Track’s Sociologist:
A Review of Lauren Fleshman’s Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World
by Scott F. Parker
One of the hazards of the celebrity memoir — and one of the reasons it tends to be such a cringey genre — is the temptation to seize what is already a public narrative and revise or authorize it to serve the author’s own interests. Inevitably, such “memoirs” read more like brand-approved releases from someone’s PR team than like literature. Memoir works when an author is willing to subordinate the needs of her ego to the needs of her book. It is therefore a genre ill-suited to the self-satisfied and even to the successful.
Which puts Lauren Fleshman in a tough spot as a writer. She, first and perhaps best among runners, used social media to give herself a “platform” from which she could successfully self-brand. And so when she shows up on the pages of her memoir, Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World, not only does her reputation precede her but her largely self-created reputation precedes her. Well-known, well-liked, and supremely accomplished, Fleshman is nothing less than a generational star in her sport. What can memoir hope to do for someone who is already enthusiastically, even reverentially, received by thousands of fans?
Falling in line with other public figures as the last holdouts for memoirs that span the entirety of a life so far rather than narrowing their books’ focus to an area of inquiry, Fleshman takes us from childhood through COVID. Predictably, Good for a Girl is at its worst when Fleshman is running through her many achievements like lines on her resume: the Picky Bars company she co-founded, the Believe Training Journal series she co-authored, her popular website AskLaurenFleshman.com, and her sponsorship with the upstart women’s running-clothing company Oiselle. It’s all quite impressive and good material for her Wikipedia page, but in the book we need to see the narrator go inward in a sincere and sustained effort to make sense of her past.
Fleshman does this by interrogating rather than concealing her own shortcomings. No matter how Forrest Gumpy she gets in recounting her career highlights, it is her willingness to portray herself in a harsh light that earns her the reader’s trust and respect. For instance, at the 2008 U. S. Olympic Trials, Fleshman finished fourth in the 5,000m, one spot away from qualifying for the Beijing Olympics, after training through and around injury. It was a pivotal moment in her career. She had to write about it. But she did not have to write about what happened next. Two of the women who beat her, Shalane Flanagan and Kara Goucher, had already qualified for the Olympics in the 10,000m. If either one of them elected to skip the 5,000 to focus on the 10,000, at the Olympics Fleshman would go to Beijing in her stead. “I wrote each of them a brief email, reiterating our shared dream of being Olympians, the heartbreak of facing four years of unknowns and aging out, and explaining the contract consequences of not making the team. They both turned me down.” Pride, in other words, is not going to come between Fleshman and the truth.
Thankfully, it is to such ins and outs and ups and downs of competitive running that Fleshman gives the bulk of her attention. She writes with deep feeling and insight into what it was like for her to be among the world’s elite runners. Within Good for a Girl is a very good memoir, celebrity or otherwise.
Fleshman found early and regular success in running, posting the fastest times in gym class week after week until the day one of her male classmates displaced her by a substantial margin. But puberty would signify more to Fleshman than just that “a boy’s changing body threatened [her] identity.” In the relative advantage puberty gives male over female runners lies the opportunity to start seeing the female body itself as a deviation from the norm. And not only do girls not gain the advantage boys do from puberty, often puberty makes them slower, at least in the short term, and therefore can be seen as something that needs to be suppressed.
This view, pervasive among competitive runners, is one that Fleshman would herself internalize despite dominating her sport. After finishing second at the Foot Locker Cross Country Championships as a high school senior, winning multiple NCAA titles at Stanford, and starting a professional track and field career, Fleshman nevertheless finds herself unhealthily restricting her eating, despite her intentions not “take it too far” (1640), in an effort to take pounds off her body and seconds off her times.
What she doesn’t know during this period — and what many female runners don’t know — is that the physical damage of starvation takes time to announce itself. In the short term, runners often improve. But as the body’s stresses accumulate, the injuries accumulate, and the decline begins. “Looking back on the places we came from, thin, sick girls continued to lower records, win Foot Locker, succeed at NCAAs for a season or two, and then disappear.”
The pressure to deny the female body starts early. Recounting her own experience, Fleshman writes, “A period was a rite of passage into womanhood, and womanhood didn’t stand for anything I wanted” (702). And yet there are penalties to be paid here as well. The male gaze resides not only in Fleshman’s psyche but in the culture around her too: “The body that made me feel powerful in sports was not at odds with being the right body, the body that qualified as feminine.”
It is observations like these that lead Fleshman to her thesis that all too often female runners are treated by the sport as defective males, when what they need is to be understood as biologically distinct and treated as such. Females develop on a different timeline from males and have different biological needs. “During the small window of years through age twenty-six when women’s endocrine systems are responsible for building the entire bone bank we spend the rest of our lives drawing from, so many of us are creating an environment where we’re barely able to maintain what we have” (1731). Yet generation after generation of female runners is pushed past their breaking points, sacrificed at the altar of normative masculinity.
Fleshman is a sociologist of her sport. Her primary research method as a memoirist is self-reflection, but this self-reflection is always carried out with an eye toward the societal implications of her observations and experiences.
In the 50 years since the passing of Title IX, girls have widely been extended the opportunity to participate in sports. Now, Fleshman is demanding, they need to be extended the opportunity also to be girls and to be allowed to become women. On this point, Fleshman is persuasive. How dispiriting is it to witness a system that encourages young athletes to sacrifice their health and well-being for the sake of their sport? Surely, these cannot be our priorities.
Except, as we know from the traumatic brain injuries that are a part of football, athletes will reliably accept substantial personal risk if that’s what their sport entails. What are we to say to female runners on this front beyond “Compete at your own risk”? Fleshman considers the football analogy, citing the fact that the NCAA, “when confronted with concussion research and potential liability, created research-backed and strictly enforced checklists and policies for head injuries that all programs must adhere to” (812) and bemoaning the fact that “the NCAA still has no official policy concerning eating disorders, despite creating the ideal environment for them to propagate.” But the analogy breaks down when you recognize that football can change its rules to try to decrease the incidence of concussions, whereas no sport can define “healthy diet” let alone enforce it.
As long as the incentives point in the direction they do, with weight loss tending to improve times, appeals to abstract notions of health are unlikely to carry the day. So unless we are going to return to the paternalistic days of protecting fragile women from running competitively (we don’t want their uteruses to fall out!) before age 26, our only appeal will be to culture: the culture of women leading by example as they attempt to balance performance, longevity, and health; the culture of women coaches and experienced women athletes establishing better norms and expectations around diet; the culture of Lauren Fleshman writing this book and challenging the prevailing values of winning at all costs and of just doing it and of treating women like proto-men.
It can come as no surprise that for Fleshman, “Making everything about winning, about the Olympics, about being the best . . . it felt bad. Not just when things went wrong, but most of the time.” How far away Fleshman got from what attracted her to running in the first place — that feeling she can still recall: “I would ramp up my speed until it was impossible to think of anything else but the running; until I wasn’t a girl, or a middle schooler, or in PE class at all. I was just a body, limbs and blood and breath and power.” Isn’t that why any of us run, for that feeling that running, when it really happens, is nothing less than a source of deep elemental meaning in what I have no choice but to call our souls. Fleshman isn’t telling us something we don’t know when she reflects that “any pursuit of excellence had to center these moments of joy, or it wasn’t worth doing”; she’s reminding us of the priorities that are already our own. Or should be.
Scott F. Parker is the author of Run for Your Life: A Manifesto and The Joy of Running qua Running, among other books. His writing has appeared in Runner’s World, Running Times, Tin House, Philosophy Now, the Believer, and other publications. He teaches at Montana State University and is the nonfiction editor for Kelson Books.