SG Reviews: Good for a girl – My life running in a man’s world by Lauren Fleshman
Lauren Fleshman is one of the most decorated American collegiate athletes ever. In her time at Stanford University, she became a 15-time All-American and five-time NCAA champion. Graduating from Stanford in 2003, whilst sponsored by Nike she became two-time US champion in the 5,000m.
It wasn’t long before Lauren saw a different world that hid behind the glitz and glamour of high-performance sport. She soon begun to realise she was competing in a world that was designed for men. Lauren’s book is more than just a memoir, it is a manifesto for change.
The ugly truth
Growing up Lauren constantly saw amazing female runners disappear off the face of the earth, without explanation or reason. At the time she never knew why but as she progressed in the sport the reasons became more and more evident.
In her memoir she recalls sitting in the dining hall the night before the Foot Locker Cross Country Championships. Loading her plate up with “noodles, red sauce, a chicken leg, a roll with butter” she noticed others around her where eating differently commenting “others looked uncomfortable, like they were having dinner with a tiger.”
Lauren looks backs on these moments and sees girls that are in need of help, but there is no way of reaching them. They are in the past, frozen in time, it made me want to reach through the pages to offer my support.
The theme of women and girls restricting their diets runs deep through Lauren’s memoir. She explains that eating disorders are not all about body-image but also an expectation driven experience based on performance.
Her story
You become attached to Lauren as she guides you through her life. I became attached to her coaches, her teammates and her family. I felt welcome in her world, which made it even more heart wrenching when I walked in her shoes.
A particularly harrowing experience is when Lauren sits in her coach’s office as they talk about the dip in her performances that year. He asks her how much she weighed when she was performing well, and how much does she weigh now. It was obviously a triggering experience for her as cracks begin to show in her own eating patterns and the way she approaches food.
The problem is the research or science isn’t there to back up the theory that the lighter you are the faster you run. Cracks begin to show as Lauren’s body deteriorates as she restricts her diet. She loses her period, and in denial tells herself it’s healthy to “skip a few.”
Reflecting on her experience she gives us the facts on why skipping her period was so unhealthy. If you skip your period, your bone density becomes decreased, in turn resulting in brittle bones that can break easily.
Before we know it, Lauren is on crutches.
Society is the problem
Lauren points to the damaging social attitudes that shaped her journey. She doesn’t blame her coach for implying she should lose weight to get faster. She wants to promote social change around the topic. In her university classes where she learned about the women’s bodies in sport, periods were skipped over as if they were meaningless. Even the topic of periods for male coaches is somewhat ignored and left to the female assistant coaches to deal with.
Eating disorders are only one facet of Lauren’s lived experience as a female running in a man’s world. In her Nike contract there were specific clauses which degraded her as a female. If Lauren was to get pregnant her contract would be suspended with immediate effect. She would lose all funding, which essentially meant she had to choose between having an athletic career and having children.
Change is a process
Good for a girl portrays the harsh reality of life as an accomplished sports woman.
Ideally, I would have liked to have heard more on how Lauren would continue to improve women’s sports in years to come. But the reality is that change is a process, and this book is a step in that journey. It raises the questions and offers some answers but lets us draw the conclusions.
Lauren has already begun to patch the cracks in women’s sport, coaching her own team of Oiselle sponsored elite females with a focus on being happy and healthy before performance. It is early days, but the group is thriving, and I am excited to see how her coaching style can be adopted by the running community in years to come.
Score: 4.5 / 5
