When I joined the team as a freshman, Blythe saw me as a threat to her reign as one of the fastest girls in school and she actually became a bully. During a practice the day after I’d beaten her in a race, she made all the boys run the opposite direction as me on the track. I felt bewildered and lame. Another time, she convinced me to run intentionally slower during a race, and yet another time, she manipulated me into forfeiting a state championship race that she herself did not qualify for. I was younger, confused, and impressionable. She was not a good role model. I now understand that she must have been suffering tremendously at the time, but back then it was hard for me to have a teammate who wasn’t eating and who based her entire sense of worth on how fast she was in any given season.
The result of this systemic prioritization of fitness over health for young female athletes is that many girls will become frail and injury-prone by the time they’re in college—as a result of her eating disorder, Blythe had injuries for almost her entire collegiate career. I know this because we went to rival colleges and I saw her show up to race after race in a medical boot. The athletic system failed Blythe and then she failed me. That’s the thing about faulty systems; they will ruin individuals who then, in turn, pass the harm along to the next batch of people.
It breaks my heart to think of all the young women who quit the sport because the system made them feel as if they “weren’t built for distance running.” To me, that is the biggest tragedy, when somebody gives up on a dream because of being mishandled or otherwise rushed due to a system that does not work. When the same bad things happen to a group of people time and time again, it is important to look closer at the failed system that is responsible. We are failing ourselves if we don’t.
* * *
After I stopped running my junior year, my coaches assumed that I’d be lost to the vortex of puberty that claims so many female runners. But what none of them knew is that rather than being a death sentence, puberty is a superpower. The body that I grew during my junior and senior years of high school was capable, durable, and powerful because I wasn’t fighting against my body’s natural inclinations. I grew C-cup boobs. I rode the puberty wave and then, when the time was right, I gradually increased my training. My mature body was far more durable and powerful and capable than the twisted Peter Pan prepubescent body that most female athletes feel pressured to maintain. It is a problem to assume that if we allow a girl to go through normal body maturity, she will never again be as capable as she was prepuberty. It’s straight-up wrong, because in reality, most female distance runners peak in their late twenties and early thirties. Our bodies take time to develop. Why can’t develop be a word we embrace?
This systemic misunderstanding of the female distance-running trajectory extends into the professional world, too. In one of my first meetings with a potential sponsor, when I was fresh out of college, the male CEO behind a female-branded athletic apparel company offered me a generous contract and told me that if, in a few months, he felt that it was smart for me to retire, he would be the first to tell me and I could keep my contract by making ads for the company instead of competing. He framed it as if he was doing me a favor, this man in his sixties telling a twenty-one-year-old woman that he would decide when she was past her prime. He fundamentally misunderstood that I was actually at the beginning of my athletic potential, not the end. He was in no position to deem my body incapable at such a young age. His diagnosis of my performance limits stemmed from an understanding of the sport based on the male athletic trajectory, which has nothing to do with the natural progression of the female athlete’s body. Maybe he was basing his information on his experience of watching so many female athletes fall apart in their early twenties thanks to the system that overtrained them through puberty, but that wasn’t the case for me.
I steadied my voice to explain to him that I wanted to be an Olympian. That I did not want to quit in the next few months, as he thought might be the case. I had just committed to my Olympic dream and the last thing I needed was this man telling me when my time was up. We did not end up working together. It turns out I dodged a major bullet: This same CEO later grabbed my waist and grinded up on me from behind without asking when he was drunk at an industry party during the National Club Cross Country Championships. He creepily said that he was “sorry things didn’t work out between us.” It made me really uncomfortable to be touched and spoken to in this way and I felt sorry for all the athletes who felt inclined to “dance” with him that night because he was their boss. I left the event immediately, uncomfortable to even be in the same space as him—later, one of his top athletes reached out to my coach to apologize on his behalf.
From my draconian high-school coach to this CEO, I learned firsthand that the distance running world is not structured to embrace female athletes. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Starting as early as middle and high school, we can educate coaches and athletes on the proper approach that young women can take to embrace their bodies and stay healthy and ultimately grow into more capable adults. I had two incredible female coaches in my career, Maribel Souther at Dartmouth and Maurica Powell at the University of Oregon, both of whom showed by example what a thriving female athlete could be. I hope that as more women take leadership roles in the athletic world, it can one day become common knowledge that female bodies operate on different performance timelines than their male teammates and require a different type of support.
* * *
When I started college, it was expected that I would join the cross-country team. Dartmouth’s recruiters had reached out to me on the basis of my performance my sophomore year of high school, and the coach was interested in my potential. I also saw a future for myself in running and I liked the idea of committing to a sport where I could do some damage. I was curious. And unlike the coaches who wanted me to specialize in high school, in college I found a coach and team who inspired me instead of pressured me. I felt ready and even happy to embrace running.
But when I reported to my first practice, it became abundantly clear that I would no longer breeze to the top of the ranks as I had in middle school and early high school. I couldn’t rely on my talent alone. After two years away from competitive running, my body had changed. It was humiliating to have to walk after only a few miles on easy training runs while my teammates literally ran circles on the trails around me. I finished dead last in my first cross-country race. I was not only the last on my team; I had one of the slowest times in the whole league. After each of my bad races, some of my older teammates took me out to a cave-themed bar that we knew would serve underage students. Nobody else drinking in that bar at noon (cross-country races were morning events) expected me to do anything great, so it was easy to not expect anything of myself, either.
Running wasn’t the only part of college life I struggled with: My adjustment to Dartmouth’s academics felt like falling into an ice-cold lake—it was a shock and I could barely keep my head above water. Unlike the kids who either came from high-end prep schools or were just straight-up geniuses, which it seemed like most of my new classmates at Dartmouth were, I soon realized that my high-school academic experience left me drastically underprepared for the rigors of an Ivy League education. One of my professors called me in for a special meeting after I failed yet another multiple-choice midterm and asked if I might have a learning disability. Anytime I failed a test, I had a sad little tradition where I’d take myself out to Ramunto’s, a pizza spot in Hanover, and treat myself to several garlic-knot pizza slices, where the crust is actually made of garlic knots. I ate at Ramunto’s more often than I’d like to admit.