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In middle school and early high school, it’s safe to say that natural ability was a huge factor in my athletic prowess. With a wiry body and unusually long limbs, I managed to become one of the top young runners in California. I finished fourth in the state my sophomore year. At the same time, I was also developing an interest in other things—student government, theater, competitive soccer, and a social life. But being a well-rounded teenager was not what my high school’s athletic leadership wanted.
At the beginning of junior year, my track coach, along with the head of my high school’s athletic department, gave me an ultimatum: I would need to quit soccer or I would be kicked off the track team. He felt it was right and best to force high-school athletes to specialize. The system itself was structured to benefit athletes who specialized and punish those with a diversity of commitments. Not all athletes, to be clear—only female athletes. There were multi-sport male athletes at our school who were celebrated, but for some reason the women’s running coach (who was a man) felt that we needed to erase the other parts of our identities to succeed, as if a fifteen-year-old girl who had to miss a few practices represented a threat to the athletic department’s authority. They wanted me to be a compliant good girl. I wasn’t a bad girl, but I wanted to be treated respectfully. There was not a single woman in this whole conversation—the entire school leadership was men. My father and I made an official complaint to the school leadership but we were disregarded. My dad even consulted with a lawyer, but ultimately decided not to pursue the case because private Catholic schools have minimal accountability beyond their own internal decision-making. Had this happened today, I’m sure it could have become a viral moment that would have stoked outrage. This was the most potent encounter with sexism I’ve ever had in my life—being unabashedly told that I was being held to a different standard than the boys within the high-school athletic system.
Since I didn’t want to quit soccer, I was not allowed to be on the cross-country or track teams and I didn’t run that year. Then, in senior year, I tried to re-join the cross-country team. The coach once again made it clear that he would not permit anyone to miss or reschedule anything, especially if the conflict was with any other extracurricular activities. This came to a head for me during Spirit Week, which is a very big deal at Bishop O’Dowd High School. It is the biggest week of the year, full of themed days and bonding activities. During Spirit Week each grade was responsible for decorating a section of hallway in a particular theme. And when I say “decorate,” I mean it was tradition to cover your entire section with a full 3-D set. We were the “Super Nintendo Seniors.” We had worked for weeks on the hallway decorations and, as the class vice president, I was personally responsible for ensuring that the decorations went up in time. I asked my coach to let me miss practice for a day so that I could be there during the final pre–Spirit Week decorating push, but he said no, I had to be at practice, and if I wasn’t there then I’d be kicked off the team. I missed practice and that was that—the end of my high-school running career.
I wish the coach would have seen that as a high schooler, I did not feel ready to specialize in anything, especially a sport that I was good at but had not yet fallen in love with. I was slowly learning to enjoy running, but it was not for the reasons he was trying to force on me. I was a late bloomer; I always have been. And I was gradually growing into the sport just as I was gradually growing into myself. The things I liked about running were the moments when sport felt fun. Like when my pals on the team and I would secretly divert from our forty-five-minute run and jump in the reservoir instead. We’d come back dripping wet and tell the coach “It was just so hot out there, we sweated so much!” Or the nights when we’d buy giant blocks of ice from the 7-Eleven and sneak into the golf course next to the park where we trained. Someone would sit on the block long enough that a little seat was melted into it and we’d take turns sliding down the grassy hills. For Bay Area kids, this was the closest we ever got to sledding in our hometown. Don’t get me wrong, we trained hard enough. We were one of the best teams in the state. But we were also teenagers. The minute the coach set unreasonable boundaries for us, it stopped being fun and started feeling too serious. All the joy was gone.
The focus of high-school sports should be on human development, not high achievement. Competition results are a by-product, not the end goal. I’m glad my father never pushed me to specialize in running at a young age—he and I both knew I was good, but my dad’s top priority was seeing me thrive as a person. He’d rather me be a happy normal kid than a stressed-out running star. I wanted to experience things. I was in the school play, I partied, I drank, I experimented. Nothing too extreme, but probably not the type of behavior most parents would associate with a future Olympian. If you look at a snapshot of me in any one moment of my high-school life, you probably wouldn’t guess where I would end up.
The ironic twist is that my forced retirement from high-school running became a major advantage in my later growth as an NCAA and then professional athlete. I inadvertently stopped training just long enough for my body to go through puberty without the strain of overtraining, which is exactly the challenge that most girls in distance running face at that age.
The vast majority of athletic programs, even at the collegiate level, lack the most fundamental information about how to properly guide female athletes through puberty and young adulthood. Programs confuse health with fitness. Fitness is not an indicator of durability and sustainability; it is only an indicator of athletic ability at the present moment. Health, on the other hand, is a more holistic measure of the body’s functionality over time. Fitness does not take into account that you need to continue training tomorrow and next week. It is better to be a hundred percent healthy and eighty percent fit than a hundred percent fit and eighty percent healthy.
But that’s not the way most programs see things. Fitness is rewarded while health is taken for granted. I don’t think this approach always comes from a bad place, it just comes from ignorance—and the unfortunate result is that when female athletes hit puberty, they’ll often take shortcuts to fitness at the expense of their long-term health. When a girl’s body transitions from adolescence into adulthood, the physical changes that occur can seem—at first—to be counterproductive to fitness, mainly weight gain as her frame expands and her body fills out. I once consoled a college teammate after the coach called her into his office and made her hold a five-pound weight in each hand and pump her arms as if she was running, and then had her put the weights down and pump her arms again—a demonstration of how much easier it is to run after losing ten pounds.
So in an effort to please their coaches and keep up with their male teammates, whose developmental trajectory is completely different, many female athletes overtrain and don’t eat enough during this critical growth phase instead of allowing puberty to naturally take its course. (I know female athletes whose periods were delayed until their twenties.) One of the upperclassmen on my high-school track team—we’ll call her Blythe—is a classic example of overtraining and underfueling. By the time she was a senior, Blythe was hospitalized for an eating disorder. But for months and even years, she got away with it. The thing about eating disorders in distance running is that, for a window of time, they appear to be effective—until they aren’t. While other girls were filling out and running slower times, Blythe was thin and muscular and as fast as ever…until she broke.