I Changed My Body for My Sport. No Girl Should. – The New York Times
I Changed My Body for My Sport. No Girl Should. The New York Times
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Women and girls are no longer content just to have a chance to play; we are demanding that sports be rebuilt altogether.
By Lauren Fleshman
Ms. Fleshman is a retired professional runner.
Over the past week, the athletic world has been embroiled in a reckoning following high school phenom Mary Cain’s story of suffering from an eating disorder and suicidal thoughts in pursuit of athletic success. Stories like hers are not new. What’s new, and what I think has triggered such outrage, is that she has audaciously put the blame where it belongs: on a sports system built by and for men.
That system is long overdue for reform.
I’ve had a lot of time to think about how to fix it. The win-at-all-costs culture of competitive high school sports manifested itself early for me — in the form of a salad with dressing on the side. That was the meal of choice for several girls seated together at a pre-race dinner before we raced one another at the 1998 National Foot Locker Cross Country Championships. The next morning, the top 32 girls and 32 boys in the nation would line up to race for medals, bragging rights and college scholarships. In the race, some of them crumpled, and others flew. Many of the girls near the front had fueled themselves with salad the night before. Some were alarmingly thin.
If I hadn’t made the medal podium, I might have doubted my choice of pasta at that dinner. If I hadn’t talked to my high school coach about what I saw, I might have fallen into the same trap in college that has annihilated enough talent to fill several Olympic teams. Luckily, my coach reinforced my positive body image and educated me about eating disorders. He sold me on the long game, and it worked.
At Stanford, I won five N.C.A.A. titles and was a 15-time All-American. I raced with unmatched consistency year over year. Part of me was motivated to prove that, with a stronger frame, you could be successful for longer — that winning didn’t have to involve hurting yourself.
But rather than change the culture, people talked about me as if I were an exception to the rule that thinner was better. During my final season, with the transition to pro running on the horizon, I began to believe them. I restricted my diet to make my 21-year-old body, still soft from the new estrogen infusing it, look like the leaner 28-year-old women I saw making Olympic teams. I wasn’t ready for that kind of body. I made myself into it anyway. I may have looked the part, but I lost my energy. I lost my period, and injuries set in, derailing the first half of my professional running career.
I was one of the fastest distance runners to never make the Olympics. I’m certain that relative energy deficiency in sport, or RED-S, the same problem Mary Cain encountered, caused me to leave some talent on the table. I don’t mind the missed podiums, the missed chances. What gnaws at me is that nothing has changed. Until we acknowledge and respect that the female performance curve is different from the male version that sports was built on, girls will continue to face institutionalized harm.
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At 17, Mary Cain was already a record-breaking phenom: the fastest girl in a generation, and the youngest American track and field athlete to make a World Championships team. Then, everything changed.
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I was the fastest girl in America. “Mary Cain!” “There are women here almost twice her age” “being left in her wake.“ I set many national records. And I was a straight-A student. “C’mon, Mary Cain!” When I was 16, I got a call from Alberto Salazar at Nike. He was the world’s most famous track coach and he told me I was the most talented athlete he’d ever seen. During my freshman year in college, I moved out to train with him and his team full time at Nike world headquarters. It was a team of the fastest athletes in the world. And it was a dream come true. I joined Nike because I wanted to be the best female athlete, ever. Instead, I was emotionally and physically abused by a system designed by Alberto and endorsed by Nike. This is what happened to me. When I first arrived, an all-male Nike staff became convinced that in order for me to get better, I had to become thinner, and thinner, and thinner. This Nike team was the top running program in the country. And yet we had no certified sports psychologist. There was no certified nutritionist. It was really just a bunch of people who were Alberto’s friends. So when I went to anybody for help, they would always just tell me the same thing. And that was to listen to Alberto. Alberto was constantly trying to get me to lose weight. He created an arbitrary number of 114 pounds, and he would usually weigh me in front of my teammates and publicly shame me if I wasn’t hitting weight. He wanted to give me birth control pills and diuretics to lose weight— the latter of which isn’t allowed in track and field. I ran terrible during this time. It reached a point where I was on the starting line and I’d lost the race before I started, because in my head all I was thinking of was not the time I was trying to hit but the number on the scale I saw earlier that day. It would be naïve to not acknowledge the fact that weight is important in sports. Like boxers need to maintain a certain weight, or you know everybody always ends up citing the math about how the thinner you are, the faster you’re going to run because you have to carry less weight. But here’s a biology lesson I learned the hard way. When young women are forced to push themselves beyond what they’re capable at their given age, they’re at risk for developing RED–S. Suddenly, you realize you’ve lost your period for a couple months. And then a couple months becomes a couple years. And in my case, it was a total of three. And if you’re not getting your period, you’re not going to be able to have the necessary levels of estrogen to maintain strong bone health. And in my case, I broke five different bones. The New York Times Magazine published a story about how Alberto was training me and nurturing my talent. We weren’t doing any of that. I felt so scared. I felt so alone. And I felt so trapped. And I started to have suicidal thoughts. I started to cut myself. Some people saw me cutting myself and … sorry. Nobody really did anything or said anything. So in 2015, I ran this race, and I didn’t run super well. And afterwards, there was a thunderstorm going on. Half the track was under one tent. Alberto yelled at me in front of everybody else at the meet, and he told me that I’d clearly gained five pounds before the race. It was also that night that I told Alberto and our sports psych that I was cutting myself. And they pretty much told me they just wanted to go to bed. And I think for me, that was my kick in the head where I was like, “This system is sick.” I think even for my parents in certain ways, once I finally vocalized to them, I mean, they were horrified. They bought me the first plane ride home. And they were like, ”Get on that flight. Get the hell out of there.” I wasn’t even trying to make the Olympics anymore. I was just trying to survive. So I made the painful choice and I quit the team. “After a multiyear investigation, the U.S. anti-doping agency has banned Alberto Salazar from the sport for four years.” “Nike will shut down the Oregon project.” “Nike C.E.O. Mark Parker stepping down from the company in January of 2020.” Those reforms are mostly a direct result of the doping scandal. They’re not acknowledging the fact that there is a systemic crisis in women’s sports and at Nike, in which young girls’ bodies are being ruined by an emotionally and physically abusive system. That’s what needs to change, and here’s how we can do it. First, Nike needs to change. In track and field, Nike is all powerful. They control the top coaches, athletes, races, even the governing body. You can’t just fire a coach and eliminate a program and pretend the problem is solved. My worry is that Nike is merely going to rebrand the old program and put Alberto’s old assistant coaches in charge. Secondly, we need more women in power. Part of me wonders if I had worked with more female psychologists, nutritionists and even coaches where I’d be today. I got caught in a system designed by and for men, which destroys the bodies of young girls. Rather than force young girls to fend for themselves, we have to protect them. I genuinely do have hope for the sport. And I plan to be running for many years to come. And so part of the reason I’m doing this now is I want to end this chapter and I want to start a new one.
It is grown women, not girls, who top the most prestigious podiums. It is grown women in their late 20s and 30s breaking American records. It is American women in their mid-30s winning the Boston and New York Marathons. Imagine if we gave more girls a chance to get there.
Eating disorders have the second-highest mortality rate of all mental health disorders, surpassed only by opioid addiction. They have continued to increase for girls ages 15 to 22, which directly overlaps with the peak of adolescence, commonly spent in high school and college sports. Over one-third of N.C.A.A. Division I female athletes exhibit risk factors for anorexia nervosa.
The natural improvement curve of young women generally includes a performance dip or plateau as the body adjusts to the changes of adolescence. If you make it past the dip, you are rewarded with steadier improvement through your mid-20s and 30s. During this normal plateau, though, girls train in a system that holds up the more linear, male performance curve as the ideal. When their biological performance curve is not normalized and supported, women and girls are faced with a choice: fight their body’s changes, or ride it out and be declared undedicated.
We do not currently have a sports system built for girls. If we did, it would look very different — and it would benefit everyone.
The abuse that Mary Cain described has been justified and allowed to persist for decades. It is still a very common practice for a coach to continue milking points out of athletes who are battling an eating disorder, while providing completely inadequate care. It is still a very common practice for coaches to directly create an eating-disorder culture in the name of performance by focusing on weight and appearance.
Coaches are the ones with the power. They bear the responsibility for creating an environment that prioritizes health over performance. If coaches are found to create or contribute to a culture of negative body image or eating disorders, they are committing abuse, and they should be fired.
If sports were built for young women and girls, the focus on weight would be replaced with basic nutrition and RED-S education, which would dramatically reduce injuries and mental health disorders for all genders. Eating disorders are a form of self-harm and should be treated as such, with mandatory reporting to medical professionals for the safety of the individual. In college programs, a nutritionist and a certified psychologist who specializes in eating-disorder recovery should be as commonly available as athletic trainers. Coaches should be rewarded based on health metrics and retention of talent, rather than for cycling out athletes who burn out year after year. There should be a hall of fame that inducts coaches whose athletes have gone on to have the longest careers.
Mary Cain’s story is the story of thousands of girls and boys. Her coach, Alberto Salazar, is just the latest in a line of powerful men being scrutinized for the harmful ways they have used their power. Women and girls are no longer content just to have a chance to play; we are demanding that sports be rebuilt altogether.
Despite decades spent submerging athletes in environments of negative body image and eating-disorder culture and contributing to a mental health crisis, very few coaches and administrators have been held to account. It’s time to acknowledge the unequal power dynamic of coaches and athletes, and address the systemic harm. It’s time to call this behavior what it is: abuse.
Lauren Fleshman (@laurenfleshman) is a two-time 5,000-meter national champion and head coach of the professional women’s running group Littlewing Athletics.
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