Lauren Fleshman’s memoir, Good for a Woman: A Girl Working 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 Woman: A Girl Working 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 faculty, and had developed a status because the quickest total runner, the one who constantly received the mile. Till at some point, she wasn’t quickest.
“Once I first bought beat by certainly one of my male friends … it was as a result of he hit puberty and form of skyrocketed his efficiency within the mile in a really brief time frame,” she says. “It was very disorienting to seek out out that puberty was going to create two completely 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 wished to be on.”
Rising up in what she calls the “lady energy revolution of the ’90s,” Fleshman had been led to imagine that she may do something that her male friends may do. However as an athlete, puberty hit laborious. She describes getting her interval as an obstacle, an “added burden that my male friends did not need to take care of.” The event of breasts and hips, she says, felt “scary, like they threatened the longer term that I wished in sport.”
Nonetheless, Fleshman went on to have a really profitable working profession, breaking the American junior file 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 College, and later, as an expert athlete, she received two nationwide championships.
However, alongside the best way, she observed a shocking variety of her feminine teammates leaving the game. Many who did keep it up developed consuming issues 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 on the subject of coaching. Their hormonal profile is such that their restoration time is faster,” she says. In the meantime, Fleshman notes, enchancment instances for feminine runners are inclined to decelerate between those self same ages.
“That is the place a variety of pressure is created for feminine athletes round their physique,” Fleshman says. “There is a fundamental degree of schooling that coaches have to get, not simply in physiology, but additionally in understanding socially what they’re doing, culturally, the setting they’re creating, that’s working in opposition to their objectives of getting a wholesome, constant workforce 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 ebook, Good for a Woman: A Girl Working 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 beloved working the best way a variety of little youngsters do, once 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’d 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 completely different neighborhoods. My world bought loads greater by means of the game of working. And I additionally beloved that whenever you run alongside anyone, you possibly can have a extra susceptible, trustworthy dialog than you possibly can whenever 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 likewise these deeper understandings of myself. It simply felt like a pure match.
On how menstruation is usually invisible and considered negatively
Once 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 consequences that it will 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 women do not have a optimistic view of their interval, which is basically unlucky, as a result of our menstrual cycle is so important to the wholesome functioning of our our bodies.
On how breast improvement in ladies impacts their participation in sports activities
The entire analysis at present exhibits that that is extraordinarily widespread, it extends properly past runners. Seventy-three p.c of women reported not less than one breast-related concern associated to sports activities in middle-school age, and half of them felt that breasts affected their participation. However the best way that we speak about breasts could be very sexualized or we do not speak about them. They’re somewhat little bit of a tricky topic once they actually ought to simply be a factual, fundamental lived expertise of half the inhabitants. Eighty-seven p.c of women wished to know extra about breasts and sports activities bras particularly. So we all know that the shortage of sports activities bras is among the the explanation why we’re shedding ladies in sport.
On teaching methods associated to weight which are damaging
Probably the most widespread ones is simply having an “very best” athlete physique in thoughts that you simply anticipate your workforce to work their method towards. When you think about all the range in our genetics and our individuality, that is an absurd thought that everybody ought to mould themselves into some specific mannequin. There are public weigh-ins that occur frequently in applications, or body-fat checks constant sufficient to have athletes turn out to be fixated on it. Athletes are given very small ranges of acceptable physique fats for an elite athlete which are primarily based on 28-year-old Olympian our bodies and never 20-year-old adolescent our bodies which are within the thick of growing.
There’s additionally meals policing — the place coaches, is not going to permit sure varieties of meals for his or her athletes. They are going to make physique feedback on athletes in entrance of their teammates. One other factor they’re going to do is level out when somebody seems “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 people are refined methods of constantly telling athletes that so as to be invested in and cared about, they have to change who they’re. And it isn’t even primarily based on actual science. That is the factor. It will be unsuitable even when it was, as a result of it creates such an unhealthy setting for athletes.
On each acknowledging sex-based variations in sports activities whereas additionally being inclusive of transgender athletes
It is clearly a really contentious, difficult concern that we’re wrestling with in tradition proper now. And I’ve advanced my perspective loads 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 side of life, together with sports activities. However that took somewhat little bit of a journey as a result of I’m so acquainted with 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 taking a look at that science or seeking to debunk it created a variety of resistance to me, and I see it in a variety of the athletes that I’ve raced in opposition to over time. It is a factor that now we have to acknowledge — that sex-based distinction exists and maintain that in a single hand and maintain within the different hand that inclusion is extraordinarily essential and that our definition of equity is so slim.
If we’re solely taking a look at equity as who’s competing within the Olympic Video games and who has skilled what sort of puberty and no matter, you are able to do that if you wish to. You may spend all of your time centered on that, however equity is about much more than that. And we are able to 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 usually put on looser becoming shorts and a jersey that covers the complete torso. In some occasions in working, particularly the quicker dash occasions, the male outfit shall be a good becoming shirt that additionally covers the torso. Feminine athlete uniforms are like somewhat bathing swimsuit backside that your butt cheeks hang around of or a really, very brief brief that they name cheeky bottoms or one thing like that. After which a crop prime 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 certain, by guidelines even, to put on in sport, male athletes would do it, too. One of the best 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 ladies, 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 an alternative utilizing the advert to touch upon objectification of feminine athletes
My first huge shot at an advert marketing campaign with Nike, I used to be so excited. I simply could not imagine that I used to be going to get this opportunity for use in a business and poster marketing campaign, media discover round it. However 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 have made it, or being on the quilt of one other journal depicted in a robe or lingerie or feminized indirectly. 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 method.
I got here up with an advert the place I used to be standing in my working garments that I practice in each day with my arms crossed, wanting straight on the digital camera. And the advert was within the first particular person voice, so I used to be very a lot in command of 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. … After which beneath it was the advantageous print of, “We examine the feminine physique in order that we are able to 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.
