed at what sport at its best can add to womens lives, and we should never stop talking about the benefits of participation. But even fifty years after federal Title IX legislation mandated equal sports opportunities for women in the United States, we have a lot of work to do. We still havent nailed the basics, with the bulk of public schools (especially those serving communities of color) coming up well short of compliance. But even in the places with adequate female sports opportunities, like most of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, surprising numbers of girls who enter sports programs arent sticking around. For those who do, physical and mental health problems occur at distressing rates, and abuse is all too common.

With female puberty framed as a threat to performance, many take measures to prevent or reverse it, often losing their periods and disrupting the hormonal function essential to building healthy bones and a healthy body. Many face pressure by coaches to achieve a body ideal that is nearly impossible during their stage of physiological development, and experience stress fractures at three times the rate of their male peers. Many learn to hate the bodies that do so much for them, and 65 percent develop disordered eating habits that compromise their ease around food, sometimes irreparably. Millions of women carry an abundance of positive memories of their time in sport, but they also carry the invisible wounds of their sports experiences. As women, weve justified these wounds as normal or internalized the belief that we were to blame.

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 its backfiring. We fold and smash women and girls into a male-based infrastructure, and then scratch our heads when the same friction points show up again and again. Meanwhile, fundamental female-bodied experiences in sport are invisible, erased, or viewed as problems because they differ from the default male standard. The refusal to acknowledge this is causing incredible harm.