Mistrained and mistreated

Women’s running is experiencing something of a moment. During the first half of 2023, three female professional runners published memoirs that recount the personal trials they faced as well as the hurdles created by an industry that often fails to recognize female dignity.

Lauren Fleshman is sometimes described as the best American runner never to have made an Olympic team. Her memoir, Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World (Penguin Press 2023), recounts her highs—she was the two-time national champion in the 5,000-meter distance—as well as her lows—ill-timed injuries kept her from the Olympics. But Fleshman doesn’t merely reflect on her athletic career. She offers an eye-opening critique of competitive running as a whole.

Fleshman explains when she first realized life isn’t fair. As a child, she had always been the fastest kid in her class, but then the boys hit puberty. They left her in the dust. That moment of clarity serves as a metaphor, and Fleshman accuses the entire running industry of leaving its female athletes behind.

Not only do male and female bodies have different parts, but those bodies develop differently. As boys go through puberty, their lung capacity and muscle mass increase, making them incrementally faster and ­stronger year over year. In girls, however, puberty doesn’t grant athletic prowess. It starts preparing the body for childbirth.

Fleshman argues most coaches neglect these differences, looking to the male body as the template for athletic achievement and harming the health of female athletes in the process. As girls go through puberty, athletic improvement stalls, only to restart two or three years later. These years of plateau coincide with the years colleges give out running scholarships. Overtraining and undereating can delay puberty’s slump, but the long-term health effects can be catastrophic for a woman. Some female athletes, often with their coach’s approval, prioritize short-term gains, risking their reproductive health and causing their bones to become brittle.

Some of Fleshman’s harshest criticisms are aimed at her former sponsor Nike, which through its market dominance sets the pace for how the running industry treats athletes. Nike athletes are independent contractors, and their endorsement contracts often have punitive performance clauses that can impoverish a runner who suffers an injury. And Nike treats pregnancy like an injury.

Kara Goucher should know. Her memoir, written with Mary Pilon, The Longest Race: Inside the Secret World of Abuse, Doping, and Deception on Nike’s Elite Running Team (Gallery Books 2023), takes a deep dive into the unhealthy attitudes toward women at the world’s biggest shoe company. Goucher worked for Nike throughout her pregnancy, appearing in advertisements and showing up to company functions. Even so, she says the company used her for free labor, quietly canceling her quarterly salary because she wasn’t racing and winning.

For seven years, Goucher trained at the Nike Oregon Project led by legendary coach Alberto Salazar. Salazar was a demanding coach, and Goucher became one of the most decorated American female runners. But The Longest Race exposes the toxicity at Nike’s elite training camp. The author says corporate culture tolerated booziness, coarse jesting, and lewd comments about women’s bodies. In 2021, the U.S. Center for SafeSport permanently banned Salazar from coaching due to “sexual misconduct.” Goucher suggests the locker-room culture ­provided cover for his behavior.

Nike wanted its athletes to win championships, but the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency found Salazar broke its rules to give his runners an edge and banned him as well. Goucher attempts to exonerate herself, claiming she never participated in Nike’s doping scheme. But she implicates teammates Galen Rupp and Mo Farah, both of whom deny wrongdoing. Perhaps Nike’s lack of concern for its female runners ­provides Goucher’s strongest defense.

The typical road to becoming a professional runner often passes by the gatekeepers of a shoe giant like Nike. Des Linden’s memoir, Choosing To Run (Dutton 2023), written with Bonnie Ford, tells the story of how Linden won the 2018 Boston Marathon—the first American woman to do so in 33 years—­despite her unorthodox approach. Linden trained with the Hansons Original Distance Project, sponsored by Brooks, which offered both non­traditional training and nontraditional compensation agreements.

Choosing To Run is probably the most engaging read of the three memoirs. The book alternates chapters about Linden’s running career with short chapters about her feelings and thoughts on her way to victory in the Boston Marathon. It had been a rough year for Linden, and she began the day assuming she wouldn’t even finish.

All three books contain some profanity, and Fleshman especially seems to revel in the language of her blue-­collar upbringing. She has also drunk deeply from the well of political progressivism, and it’s perplexing that she doesn’t see the tension between her politics and her advocacy that’s rooted in a traditional view of biological sex.

These books highlight that while athletic prowess brings some fleeting glory, the day-to-day life of a female professional runner is financially precarious and anything but glamorous.