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Episode 352: Lauren Fleshman
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Lauren Fleshman is the author of Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man's World (Penguin Press).
Social: @CNFPod
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
Show notes/newsletter: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Listener Offer
00:00:00
Speaker
ACNFers, I have a teensy bit more time on my hands. That could be changing. Who knows? If you leave a review over at Apple Podcasts, I'll give you a complimentary edit of a piece of your writing up to 2,000 words. Once your review posts, usually within 24 hours, send me a screenshot of that review to Creative Nonfiction Podcast at gmail.com.
00:00:22
Speaker
and I'll reach back out and we'll get started. Who knows? If you like the experience, you might want me to help you with something a bit more ambitious. Making sure you stop to feel satisfied. Like people have gratitude practice, but this was like a satisfaction practice. Like, okay, good job. Like you have to like manufacture the positive feedback for yourself so that it makes it easier to get up and do it again tomorrow.
Guest Introduction: Lauren Fleshman
00:00:53
Speaker
Hey CNFers, it's CNF Pod, that creative non-fiction podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about telling true stories. I am Brendan O'Meara, how's it going? Today's guest, whoa, it's a good one, fast one, super fast.
00:01:09
Speaker
Like the wind, CNF'ers. Lauren Fleshman, the author of Good for a Girl, A Woman Running in a Man's World. It is published by Penguin Press. Hell of a book, CNF'ers. Hell of a book. An important book, especially if maybe you're a parent of a young female athlete, specifically a runner.
00:01:29
Speaker
Lauren was a five-time NCAA champion at Stanford University, Wicked Smack, Hobbit of the West, and two-time national champion as a professional. Her book chronicles her rise as a young phenom, and the trials and tribulation in the toxic world women runners are subjected to based on the male standard.
Challenges for Women Runners
00:01:52
Speaker
Women face a whole different set of pressures and athletic peaks based on their own unique biology where puberty and periods and hips and breasts are often called injuries. Lauren creates space for a new conversation that might just move the standard for women athletes so they might have a less physically and mentally toxic experience on and off the track.
00:02:17
Speaker
We're talking disordered eating, missed periods, you name it. That whole world is broken and Lauren is out to fix it. And it wouldn't be a CNF pod experience. If we didn't talk about the challenges of writing the book, something that Lauren hasn't spoken much about in her media blitz for this now New York Times bestseller.
00:02:43
Speaker
We talk about how running is a writer's sport and how writing is a runner's art.
Writing and Running: Overcoming Daunting Experiences
00:02:50
Speaker
How she handled a particularly dark time in her life, following a possibly career into injury, writing about hard stuff and why she's scared when she sees the next young phenom runner. See Mary Kane. Google Mary Kane and you will, you will know. Juicy conversation, guys.
00:03:11
Speaker
One last thing, head over to BrendanAmera.com for show notes and to sign up for my up to 11 rage against the algorithm newsletter. Lots of cool stuff, goodies, raffles, happy hours. Shout out to Lori and Andrew. First of the month, no spam. As far as I can tell, you can't beat it. There's also Patreon. If you want to check that out, I won't belabor the point. See patreon.com slash cnfbot.
00:03:36
Speaker
And I'm just going to get right into it. Okay, CNFers? This is Lauren Fleshman you're about to hear from. All right, Ruth. It's like a lot more than I expected. Yeah, it's been great. I mean, it's, I don't know how common this is or if it's just the way my brain works, but
00:04:05
Speaker
I spent a lot of time convincing myself that the book made no sense and people who read it early and said nice things were just being nice to me. It's really hard for me to be convinced that the book accomplished what I set out to do and that people are actually enjoying it. I think it's finally sinking in that at least some people are being honest when they say that, but that's nice. For sure. What about the book did you feel made no sense?
00:04:36
Speaker
I think it was just like, the main thing was that I made it all up somehow, which is what a lot of women who are reading it in their 30s, 40s and 50s are writing to me. They're like, wow, seeing you write those feelings and thoughts and experiences like the undercurrent things, the unspokens.
00:04:55
Speaker
They were like, I had sort of convinced myself I had made that up because no one was talking about it plainly with each other. And you get enough distance from it and you start to kind of doubt like, was there as much implied pressure as I thought to change my body or, or was that just me being sensitive or
Mental Space in Running and Influences
00:05:16
Speaker
whatever?
00:05:16
Speaker
That's been nice to see. It's just like, oh, yeah, no, that was real. And taking a huge risk on vocalizing those inner monologues was like, oh, boy. Yeah. And it strikes me that writing is kind of a runner's art and that running is kind of a writer's sport. So for you, what is your relationship to running and writing and sort of how they tie together, I think?
00:05:46
Speaker
specific to this book, so much of what this book's about, the themes, the little moments and scenes that stuck out that I felt compelled to write about are things that
00:05:59
Speaker
I've processed on runs or talked about or around with people on runs. Not only is a run when you're alone, running is this place where you can work things out in your mind and your mind can hop freely around what seems like unrelated subjects as you're moving through space. You just ping pong around, but really, I think it's like dreaming and that your brain is trying to solve things and it's uniquely able to pull from
00:06:25
Speaker
what seems like unrelated categories in order to figure stuff out. It's difficult to process. And I think running alone can put you in that space too, but running with others, there's an openness to the kind of communication that you do on a run that's so different from sitting across a table from one another. So that running played a huge role in just formulating the book, what needed to be said and where the problems were.
00:06:47
Speaker
I think maybe only baseball is the only other sport that rivals running in terms of the volume of things that have been written about it, in a sense, especially in the book space. So for you, what were some potential models or even just favorite books on running that light you up and might have even given you the inspiration to write your own and contribute to it in your own way?
00:07:13
Speaker
Well, I read very few sports books, but, um, I'd say let your mind run. Dina Castor and Michelle Hamilton's book was a big one for me. Um, running while black. I read after I'd already written my book, but that's one that has influenced me a lot. I think our books rhyme, Alison Dezier's book on my rhyme and the way we approached it. Um, but like Seabiscuit is an example of a book of horses running his horse racing, but that influenced me a lot.
00:07:42
Speaker
trying to think if there were any other running books specifically. Like I read The Perfect Mile. I liked that. But I think yeah, overall, I've had a hard time connecting with running books. So I prefer stories about like worlds that I don't know.
00:08:01
Speaker
Yeah, is that because you have such a intimate connection to running just with all your successes and having done it for so long that when you read about it, that there are certain things that maybe the writer who doesn't have quite your experience doesn't quite stick the landing. You're like, yeah, it's just not quite there. Yeah, I think it's mostly about the thrill of learning something new. And so I think lots of writers
00:08:32
Speaker
I'm sure sometimes it's because they don't stick to landing, but sometimes they do stick a landing. It's just like, I've already stuck that landing in my mind or there's nothing novel or surprising about it to me. So it's just I've spent 30 years of my life so deeply engrossed in that world, but it's tough to surprise me at this point.
00:08:51
Speaker
I love in the acknowledgments of the book, too, when you're writing about Jennifer Loudon and how she helped you recover from the devastating realization that you weren't Ann Patchett about halfway through your first draft.
Struggles and Insecurities in Writing
00:09:04
Speaker
So maybe just kind of talk about that dynamic and also the doubt that comes across when you're trying to accomplish something and you're like, oh my God, this just isn't manifesting in the way that in my head I see it coming together. Oh, yeah. Well, it's crazy because previous to this book, I've only written essays, blogs.
00:09:21
Speaker
that kind of thing. And the 800 to 1600 word experience of trying to take your grand idea and humbly patch it together with words in an order is always frustrating, but it's only frustrating for like a limited amount of time. But in a long form, I mean, you're just in that place of frustration for so much longer and there's so much more room for doubt that you'll ever be able to pull it off, that it will even remotely resemble
00:09:49
Speaker
what you have in mind because the longer form gives you so many more possibilities, the potential for weaving together themes and overlapping narrative arc. I mean, you can just do so much more, but yeah, then the space between what you think you can do and what your skillset is can be...
00:10:07
Speaker
And then it also can take three, four or five or more drafts before it starts to remotely resemble your thoughts. That's just so much work, like a lot of time with the inner critic without positive reinforcement.
00:10:24
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. When you had started your blog and social media accounts kind of in the heyday of when that stuff could really gain traction where, you know, you could really kind of glom on and get an audience. You could write a missive and then you could
00:10:41
Speaker
tell if it was resonating with your audience in a way that like kind of put fuel in your take was fairly instantaneous but with a with a book it's kind of like you're alone with it for so long and you just don't know if it's going to come together and like you said it can take it can take so long and then yeah you just don't necessarily know you know how it's coming together it's unlike a blog post or something
00:11:05
Speaker
Yeah, and as a runner, you hit it totally right on with the blogging. You get pretty much instant feedback. As a runner, I was used to that as well. You can just go out and time a run. You can go do a race every weekend. You can push yourself on a certain interval session that you are familiar with and get an accurate gauge of where you're at. That's just for yourself. You can also, if you have a social media presence, just
00:11:35
Speaker
put out something to get some sort of reaction. Like if you need to feel like you're in community. But yeah, I think that that being alone with myself, it really highlighted where my insecurities still are. And I'm a human like everybody else. I mean, I know we all have that, but I didn't have a lot of practice sitting with that feeling for a very long time. And then having to do that during the pandemic and during lockdown.
00:12:03
Speaker
a lot of other things sort of fed the insecurity side of the fire. Yeah, and that's something I love talking about on this show just as writers because sometimes it's what we feel but we don't necessarily articulate, especially those feelings when we're alone and doing these things on our own in our own offices or retreats or wherever we might be.
00:12:26
Speaker
about how hard it is to do it and feeling like everybody else is really, really good and like here we are stewing in our own garbage. So for you, how did your insecurities as a writer manifest? Oh gosh. So many ways. This is such a hard question. How did it manifest? I mean, I would just
00:12:50
Speaker
I would just avoid doing the work. That was the biggest way that it affected me. I would find any excuse not to do it. I had to play games with myself to convince myself to take the small steps one at a time, right? Like it felt like I was building this
00:13:08
Speaker
big Lego creation. I got young kids, so Legos are top of mind. So I'm building this huge Lego creation and I had to find a way to get myself excited about a random two by two brick that I successfully placed on one side of the castle, right? Because if you can't find a way to generate some sort of positive energy in your body when you are making progress, then it's just like this, it becomes this endless march into who knows what.
00:13:38
Speaker
And so I made a lot of, my book coach Jen Loudon, who you mentioned earlier, she has some really great frameworks for that of just like practicing satisfaction and making sure that you're measuring satisfaction by things that are measurable and realistic.
00:13:53
Speaker
And so that you're spending less time asking myself the question, am I accomplishing what my imagination thinks I can do here? Is this book going to work? And instead spending as many days as I can going, did I sit down in the chair for two hours before I took a break? Or did I write this many words today? And then the last step is making sure you stop to feel satisfied.
00:14:19
Speaker
Like people have gratitude practice, but this was like a satisfaction practice. Like, okay, good job. Like you have to like manufacture the positive feedback for yourself so that it makes it easier to get up and do it again tomorrow.
00:14:32
Speaker
Well, it's got to be, for a runner too, it can be those points of satisfaction are pretty concrete, be it just how you check in with your body, but also just looking at the stopwatch. Be like, okay, well that is objectively feedback that you can either be satisfied or dissatisfied with. So just flipping that over to the writer side of things, how did you measure satisfaction? So it was something like looking at the stopwatch and be like, okay,
00:15:02
Speaker
That was a good lap. Yeah, I think I just time and words. So if I successfully wrote for a certain amount of time before breaks, if I wrote a certain number of words, then I would, I treated that as miles and pace, even though miles and pace are more universally understood as satisfying in it of themselves. Like you do a five mile run, like that's satisfying no matter what you're training for or not training for.
00:15:29
Speaker
I did have to train myself to just think it was satisfying to write 1500 words, even if those words sucked because they were all in service of getting to the better words later. I think there was this acceptance of like, I'm just going to have to write a lot of garbage here. I really didn't know how much of my book would just get thrown away when I was sitting down to write a book for the first time. That would be so much better the next time around. It would take a lot of pressure off.
00:15:57
Speaker
finding the perfect words or the right words if I just knew that I would essentially write four books worth of words and I would keep one book worth of words in the end.
00:16:05
Speaker
What I liked about some of the book as well too was how you kind of like folding in elements of family that really kind of are an undercurrent of the thing. And then there's a moment early on where you said there's a shelf above your dad's bar that your sister called the Lauren shrine as she fought for real estate with softball awards, a symbol of your sibling dynamic.
00:16:31
Speaker
that she hasn't fully recovered from. So I imagine by now, is this still a point of contention with your sister? Yeah, I think that we're older now, right? I'm 41, she's 38. But there were so many years of our relationship shaped by that childhood dynamic of comparison, of trying to win our dad's approval through
00:16:51
Speaker
um, achievement and her, you know, there's always like, or not always, younger sibling conflict with older sibling is really common in being compared to the older sibling and
Personal Reflections and Relationships
00:17:04
Speaker
stuff that happens a lot. A lot of my friends have experienced that on one side or the other, but then, um, it's really like how many years went by after that without a lot of positive things to build your relationship on.
00:17:17
Speaker
and we went to school in different places. We never really lived in the same city for any significant period of time. I was working this job as a professional athlete traveling and racing around the world and wasn't putting any energy into my relationship with my sister. I just didn't prioritize it. And so at our ages now, we still have a like this, we just don't have much built on top of the childhood dynamic. And that's what we're working on now.
00:17:45
Speaker
Yeah, it's tough. Speaking of tough, what was what did you find more challenging in this book, like writing about intimate details of what you chose to share with your family or intimate details with yourself in your running career? I think the toughest thing was sharing details about my teammates and my coaches, because that ties back to what we were talking about earlier with all the unspoken things where there were these
00:18:15
Speaker
words a coach might say with very little thought as to how much weight they carried. And then they forgot about it five minutes later, but the room full of athletes remembered it for the rest of their lives. And that's the power a coach can have or a parent can have when you have that power dynamic. Some of the things that were said or
00:18:37
Speaker
the societal norms and pressures placed on our team didn't affect me as much as my teammates were affected. But I needed to tell those stories of how they can affect people because they do affect so many people. So I was essentially telling other people's stories instead of my own, which is always uncomfortable. And then I love my coaches. I don't want to make anybody look bad, and I don't think anybody's a bad person.
00:18:59
Speaker
but I had to find a way to tell those stories if I wanted things to change. That was really hard. It's still hard. I still feel deeply uncomfortable with having done that. I ended up making this bargain with myself where I really wrestled with each story and said, does this need to be in there? Does it serve a purpose? Am I being fair? Am I painting a complete picture of this person and not just a caricature the best that I can in the space allowed? Then am I willing to disappoint people?
00:19:29
Speaker
Yeah, that surprises me because, you know, you're very candid about your father's alcoholism and how even though he was very proud of you, you know, super and super supportive in terms of your sports. And, you know, when you made the teams of freshmen, you're like, yeah, there's fleshmen, the freshmen.
00:19:48
Speaker
and everything. You know, you could just hear him cheering for you, but there was a very uncomfortable domestic component to your story, too. So it just surprised me that it was like the track stuff and teammates and coaches that was more uncomfortable for you. Well, it was all really uncomfortable. But if my dad was still living, it would have been impossible to write the book. And so I think that, yeah, his death seven years ago and the amount of
00:20:18
Speaker
grieving and processing that I've done in the years since. I feel more confident that the story I told about my dad is my story, even though it's him too. Because it was so critical to understanding the person I turned out to be and the lens with which I view the world and the sensitivities I brought to every room.
00:20:40
Speaker
After that, that I like, even if he were alive, I feel like it would have been harder to write the book. But I do feel like I could have had a conversation with him about it. I don't know that all of those pieces would have been in the book that are in there now. But yeah.
00:20:56
Speaker
And as you start to progress and you know you have a certain skill for running, at what point does the switch turn on and you're like, oh, I'm pretty good at this. And people like Coach DeLong start really encouraging you to pursue this competitively.
00:21:19
Speaker
Yeah, well, I think when I was discovering I had aptitude for it, I was pretty good at most physical things I tried as a kid. That was my gift. I can learn a physical task. My body had this physical intelligence that would learn things quickly. And so I wasn't surprised when I was good at running. And it took a while for me being good at running to then flip some switch to like, oh, I'm
00:21:48
Speaker
I now feel pressure or I now I'm doing this for some other reason than just the thrill of doing it.
Systemic Issues in Women’s Sports Development
00:21:54
Speaker
Because winning or placing near the top was still part of just the thrill of doing it at first, for the first few years. That's when those economic forces start to get tangled up with it, like, oh, running could be a pathway to free college education, which could change the entire course of your life. That's when it gets a little complicated.
00:22:14
Speaker
And there's a moment, as you're starting to progress and you're noticing, you're starting to get hit in the face with the different dynamics between men's and women's running and you're fully immersed in it. And there's a point where you write, too, with the men, they were focusing on battling the competition. And then you write, we spent so much competitive energy battling ourselves.
00:22:39
Speaker
So maybe you can kind of take us into that and unpack that sentence a bit. Yeah, for sure. I think that because the sports system was designed around, you know, high school and college sports system around the 13 to 22 year old male body and women and girls were actively excluded until 50 years ago from participating in any meaningful way. There's just a lot of things we take for granted that should apply to everyone like all these sports sayings of
00:23:08
Speaker
you get out what you put into sports, right? Effort equals results. Like if you train harder, you get better. And those comments are relatively true most of the time for male athletes, barring injury or illness. But for female athletes going through development during those ages, that's just not the normal experience. It's way, way, way more common to improve for a while, then your body changes, and then you have this period of time where
00:23:34
Speaker
you're having to adjust to your new body, to like breasts, hips, higher body fat percentage, your strength to weight ratio changes in what is at first an unfavorable direction, but then after a couple of years becomes favorable again. And then we can enjoy a second rise that lasts well into our twenties, thirties, and even forties. But during those critical years where we're having a different experience than the male bodied people around us, we aren't in a sports system that meets that, meets you where you're at and like,
00:24:04
Speaker
helps you see that that's normal and encourages you to lean into your new body changes and development. Instead, we treat it as a deviation from what's the definition of excellent and
00:24:17
Speaker
we tell girls they're being uncommitted if they gain body fat or we criticize their diet or we try to restrict their diet. Coaches try to control women's bodies through mandatory weigh-ins and body fat testing and things during this age when they shouldn't even be paying attention to that at all. So their bodies are just taking the form that they're meant to take. And so because of that conflict between what's happening in the female body and the environments that we're in that don't
00:24:43
Speaker
respect what's happening in the female body, we spend a lot of energy battling ourselves. And we assume there's something wrong with us. And watching my male peers have this freedom to have a body that matched the expectation around them, that
00:25:02
Speaker
could work harder and get better, right? Like fairly predictably was tough. It just, we, a lot of the next stage for the female athletes, like you get into that place of battling yourself. You can get pretty deep into disordered eating and anxiety, just thinking negatively about yourself, your confidence taking a hit. So it's like you're fighting just to try to have any semblance of confidence on the starting line through tumult.
00:25:28
Speaker
And I think that that sentence you read, that's what the heart of that was.
00:25:33
Speaker
And I think in terms of disordered eating too, when you come into, when you start phrasing the sentence around it, developing, eating disorder. And if we kinda like split hairs on the wording there, you know that developing is such a key thing. It's not a cute, it's not always, but it is kind of like a slow development. It might start easy, you might be cutting something here and then it's like, well I could cut a little more.
00:26:02
Speaker
And maybe you can speak to that and how you experienced it and how your teammates experience it as this slow, insidious thing that eventually turns into something completely toxic. Yeah. Well, eating disorders can come on a lot of different ways and people experience them a lot of different ways. The most common experience that I highlight in the book is one of a gradual progression
00:26:29
Speaker
like of becoming more and more disordered to a point where you end up losing control. And it starts, the problem is there's like this Venn diagram of overlap between what can lead to an eating disorder, like eating disorder risk behaviors and high achieving athlete. So like if you are very disciplined and you're kind of perfectionistic, driven, people pleasing,
00:26:59
Speaker
These are four qualities that can be like a boon as an athlete. It makes you coachable. You can easily see how those things can lead to drive, but those qualities are also eating disorder risk factors. If you start being a perfectionist with your diet and obsessively measuring everything,
00:27:22
Speaker
it's very psychologically different than if you were a meticulous person who keeps track of how many words a day you write. When you start messing with the way you view food, which is something that innately your body knows how to do. Your body knows when it's hungry and when it's full and has its needs, its vitamin and mineral needs, and there's an internal wisdom there.
00:27:45
Speaker
that when you try to add control and perfectionism to it, you're pulling yourself away from that body wisdom. And that can lead to the second deadliest mental health disorder for women, right? Behind opioid addiction is eating disorders. So it's very serious stuff. And coaches often, and parents, and just people in general, don't often realize
00:28:14
Speaker
just how dangerous the waters are when they start tracking things and viewing food as good and bad or saying things like clean food, toxic food, and all these kinds of things.
Eating Disorders and Athlete Development
00:28:27
Speaker
They seem harmless and they can be pop culture-y things to say and do, but they can be extremely damaging. You tried your damnedest to lead by example. I believe it was at Stanford too. You were one of the top performers on your team.
00:28:42
Speaker
you know you wrote that you saw the disorder of eating in your teammates and you wanted to be the one who would have have that extra cookie or that extra serving and and that extra helping and and it was all well and good and then then you write just this one standalone sentence and it's like but then I stopped winning yeah and was was that a moment where you're like like oh shit is this like the start of something
00:29:05
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Like it's all well and good to like be like, Oh, I'm not going to change my behavior. Um, like I feel confident that the choices I'm making are good choices because I'm still winning. But yeah, once you stop winning, then, uh, then everything gets called into question. And then that's the first time I was subject to all the insecurity. So many of my peers and teammates and competitors faced a little bit sooner than I did. It's like, how do you continue to prioritize your health?
00:29:34
Speaker
and keep that big picture perspective when you're having short-term consequences in your performance that you feel or you're told to view as consequences. They're not consequences. You're just going through a period of adjustment to your new body. But that's the core of the book is how do we view, how do we create language around these normal experiences for women? We view them as deviating from the ideal path.
00:30:03
Speaker
when the ideal path doesn't apply to us. We have our own ideal path that's not acknowledged. Right, yeah, you write about that just normal biological development, be it menstruation, puberty, every other sort of just physical development is deemed, quite literally in some cases, like career-ending injuries for quote-unquote injuries.
00:30:29
Speaker
for a lot of women in this game. And it's really just dispiriting and sad to hear it just as a reader. But I can't imagine what it's like for women experiencing it. And you convey it so well. Yeah, I think we just have to create a new norm. I mean, I just think about if you just tried to apply this to other industries, let's say that male singers
00:30:55
Speaker
at age 14 would develop like a crack in their voice for two years, which is not too much of a reach from what could happen during puberty. But let's say that this was just a universal experience for half the population. And let's say that in the singing world, who got to be a singer as a professional depended on what your voice sounded like at age 14 and a half.
00:31:17
Speaker
Well, there'd be a lot, like females would not even have to deal with that. And that would be a totally fine thing for, I mean, it wouldn't be like the best way to measure a future career of a person, but it certainly wouldn't be disqualifying necessarily in the same way it would for males if they're undergoing this predictable body change, right? Kind of right at the quote, wrong time. Well, that's what sports are. Like sports rewards bodies that are in their prime at age 17, 18.
00:31:46
Speaker
which is just totally different in a female body than a male body, and then again at 21 and 22, which determines whether you have a pro career or not. I don't know, we just need to find ways to see how absurd this would be in other industries or other cultures so we can see how obvious it is, that we just recognize different norms.
00:32:07
Speaker
Yeah, because you're essentially, since Title IX, at that point, it was like, let's try to make everything – take biology aside, let's just try to get everybody equal, and that advanced the ball to a certain point.
00:32:23
Speaker
And nowadays, it's almost like you wanna see, maybe the timeline, I don't know, would you suggest maybe, if you could wave a wand, that you would just want the timeline maybe shifted, I don't know, five years for women to get through that sort of, for lack of a better term, that dip that men don't experience, and that way it puts you on a better trajectory to be a pro into your prime years, whereas men just kind of peak at a different, not peak, but they hit a peak at a different time.
00:32:53
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's certain things we can't change that would be great in theory, right? At least for running. Like if you could have college be ages 22 to 26, instead of 18 to 22, college sports, that would change everything. That would change absolutely everything. But we're never going to do that, right? So when it comes to college scholarships, that's always going to be an economic pressure that female athletes are going to have to contend with.
00:33:22
Speaker
where they and their coaches and their parents and loved ones are going to have to keep an eye out and go, hey, there's a lot at stake here that's going to make this young person feel they should maybe fight their body or view puberty as a negative. And that is very real. And so we have to have all the lights on in the building here and make sure that we're not adding to that pressure.
Diverse Athletic Pathways
00:33:49
Speaker
or that we are expanding that athlete's options to division two, division three schools, club running, making other avenues of sports participation that aren't just D1 scholarship level stuff, appealing valid other steps on a path for their long-term career to take some of that pressure off. I think we could do that.
00:34:13
Speaker
There's a moment, too, in the book where it reminded me so much of just the ethos behind it, essentially, of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, whereas somebody, let's just say someone above you in a team or on your team or maybe on a different team, like be a professional, and you're like, oh, my God, that guy is juicing.
00:34:33
Speaker
I'm not, but shoot, if I'm gonna supplant him or even just keep up, I might have to do the same thing. And there's a part in the book, too, where you notice that someone who's ahead of you, you can tell just by looking at her that she's probably anorexic and you were not. And you're like, I can't keep up with this person right now. Who would let this person do this to themselves just to be ahead?
00:35:01
Speaker
And therein lies that that arms race of now I might have to incur an eating disorder in order to keep pace. It's like that arms race is really, really toxic and dangerous. Yeah, that's the I mean, that's where coaches and administrators can make a huge difference because their incentives. I mean, this was kind of ties back to your previous question of like coaches in college are incentivized and rewarded based on
00:35:30
Speaker
how many points they get, where they rank in conference, where they rank at nationals, right? And so if you're going to be punished or at least not rewarded for things like keeping your entire team healthy and everyone on the team still enjoying running throughout the process of their development and you're instead rewarded on
00:35:50
Speaker
on points and rankings, then you're more likely to overlook what may be an athlete struggling with an eating disorder who this season happens to be having a short-term performance gain from losing weight.
00:36:05
Speaker
Um, and you can overlook the fact that their bones are depleting. They probably aren't getting their menstrual cycle and they may be on their way to a lifelong struggle with food and body. Like you're just not motivated to see the things that are harder to see. And, and so I think we can do some changes there. Like I think coaches of women's sports during those developmental years, we should change the rewards. We should create a different ranking system for college programs where, you know, we have like ranked.
00:36:34
Speaker
programs based on results and they need to be ranked on health and nutrition rates and like affinity for the sport that they came in loving.
00:36:46
Speaker
Yeah, or even injury tracking, too, be it bone density, too. So much of the hormonal stuff that gets interrupted through disordered eating leads to brittle skeletal structures. And it may sound kind of weird, but I don't know. That, to me, strikes me as a way to be like, oh, this is a coach in a program that is putting the health of the actual physical athlete and, by extension, their mental health.
00:37:14
Speaker
far ahead of wins and losses, but that might in the end translate to more wins and losses if you can just kind of, you know, I don't know, you just have to shift that paradigm. Yeah, it would be huge if we could. I mean, think about all these ranking systems based on whatever things they decide they want to rank. Like what is this US News and World Report that ranks the best colleges in the country? Like it's all
00:37:36
Speaker
subjective? What are they choosing to put into the equation of what makes the best school? If you know that huge numbers of people are being harmed in the system, that should be a motivator to change the ranking system. It would really empower athletes and their parents, like young people and their parents, to be able to create a different rubric for making their decisions about where to go next.
Dropout Rates and Retention in Girls’ Sports
00:38:00
Speaker
Early on in the book, too, you wrote, you cite some studies about where you see basically young women sort of leaking out of sports and organized sports. Maybe we can just like kind of talk about that a little bit and some of the reasoning or the reasons behind we see such a falloff in female athletic participation. Yeah, well, the Women's Sports Foundation has done a lot of research into this and there's a lot of issues that are
00:38:29
Speaker
are outside of puberty that affect this. People can read about that online, but it's like having role models. We still lack role models. We still only get about four or five percent of the sports coverage for female athletes. Endorsement money is one percent of all the endorsement money in sports goes to women's sports. We have a serious inequity problem that trickles down to participation of
00:38:54
Speaker
girls growing up believing that sports matter on a cultural level for them. And then there's how does it feel in their body? And that's what I focus on in the book is how does it feel when you are climbing a tree and running around a grass field as a child and your child body that hasn't developed yet? And then how does it feel a year later when you're developing breasts and they're sore, or when you're managing cramps from your menstrual cycle and kind of the mood cycle that you're getting used to
00:39:24
Speaker
for your adult female self, right? So how do we think about and acknowledge that movement feels different for girls during that time and that they're not, because it's not acknowledged, a lot of them are leaving sport. They leave at two times the rate of their male peers by age 14, by age 17, half of girls quit sport, organized sport. And that's an international problem even in countries that have
00:39:53
Speaker
great access in theory, right? They're just not sticking around. And so breasts are the first part of development for puberty, for female puberty, and that's right around middle school age. And half of girls don't own a sports bra at that time, and three-fourths of them have breast-related concerns about exercise. So they have questions. They lack equipment.
00:40:15
Speaker
And I really believe that if nails got breasts during middle school, there would be a standard issue sports bra and every locker alongside the jock strap. Like it would be, it would just be standard equipment. And yet youth sport uniforms don't come with sports bras, at least in any place I've ever heard of. It's you get your jersey and your shorts, just like the boys team does. And it's like you're on your own to find a sports bra. And that's just like, it's such a low hanging fruit thing to keep more girls in sport.
00:40:45
Speaker
Yeah, yeah for sure it's a it's a and especially in that age where where where kids are so Really like really cruel and you know if you have a you know a poor You know poor girl who's like self-conscious about her body to running around and things aren't you
00:41:04
Speaker
It can be a point of ridicule and that girl, but she might never turn to sports again just based on people making fun. And it's just like you said, it's such a low hanging fruit, such a simple thing to just recognize that this is a part of a body in motion. This is how we make it more comfortable for people and less self-conscious. So then you can just manifest the best version of yourselves out there and feel more free in your own skin.
00:41:33
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing that people love about sport, right? Is that you get to feel freedom in your body and power in your body. And that's powerful for anyone, but it's especially powerful for women and girls in our culture whose bodies begin to be sexualized as soon as they hit puberty and they begin to see themselves through their own eyes, but also through the eyes of men. And they develop this double consciousness as they're moving through the world. And that like the ability to, if you can keep girls in sports and keep them feeling good in their bodies,
00:42:04
Speaker
in sport, that's a huge boost for resilience to move through the world for them. But I'd say giving a sports bra is simple. But I just also want to point out that a good sports bra that will adequately support a D or above chested woman or girl is expensive. I mean, it can be over $100. And not all sports bras are equal. You can't an A-cup sports bra person
00:42:33
Speaker
that they're going to be easier to fit and easier to help through that time with their equipment than another person with larger breasts. Even people with moderate funds can struggle to spend $100 on a sports bra and parents are likely to
00:42:53
Speaker
Um, underestimate that like there's a lot of cultural ceremony around the first bra, like regular bra, like it's written about in books that it's kind of a big moment and you need to buy your first bra. Um, we should have a similarly empowering, like much more empowering one around buying your first sports bra. And we got to get, give them, get them for our girls before they actually need them. Like have it ready in the drawer, you know?
00:43:19
Speaker
Yeah, there's a there's a point in the book to another another one of those like things that planted a very sort of toxic seed in your head. You know, Paula Radcliffe is one of your one of your like idols as you were looking at someone who hit her athletic prime late 20s into her 30s doing doing amazing just amazing work.
00:43:41
Speaker
And you had noted, I believe, like, you know, she weighed a certain thing in the program. And then you met her, had lunch with her, and you said you brought that up. She's like, I never weighed that much. Oh, that little, that little. And it's just like, holy shit, like, that was like this little virus.
00:43:57
Speaker
that infected you and then it wasn't even real. And that pushed you down a very, I don't know, just a destructive path to try to be like, well, if that's what it takes to be successful, I gotta, and Paul Radcliffe is successful, I gotta be like that. And it wasn't real.
00:44:14
Speaker
Yeah, it was never real. It was a myth. And like that example is a concrete one of like seeing someone's profile online and it has their height and weight. And I take that myth and it impacts my years of my life, right? But that same theme happens in
00:44:34
Speaker
women's sports and girls' sports in general. So much of what we're taught to strive for is a myth. The male development linear path or that gaining weight is bad or a changing body is bad. There's all these myths and they are also these viruses that are infecting millions of us and changing our life course, changing the way we view ourselves, the way we fuel ourselves.
00:45:02
Speaker
I'm hoping that this, and it seems like it is, and it's different for different people, but there's alarming things that people read in here where they go, oh shit, whoa, yeah, that happened to me. I did ingest that and take that on, and that was a myth. And what would have been different if I hadn't done that? And then there can be an anger that happens first, but then a determination to stop it from happening to anybody else.
00:45:29
Speaker
And there's a point, too, in your story, too, where you suffer a pretty gnarly foot injury.
Injury and Emotional Impact
00:45:36
Speaker
And it puts you on the shelf, and you're speaking to a doctor, and he's just like, basically, if you're a racehorse, we'd shoot you. This is the kind of foot injury. Which leads to, to me, it was the greatest. It's such a subtle thing in terms of the writing. But to me, it was the best sentence in the whole book, where you were
00:45:56
Speaker
You're talking about the, you know, the of just like losing losing your space and you had doctor recommended surgery and then you had about a 50 percent chance of returning the form. Then you write like I thought of the race horses and I was just like total gut punch. It's like, holy shit. Like it's like your life ended. Yeah. Yeah. That's I love that. Like, like that was a really satisfying chapter kicker to write. Like I was like, yeah, that's exactly what needs to go there.
00:46:23
Speaker
That's going to bring home exactly what I want the reader to feel. You know, in that moment, there could be two ways of thinking about it. You could have been truly despondent and sometimes that injury made a decision for you and it put you on the shelf and maybe when you otherwise wouldn't have. Was there ever any relief or was it more depression that you had to be laid up?
00:46:48
Speaker
Um, it was a lot of things. I mean, I think at first it was relief because I'd been pushing for so hard and I'd been heartbroken again. And then an Olympic sport athlete really only gets to rest once every four years. And it's right after either the Olympic trials or the Olympics. That's when you, that's like, you know how most people do a New Year's resolution every year where they sit down and take an assessment.
00:47:13
Speaker
for the Olympic sport athlete, like every four years, there's this extra big important one where you set up your next four years and you get to analyze all the choices you've made and you start on this next macro cycle. And so there was a relief with like, okay, I can rest now and I have this serious injury that means I have to rest in a way I've never even rested before, like I need to just sit around. But then when you don't move your body and you're not around your people and depression really set in and just the gravity of the heartbreak
00:47:43
Speaker
that it would take four more years in order to give it another try. And just believing, truly believing in my heart that I had what it took, that I was that level of athlete, but I just couldn't seem to catch a break. I couldn't seem to do it when it mattered most. So yeah, it was blue. It was a blue time. But then it was also a chance to reevaluate, OK, if I'm going to do this again,
00:48:10
Speaker
I'm going to do it differently. Like I'm not going to live the runner monk lifestyle. I'm not going to buy into this idea that I can only be one thing and I have to forego all other parts of my identity and self in the name of this goal because I have done that. And it got me here in this wheelchair anyway. So if I'm going to spend four more years, I need to find a way to do it where it's enjoyable, where I can reconnect with some of the things that made me fall in love with the sport in the first place.
00:48:38
Speaker
What were the moments like when you felt most blue? And what was your self-talk? How did you get yourself through it to give yourself a light at the end of the tunnel during the long rehab? Oh, man, it's probably similar to what I did in the time when I was writing
Blogging for Emotional Processing
00:48:57
Speaker
this book. I went through a mental health crisis of depression. I had a pretty lengthy depressive episode. And I think it was just like,
00:49:07
Speaker
trying to reconnect with my reason for being and the most important things in my life, just really boiling them down to what are the minimum things that I need to make life worth it. So in 2008, in the same period of life you're talking about, it was like to make my running life worth it, because that was what I was centering. Life would follow suit if my running life was working out, and that's not how I view things anymore.
00:49:38
Speaker
Um, but then it was taking some control of my story. So writing a blog really helped me get out of my depression at that time and feel like, okay. Um, as a sports person, the world tells us that what you're doing matters. If the media is writing about you, if they have decided, if someone else decides your story is worth telling, then you're successful.
00:49:59
Speaker
And when you write your own blog, you're like, I get to decide what moments I think are worth sharing and my audience will find me or they'll leave. And that's great. Like it just created more of an agency feeling to that. And then I could also.
00:50:12
Speaker
highlight the things that I felt mattered about sport that weren't podiums, like more process driven stuff and community driven stuff. And then so once that, once I decided to write that blog, then I was living my day to day life looking for those things. Where are the moments of joy? Where are the moments of community? Like I trained my writer's eye to observe and see and feel those things more deeply, which improved my day to day experience.
00:50:38
Speaker
Yeah, and speak of writer's eye there, and there's something to be said for, you know, as you progressed as an athlete, and it transitioned more into coaching, and you kind of developed that coaching eye. The, I suspect that when you see somebody like a Mary Kane come along, your antenna, your spidey sense starts to tingle.
00:50:56
Speaker
I I suspect you know you see you see it quite frequently so when you see. The American. The the archetype of American who is you know super young super precocious runner. It may make that make the turn you start seeing things you know what are you seeing him is it is it improving at all.
00:51:20
Speaker
Oh, no, it's not improving. And like, there's nothing more frightening to me than a female phenom, a young female phenom in sport, because it just when you understand female physiology, there it's like that voice changing as a male singer thing, like I know what's going to happen. And so then the question is, what will the environment be like for this person when it happens? Who is in their corner?
00:51:49
Speaker
Who's in their ear, right? And like, what's their financial stability situation like? Can their environment, like, can they ride through this to get out the other side? Since structurally and institutionally, we haven't built anything to do that. It's really up to like, whatever random people are in their corner.
Call for Sports Health Best Practices
00:52:07
Speaker
And that's just, that's just too, that's leaving too much up to chance. And that's why I really advocate for structural reforms and best practices wherever we can put them.
00:52:18
Speaker
like we did have done with concussion policy. We need to formalize best practices, take a lot of decisions out of individual coaches' hands. We shouldn't have individual coaches deciding when someone's sick enough with an eating disorder to get them help. Those things should be standardized because we know how grave they can be. It's hard to watch. It's hard for me to feel enthusiasm when I see a young girl kicking butt in sport.
00:52:43
Speaker
And sometimes the athlete also goes back to what you were saying about the Venn diagram of disordered eating comes down one of those traits of being like people pleaser, being coachable. An athlete can be, you know, he, she, or their own worst enemy.
00:52:59
Speaker
football players getting their quote bell rung and they don't want they want to get back out there and you name it fill in your sport and injury so yeah it's like but if there are protocols in place you can remove the route take that decision out of their hands because you know because how they're wired you know no pain no gain it's they're gonna they're gonna want to keep competing even if it's at their own detriment
00:53:27
Speaker
Well, that's why this and I know we're running low on time now, but like.
00:53:31
Speaker
why Simone Biles' story was so important for me to put in the book. Because when Simone decided not to do one of the events at the Olympic Games because of mental health, I'm not feeling like I'm mentally in a place to do this high risk activity where I can break all my bones and snap my neck. I'm the one that can decide and must decide when it's safe to do so and I'm deciding it's not and I'm not going to do it. That's something that no gymnast could have done
00:54:00
Speaker
15 years earlier, like under Bella Corolli, like that was not an environment that permitted such things. And so yes, there's going to be those kinds of athletes that are like, not gonna, they're gonna be their own worst enemy, and they're not going to advocate for themselves. But part of that is because we haven't been shown cultural examples of the most successful people making different choices. And so the Simone story needs to be like far and wide, or like Naomi Osaka saying,
00:54:28
Speaker
I'm not going to do a press conference, uh, before this tennis tournament, which she was deeply criticized for and financially penalized for, but it wasn't good for her mental health. And she was just like, I'm not doing it. Um, and we need athletes to like see those examples and go, Oh, it is my body. I am in the end, the one that, that can like decide on a lot of this stuff. And like health is more important than any trophy or metal or whatever. And then we need to.
00:54:55
Speaker
bolster the institutions to make those choices easier too with policies, but also like league minimum salaries can be helpful. Things that take the heat off economically for people like in a track and field. I mean, there are no league minimums. There is no health insurance. There's no benefits, right? So everything is on the line at all times. So it's like an environment like that makes it much harder to flex your agency and protect yourself.
00:55:23
Speaker
Well, very nice.
Recommendations and Resources
00:55:24
Speaker
Lauren, there's always one question I like to end these conversations with, and it's just asking you as the guest for a recommendation for the listeners out there. And that can be anything from a book to a brand of coffee you're inspired by. It's always up to you. So I'd extend that to you as we bring this conversation down for a landing. Oh, yeah. Well, there's two things. One is my friend Lori Wagner's 27 powers wild writing stuff.
00:55:49
Speaker
She's got a whole community. She's got workshops. They're very affordable. And that work has been incredibly useful for me to be able to write more honestly. The book would not have been what it was without the years that I spent doing Laurie's work. And then the other thing is just Jennifer Loudon's coaching. She's a phenomenal coach. If you have a project that you're really needing to get done, but you're having trouble
00:56:14
Speaker
like breaking it into smaller parts. She's so experienced and so motivated and that's only one of many things she does, but she's just an excellent book coach.
00:56:23
Speaker
Well, fantastic. Well, Lauren, thank you so much for carving the time to come over and talk shop, but also talk about this important memoir slash manifesto that you've written that I hope really moves us in a direction where it truly puts a greater sense of attention and empowerment where it belongs. So I just got to commend you on a job well done, and I eagerly hope that it'll do what you set out to do.
00:56:49
Speaker
Thank you. I'm so grateful for this opportunity to talk to you. And it's a real pleasure to talk about the craft as well, you know, the craft and the content together. It's not something that I get to do often. So thanks for the time.
00:57:05
Speaker
Alright. Alright. Man, that was great. Nice to give Lauren other things to talk about besides running in the book itself. That's always the balance between having a conversation surrounded by content and craft. You want to honor the book at hand, but you also want to dig into how it comes to be, how they go about it.
00:57:30
Speaker
Good stuff.
Community Engagement and Creative Reflection
00:57:31
Speaker
Thanks for listening and making it this far. CNFers, if you liked what you heard, don't be shy. Share this across your networks. Link up to the show on social. Spread it hand to hand. Tag it at cnfpod on Twitter or at creative nonfiction podcast on Instagram. I'll be sure to just give you a little, I don't know. It depends. If it's something I like, you might just get a James Hetfield gift and you're just walk out. You don't know.
00:57:58
Speaker
you know, early 90s James Hetfield, you know, to me is like Apex Hetfield. All right, consider subscribing to my monthly newsletter, book recommendations, links to helpful and inspiring articles and exclusive happy hour. That's how we rage against the algorithm. Check out patreon.com slash CNF pod, shop around, see if you want to support the show with a few bucks to help offset the costs. Show is free, but as you know, it sure as hell ain't cheap.
00:58:27
Speaker
So for the few of you who may listen this far and want updates or news about what's going on at CNF Pod HQ, specifically yours truly, I had my meeting with the Harper Collins editor and my agent today. I'm recording this on a Thursday. You are listening to this at earliest, Friday the 20th.
00:58:51
Speaker
We had a 75-minute conversation. Never having been in one of these meetings in my life, I think it went all right. I think it went well. Excuse me. Did it go that well that you had to cough up something in your throat as you said those words? I've gotten my hopes up in the past about various things and it always
00:59:17
Speaker
Well, let's just say it usually leads to disappointment. When it comes to the matter of art and subjectivity, you're best to just be happy you're in the room. I guess if you were nominated for like an Oscar or something, I think you just need to just celebrate the fact that you were even nominated, because you can't control anything. And who the hell knows? You might happen to be up against Daniel Day-Lewis that year, and well, you're kind of fucked.
00:59:45
Speaker
So you can't hope to win, but the fact that you're even on that stage and in the room and being nominated, that's a win. You have to rewire your brain to think that way. I think it's healthy to think that way. It got me thinking about this long road to getting in this particular room. Here I am, 42 years old. 42 and a half.
01:00:07
Speaker
Okay, so this podcast will turn 10 in two months, 10 fucking years, with six of those years, the last six, being pretty damn strict about one podcast a week. And it was through this show that I've met a lot of great people. One of those people put me in touch with an agent who liked my memoir, but wanted to do something more commercial first, hence this book proposal journey that's been going on for a year at this point.
01:00:35
Speaker
And how lucky I feel, you know? It just, luck has a lot to do with it, but I think it's something like, some situation like this, it's a bit more common than maybe we'd like to admit. Like through your body of work, you might meet the right people. And I meet a lot of people as a result of this show. And soon that network, in a way, starts working for you and opens up a door or two and gets you in a room you should never have been invited in.
01:01:04
Speaker
We harbor hopes, I guess, of rising out of the slush pile. Feels like you did it on your own merits. You didn't need anyone else's help. Your own talent, your own ability got you into the room, out of the pile.
01:01:21
Speaker
Representation, publication, you name it. But I'd wager that the people and writers we've long admired had a leg up in a way that maybe I had a leg up to get in this room. You just don't hear about it very often. So I like being forthcoming with that kind of thing. Any degree of privilege that I might have.
01:01:40
Speaker
For instance, and I've mentioned this before, but for anyone who doesn't know, I'm not the breadwinner in the family. My wife makes a healthy salary from a job that's killing her, but she has the health insurance and the steady paycheck, allows me more wiggle room to still lean into this and to pursue freelance opportunities and to not have the pressure of having to earn that steady paycheck to keep the lights on. She does that.
01:02:10
Speaker
That is a gift. That is a big gift. Maybe the biggest. And so I like to recognize that in any case. And so it's a little listen. Nothing might come of this meeting and how I got into this room based on the merits of this show and the people that it put me in touch with.
01:02:31
Speaker
I only earn this leg up by putting this podcast out every week for years and years and trying my best to serve this community as best I can. And that community put some wind in my sails. I guess all of this is to say that we need to keep making stuff, making a ruckus as Seth Godin might say, serving the community. We've chosen to help and maybe that, well, that boomerang will just kind of circle back and land in our hand and be like, oh, damn, that's nice.
01:02:58
Speaker
But that can't be the reason you do it. You know what I mean? I think early on I had these hopes that if I did this thing where I was celebrating people's work, then I might get some sort of karmic boost. But that's the wrong way to think about it. It's gotta be genuine. And I like to think I've grown into that kind of advocate over the years. You know, win or lose? I'll keep doing my thing here because that's what we do. And if you can't do, well, shit.
01:03:27
Speaker
Interview. See ya.