Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man's World

"This is probably my favorite book on this list, just in terms of what it taught me. Lauren Fleshman was a professional runner in the United States. Initially, she ran for Stanford, and was a many-time national champion and subsequently she ran for the United States. She writes about the way in which structures surrounding sport are often built with men in mind. A lot of that has to do with the fact that women were only permitted into sports later on. Contracts are not built with pregnancy in mind, for example, or there are ways in which women’s uniforms objectify women in ways that they don’t for men. If you’ve ever watched professional track and field, the women wear these small swimsuit-type outfits, and the men wear just floppy shorts. Why is that the case? In the United States, we have something called Title IX, which granted equal access to women in high school and college, to be able to participate in sports in equal numbers to men. That was wonderful, but oftentimes, equal access meant we were granted permission to be in a space that was designed with men in mind. An example Lauren Fleshman provides is how scholarships are generally awarded in junior year of high school, when as a woman you are more or less at your performance nadir, hormonally. Women are encouraged to be lighter and faster, and to not have that dip in performance comes at the cost of long-term health. Another issue is that women are typically excluded from empirical studies on performance. Men are easier because they don’t have cycles. But that means that a lot of the studies that we have about what kinds of performance, what sort of training work, are designed with men in mind—when women have different physiological responses to those things. It’s just a really interesting book. I went through high school, collegiate running and professional running, and I felt tension points at various places, but didn’t have a language to describe what was happening. For me, it was an important book. Things are improving. For example, over the last few years, at least in the United States, our contracts do include things like maternity clauses. Previously, those were treated as injuries. And there are more conversations about female specific nutrition and relative energy deficiency in sport. There are a few notable institutions that are now focusing on female health specifically. There’s a performance lab led by Trent Stellingwerff in Canada. Stanford has the FASTR program which is about female health as well. So there’s a great deal more research now than there probably was when she was coming up the ranks. She was a very high performer. She describes how she was a late bloomer which profited her. Some of the accidental conditions of her life led to her having success. She does describe walking away from Nike after she wanted to have a child and couldn’t do that without having her contract suspended. She describes those tension points in her career."