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Episode 374: Christine Yu
1.3k Plays1 year ago
Christine Yu is the author of Up to Speed: The Groundbreaking Science of Women Athletes (Riverhead Books).
Substack: Rage Against the Algorithm
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
Sponsor: Liquid IV, promo code CNF
Recommended
Transcript
Sponsorship Mentions and Promos
00:00:01
Speaker
Hey CNEvers, this episode is sponsored by Liquid IV and I gotta say, this is a delicious way to rehydrate and fuel those endurance activities. Or if you just want to zhuzh up your water.
00:00:13
Speaker
As some of you know, I'm training for the unsanctioned Mackenzie Marathon and Liquid IV is in my stinkin' bottle. It's some tasty stuff. Been a big fan of the lemon lime. Non-GMO, free from gluten, dairy, and soy, so you know your burly vegan digs it. Get 20% off when you go to liquidiv.com and use the promo code CNF at checkout. That's 20% off anything.
00:00:38
Speaker
You order when you shop better hydration today using promo code CNF at liquidiv.com. Also, requisite shout out to Athletic Brewing, the best damn non-alcoholic beer out there. Not a paid plug, but I am a brand ambassador.
00:00:55
Speaker
And I wanna celebrate this amazing product. So if you head to athleticbrewing.com or use my specific referral link in the show notes and use the promo code BRENDANO20 at checkout, you get a nice little discount on your first order. I don't get any money and they are not an official sponsor of the podcast, but I just want to give you the juice. And all I get is points that I can redeem for beer and stuff of that nature.
00:01:21
Speaker
Give it a shot. I feel like every time I open up a document to try to draft something, it's like I forget how to write. And I'm like, yeah, I'm like, wait, how do I do this again? Like, I don't remember and I don't think it's possible.
Introduction to Christine Yu
00:01:41
Speaker
Oh they see an effort to CNF pod that creative nonfiction podcast not that one that one The show where I speak to badass people about telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. Awesome Christine you is here to talk about her new book
00:01:58
Speaker
Up to Speed, the groundbreaking science of women athletes. It's published by Riverhead Books. Christine. Christine is an award-winning journalist whose work focuses on the intersection of sports science and women athletes. Her writing has appeared in Outside Magazine, The Washington Post, Runner's World, and other publications. She's a lifelong athlete.
00:02:23
Speaker
and yoga teacher who loves running surfing and skiing she lives in brooklyn there you have it cnfers if you want to be a writer get your ass to brooklyn do it now make sure you head over to brendanomero.com hey hey
00:02:38
Speaker
For show notes and to sign up for the Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter, just click the lightning bolt on my website or visit rageagainstthealgorithm.substack.com.
Newsletter Engagement and Book Releases
00:02:48
Speaker
June's issue, titled Discovery, was a good one, man, real good one. I put up a survey to see if you or the readers would want it more than just once a month, maybe a mid-month dispatch. They might deal with book writing research or best of riffs from the podcasts.
00:03:09
Speaker
to make the newsletter kind of have more crossover with the show. The issue went out to 898 people, 50% opened it, there were 805 views, so I guess this is from other sub-stack recommendations.
00:03:24
Speaker
and eight people voted and wouldn't you know four people voted for two a month four people voted for one a month so very definitive results rage against the algorithm still first of the month no spam can't beat it if you dig the show
00:03:43
Speaker
You might want to consider sharing it with your network so we can grow the pie and get this CNFing thing into the brains of other CNFers who need the juice. Leaving a review on Apple Podcasts so the Wayward CNFer can see a nice chunk of reviews there from what we've been working on for the past 10 years. Might sway them. Attention is finite and reviews of that nature will get people to think twice before they pass.
00:04:12
Speaker
It's also patreon.com slash CNF pod. Hey, if you have a couple extra bucks, if you have like one cup of coffee money, just drop it in the hat if you glean some value from this show. The show is free, but as you know, it sure as hell ain't cheap. Christine Yu, yes.
00:04:32
Speaker
It's one of several women who've written books on women's athletics and running tangentially. Hers is like tangentially associated running. There's running aspects in it, but it's more like an overarching treatise on calling attention to research in women's athletics and the science behind women's bodies.
00:04:53
Speaker
And like Lauren Fleschman's Good for a Girl or Alison Daseer's, I don't know if that's how you pronounce her last name correctly. I will get that definitively on the record when she's on the show. She's the author of Running While Black, an incredible book.
00:05:08
Speaker
And then there's Kara Goucher, who Mary Polan co-wrote that book for Kara, The Longest Race. There's a lot of good juice out there calling attention to marginalized genders and communities and endurance athletes.
00:05:25
Speaker
It's great stuff and it's illuminating. Really illuminating stuff and Christine's book is especially illuminating. I think it's gonna, I think it's gonna have a real, a lot of success on the long tail. You know, really germane. It's very eye-opening and it's just a great book. So now I'm thrilled to welcome Christine Yoo to the show.
00:05:57
Speaker
It's been a lot of ups and downs. I mean, right? It's like really high highs, really low lows. You know, I mean, as much as I think I tried to prepare for this too, like nothing prepares you for it, right? In terms of you've
00:06:15
Speaker
I mean you know right like you're in the process of this you pour your heart and soul into this thing and you know it's hard not to then release it or it's hard then to release it into the world right and not pay attention to what's going on or you know stupid things like sales and Amazon sales ranks and all of those things.
00:06:33
Speaker
But, you know, aside from when I put that aside, you know, it's been great. Like I've had a couple of events. And the one that I really love the most was I was out in Berkeley last Monday and speaking at Berkeley High School. And it was a ton of, you know, student athletes and their parents.
00:06:53
Speaker
and coaches who are there and they're super engaged and actually really great questions. And it reminded me, I'm like, this is why I wrote the book, right? Like this is the audience that I want to be speaking to. These are the people that I want to be reading. And these are the lives that I hope, you know, will take something away from this book. Yeah. So it's a lot of ups and downs talking to my therapist on Thursday. So it should be a good session.
00:07:19
Speaker
Yeah, riding those highs and trying not to be distracted by bad reviews on Goodreads or on Amazon and trying to like, here's the thing, like you said, you poured your heart and soul into this thing and it comes into fruition. Here it is.
00:07:36
Speaker
And then it ends up being, it's kind of a flash fire. You know, you get kind of like two weeks, maybe two, like a month really of hot iron in the sun. And then naturally things kind of tail off and it's just like, wow, that was years of work. And then all of a sudden it's, you know, it just, then you start to fade for lack of a better word.
00:08:02
Speaker
Yeah, no, and it's you want it so much to be like a success. And obviously, you know, everyone's dream, right, is like coming like hot off, you know, publication and making bestseller lists and all of this stuff. But also recognizing that my hope is that this isn't just a flash in the pan, right? That this is something that it has a longer tail and a longer life and that people will continue to keep discovering it and finding it and reading it and recommending it.
00:08:31
Speaker
Yeah but it's hard in our culture today right where everything is about like instant success and like bestsellers and you know all of this stuff. It's hard to reconcile. Yeah because there's only a few books when you think about it that that just truly let's just use the bestseller list as
00:08:48
Speaker
as an example, that stay there and glom on to the culture, be it like Unbroken or Seabiscuit, anything like a cast by Isabel Wilkerson and other books like that. But those are like unicorn books that really glom on to the culture.
00:09:07
Speaker
And I think like your book, I think, is going to have like a really good success on the long tail. Like it's just I think more and more people will recommend it and put it in the hands of others. And it'll, I think, affect change for for for years, I think, because I think everything you touch upon is timely and timeless. Yeah, I mean, that's my that's what I'm holding on to and hoping, right, is that that it does have that long life.
Christine's Writing Journey
00:09:32
Speaker
Now, I got to ask you, so you wrote a memoir in high school. Tell me about this memoir.
00:09:38
Speaker
Um, maybe memoir was a little bit, you know, too generous for description, maybe more of like creative or like, you know, creative nonfiction writing project. Um, but yeah, kind of talking about my, both my identity as, you know, a Chinese American, um, first generation.
00:09:59
Speaker
as well as my dad passed away when I was little, so when I was eight. And so kind of reconciling some of those memories and kind of his legacy and what that's meant to me. And I like reading this from your bio, and your teacher, sometimes people will say, keep going, and others will be like, oh, that's nice. Go over here in color or whatever. And it's like you had someone in your corner there who read that and saw something in you. So what did that mean to you?
00:10:29
Speaker
I totally didn't take it seriously, right? Because in my mind, I was like, right what? Like, that wasn't a viable career option. And I also, I mean, on the one hand, it wasn't a viable career option, you know, in terms of just the culture I was brought up in, right? And kind of the expectations of my parents. At that point, I thought I was going to medical school, I thought I was going to become a doctor.
00:10:54
Speaker
And I think the other piece of it is I didn't know what that meant, right, to keep writing, to be a writer or to even think about that as a career. Like I had no real role models in a way. And it wasn't something that I ever saw myself doing or fitting into, if you will.
00:11:13
Speaker
Yeah, I remember when I was in undergrad, I studied biology, and I thought for a hot minute I might want to go to medical school or go into research. And then it just didn't pan out. It was like when George Costanza kept trying to say he wanted pesto. He's like, why do I keep ordering pesto? I don't like pesto. And that was what biology was like for me. I was a decent biology student.
00:11:38
Speaker
Ultimately, I was going to be enrolling in med school to maybe impress people, impress my father or something. And it just wasn't right. And I wonder for you, because you said you wanted to go to med school, but you end up in your career as a writer. So what was that watershed moment like for you and when you decided to go one way versus the other?
00:12:04
Speaker
Yeah, it really didn't happen for a long time. So when I put off medical school, it was really because I realized I was, you know, I was really interested in health and kind of public health issues, but not necessarily, you know, treating patients one on one, but thinking more about the system, the larger systems involved in how we create healthy communities, how we, you know,
00:12:28
Speaker
encourage health and prevent disease and the like. So I actually went and got my master's in public policy and worked in the nonprofit sector for 10 years, 15 years, something like that, before I actually made the switch into writing. And the switch to writing was a total fluke.
00:12:46
Speaker
Um, my husband and I, he was like the first vacation we took after having kids. We went to a surf camp in Costa Rica and both totally fell in love with surfing and it came home and he knew that I needed some sort of outlet. He's like, why don't you try blogging? You know, this was back in 2011.
00:13:05
Speaker
you know, kind of the height of like fitness blogging and health blogging and all of that. And so he's like, you know, why don't you write about this, because no one really talks about what it's like to be a novice surfer, right? There was all these blogs out there about like surf reports and, you know, all this stuff, but not really talking about the actual process of it or what it's like. So they're okay.
00:13:23
Speaker
And so that's how I started writing and got connected to this larger community of other bloggers and all of that. And I really realized like, wow, I really miss this type of writing and storytelling and connecting with people in this way. And kind of one thing led to another. And, you know, I thought, oh.
00:13:42
Speaker
there's a whole, there's a whole field out there, you know, you know, about writing about fitness and sports and science that maybe I could do. And so it was kind of, again, it was kind of a fluke, a lot of like, lucky breaks. And, you know, I ended up freelancing initially for ESPNW, doing a lot of like gear reviews and stuff for them, but then it kind of just built from there.
00:14:04
Speaker
I was speaking of ESPNW. I read your wonderful essay about autographs seeking. Let's talk a little bit about some of your great trophy autographs you've gotten over the years and then how you came to write that essay.
00:14:20
Speaker
I grew up in Connecticut, and so in the end of August, when the US Open was on, my family would often come into the city to watch the tournament. And I had this sandwich notepad. It literally was two pieces of foam that looked like white bread, and then in the middle were these different color pages that looked like cheese and meat and whatever.
00:14:43
Speaker
But for some reason, like, this is what I carried around with me at, you know, at the US Open. And my brother would go around with me and, you know, he would point out all of these players because I maybe was, I don't know, maybe eight, nine, something like that. So he would kind of point me in the direction of all these different players.
00:15:01
Speaker
and say, go get their autograph. Because he figured I was a little girl, they wouldn't say no to me. And it just became this fun thing. And I think one of the ones I was most excited about was getting Matt's V Lander's autograph, because I loved him as a player when I was younger. There was one time we were walking around
00:15:22
Speaker
on the grounds and, you know, again, my brother kind of shoves me in front of someone. I'm like, I don't know who this is. And I got her autograph. I believe it was Virginia Wade. But the funny part was that they were also filming her for like, you know, some shots for TV and whatever. So I got to be on TV, which was fun.
00:15:39
Speaker
So it's like some family members saw me there. But it just became this like tradition and the thing that I came to associate with Washington at the US Open. And so when my kids were younger, I mean, I guess they still like doing this now, but it became this thing where I was like, oh, this will be fun. I can share this with my kids, this, you know, not only watching tennis, but this like, you know, going around and getting autographs and, you know, that piece of kind of fandom.
00:16:07
Speaker
You know, things have changed a lot in the last like 20, 30 years since I was doing this and getting players autographs has become much more competitive and a little harder. So it became this thing where, you know, I was becoming obsessed with it, whereas my kids were like, can we just watch tennis?
00:16:24
Speaker
Like this is ridiculous because we were just spending all this time running around. So it was a fun way for me to kind of think about how we pass on these traditions, right? These things that mean so much to us, you know, in our childhood or growing up and how we want so much to pass those on to our kids too, and how the meaning kind of changes in the intro, right? In those intervening years and how
00:16:48
Speaker
you know, sometimes it doesn't mean as much for our kids and that's okay. And sometimes, you know, vice versa, it means a lot to them and that's okay too. So that was a really fun piece to work on.
00:16:58
Speaker
I enjoyed it a lot. It showed a lot of vulnerability on your point, because when you got the ball and you were like, I'm going to get these autographs for them, I was just like, oh, I could see the turn here where it's like, oh, no, she's trying to impart this thing that was important to her as a kid onto her kids who don't care about this aspect of it. And I was like, here she goes. She's doing this. She's like, all right, I got it. I came back. I got these autographs. And they're just like, we just want to watch tennis.
00:17:25
Speaker
I just thought that was really cool. I was so determined, yes. Yeah, and then you wrote it towards the end. I was hung up on trying to realize my dream of filling a giant tennis ball with players autographs, and it was your thing. And then they just were like, oh, let's go watch tennis. We're cool with this.
00:17:40
Speaker
Yes. Yes. But funny thing is, is like that tennis ball is now completely covered with autographs. My kid, you know, especially one of my kids has kind of adopted it. So now that that's full, I'm like, I'm not buying you guys another giant tennis ball. We are done with this. We're just going to go watch tennis.
00:17:59
Speaker
And given that you came to writing a little bit later and you've got a wonderful body of work across journalism and books and brand stuff and university stuff like that big kind of wide swath of stuff that allows people to kind of make a living as a writer.
00:18:20
Speaker
You know, for you, when you're maybe doing a lack of better terms, so maybe like an autopsy of your own own work, you know, what are the the flaws that you feel like you deal with and the self doubt that you have to reckon with to get work done when you know you're sitting there with your notes and and opens in a in a in a cursor blinking
Challenges in Writing and Science
00:18:39
Speaker
at you.
00:18:40
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I feel like every time I open up a document to try to draft something, it's like I forget how to write. And I'm like, yeah, I'm like, wait, how do I do this again? Like, I don't remember and I don't think it's possible. I think that imposter syndrome is a big piece of it because
00:19:01
Speaker
I don't have a journalism degree. I've never trained in this, if you will. I've never had a staff job. I've never been in a newsroom environment or anything like that. I've picked this all up on the job as I've gone. So there's a piece of me that always feels like, who am I really to be doing this? And always
00:19:25
Speaker
kind of afraid that I'm going to get something wrong, right? Especially if I'm talking about the science aspects of it. So I worry about that a lot. And I fact check like 16 million times, I feel like, just to make sure everything is correct. But I think that imposter syndrome is a really big piece of it because I always question, right? Like, am I the right person to write the story? Am I the best person to write the story? Why am I writing the story? Right.
00:19:52
Speaker
And why will someone talk to me about this? And so that's always a really hard piece of it for me. I procrastinate a lot, too. I'm a very slow writer, both in terms of my on ramp to actually sitting at my desk and writing and then the actual process of writing, too. Like, I feel like like I wish I could write faster. I feel like my many things would be easier if I could write faster. How does your procrastination manifest?
00:20:19
Speaker
For a while, it was playing a lot of two dots on my phone just to kind of clear my head. It is a lot of I will end up kind of almost like a tick going back and forth between like Twitter and Instagram and like checking social media. And I literally have to block those on my computer so I don't do that and then leave my phone in a different room. So I'm not checking it on my phone.
00:20:46
Speaker
That's really hard because what I because what often happens is I will sit down and try to write and write like it It takes a little while for me to actually formulate what it is I actually want to say and in that time in that discomfort of not
00:21:02
Speaker
Being able to piece together the words the way that I want them the way that I imagine in my head That's when I will like flip to something to distract me right to kind of take my mind off things So that's been that's been a hard one for sure, but then it's also kind of recognizing
00:21:19
Speaker
That there is some procrastination like that right when I'm trying to distract myself from actually doing the work forces. I don't even know if it's necessarily procrastination, but things like taking a break right and going for a walk or doing something else to take my mind off of it because that's also when right the words and the and the sentences and the structure starts to come together is when I'm.
00:21:39
Speaker
actually not thinking about it so actively. Yeah, the forgetting how to write thing is so it's so really I'm experiencing that too. It's a I have a pretty short deadline with what I'm doing. So I'm still like, let's just say halfway through the research, but
00:21:55
Speaker
I do have to start the writing too. And so when I've sat down to write even just a page or a page and a half, it's almost like, oh my God, I've been in a research boot loop for so long that it's like I'm almost forgetting how to put that research into action, into narrative, into story. And it's, I sit down and it just feels, it doesn't feel right. It's like the guitar's not in tune and I don't know how to get it in tune. Is that something you've kind of experienced too?
00:22:26
Speaker
Oh, my gosh, absolutely. And I think, you know, going from writing articles like at a pretty regular clip, right? And you're just in that process of doing it, researching, writing, researching, writing and editing and all of that.
00:22:41
Speaker
to then going to a longer project like a book where, you know, it was lucky in the sense that I didn't have to do as many like freelance articles or assignments during the process of writing the book. And then, like you said, having to sit down is like, oh, I haven't used this muscle in a really long time. I don't know how to use it anymore or how to warm it, even warm it up. Right. And that took a while to
00:23:07
Speaker
to figure out again, right? Like you said, how do you put that research together into a compelling narrative and a story and a structure? And then what I'm finding now is that coming off of doing a book length project and writing a lot, a lot of words on this thing is then how do I then transition back to writing shorter pieces, right? Where I only have 1200 words. I'm like, how can I say anything in 1200 words?
00:23:37
Speaker
which is weird, but it is, right? It's what your brain starts to get accustomed to.
00:23:43
Speaker
When you were, you know, setting down to write the book and it is especially early on when you kind of have an idea of where you want to go with the whole thing. But it's it's so daunting. It's whatever. It's 80 or 90 thousand words. It's long. You've got all this research and it just even writing 500 words as it's progress. But it is pushing up against the mountain. It still doesn't feel like much.
00:24:07
Speaker
How did you just reckon with the feeling of it just never felt like you were making progress, but you still just had to keep showing up?
00:24:15
Speaker
Yeah, I think for me, what was helpful was just thinking about things in chapters because in my book, each chapter is fairly self-sufficient in that they each tackle a specific topic, right? So whether it's the menstrual cycle or endurance or injury or something like that. So I could separate that, right? I could think about that as a discrete piece.
00:24:41
Speaker
And in the back of my mind too, I also had just an internal deadline timeline, thinking that I had about roughly a month to draft, to research and draft each of these chapters, because I worked on it chapter by chapter. Having those two things was definitely helpful, but it was hard, right? It was hard to keep that motivation going or think about,
00:25:07
Speaker
how I had so much research, how I was going to be able to boil that down into, you know, what, seven, eight thousand words per chapter or something like that. But it was just trying to, again, you know, breaking it down into individual chapters and then from there breaking it down into individual sections. Right. So trying to make it as small as possible that my brain could actually wrap it, wrap around that and not get overwhelmed in thinking about this larger, bigger thing that I eventually have to complete.
00:25:37
Speaker
Did you find yourself for the sake of getting work done that you could write more modularly like you could go you kind of jump around maybe I'm this chapter I'm going to write chapter eight today but maybe I'm going to go back and do chapter three next week or something.
00:25:55
Speaker
Um, I didn't do that so much because I, for me and just the way my brain works, it, I needed to be like fully immersed in that one thing in order to kind of make sense of it. Uh, because again, it felt like.
00:26:10
Speaker
It took me a little while to get to the heart of what I wanted to say in each chapter because I would start off with some idea about what I thought this chapter would be about and start to piece together the anecdotes and the research and all of that.
00:26:27
Speaker
But then as I got more into it, I'd be like, oh, no, no, no. This is actually what the chapter is about. And I felt I realized that I needed to be fully immersed in that in the chapter I was working on. So it was hard for me to kind of pull out and work on different chapters while I was working on one main chapter.
00:26:46
Speaker
And over the course of the book, you talk about reading scientific articles, stuff steeped in research ease, stuff that doesn't read particularly easy, and it's hard to read. For someone out there who might be looking to read that kind of stuff and try to glean the greatest amount of insight from it, how can we as researchers and writers be more scientifically literate when it comes to these papers?
00:27:14
Speaker
That's a great question. I mean, yeah, those papers are not the most reader friendly if you're not in that field. I had to make sure that I was reading them probably earlier on in the day versus in the afternoon or evening because it would just put me to sleep. But I think, you know, I know for myself, the tendency was initially right when I was getting into
00:27:39
Speaker
this field was like primarily looking at the abstract, right? That's, that's largely what a lot of us have access to because not all papers are available. But I think it is looking at, you know, really trying to understand the context in which that study is being done. So what I mean by that is understanding like what's been done before, kind of what gap this, this study is trying to fill or what they're trying to confirm, because a lot of times it is like verifying
00:28:05
Speaker
you know, some other finding or something like that. So really understanding that context, right? And then looking at, for me, it's also looking at the discussion section. Yes, obviously the results matter, but sometimes if you're not as seeped in the science or kind of statistics and all of that, the results can be a little confusing, right? But just looking at the discussion section and really trying to understand
00:28:30
Speaker
again, what it is that they were pulling out of this? What was their significant findings? What was surprising about that? Those were the key pieces for me in trying to understand this work a little bit better. It was hard because there are so many studies out there and a lot of the studies can be really small, like 10 people. What's the significance of that? Can we really draw any broader conclusions when you're only looking at
00:28:54
Speaker
an end of 10 versus something that's larger population based. So it is a lot of puzzle piecing together. Why is this important? What's the context of this? Why is this significant or surprising? Does this confirm or refute some previous findings?
00:29:12
Speaker
And actually towards the end of the book, in your conclusion, you said you wrote while writing this book, one question kept ringing in the back of
Research Gaps in Women's Sports Science
00:29:20
Speaker
my mind. What do we miss when we understudy women? So I just wanted to maybe have you expand on that as kind of a launching pad into really the content of this book.
00:29:32
Speaker
Yeah. So, I mean, the vast majority of sports science and exercise physiology studies are conducted with male participants and they tend to be a lot of times pretty young men, right? Like young collegiate athletes. And so if you think about that, you know, not only is it looking primarily at men, which is, you know, 50% of the human population, you're also looking at a pretty narrow sliver of that population, right?
00:30:00
Speaker
And yet we use all of these studies to then draw broader conclusions about fitness and exercise and how bodies adapt to training, how bodies perform, how bodies get injured or can recover from injury. So it raises the question, right? Like when we just study one segment of the population,
00:30:21
Speaker
It's creating a sampling bias. It's skewing our understanding of what's considered normal physiology because we're basing what we think is normal for everyone on the small sliver of population. The question then is, like you said, what are we missing when we don't study women or when we don't actually include more diverse populations in our scientific studies?
00:30:46
Speaker
I think my answer is we miss a lot, right? We miss a lot of potential insights into the diversity of how human bodies train and adapt to training and perform and recover from injury because humans are so diverse and so interesting. And so when we include women and when we include more diverse populations, we can actually increase our understanding of humans as a whole, right?
00:31:13
Speaker
in terms of all of these questions, I think that we're interested in. Going to the beginning of the book, you know, a big reason why that women aren't included in studies was just like, well, women are complicated.
00:31:27
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, I pretty much asked most of the researchers and that's what they would say. It's like, well, you know, people would say that women are complicated and it is largely because, you know, female bodies have menstrual cycles and with the menstrual cycle hormones fluctuate up and down and kind of
00:31:46
Speaker
in various ways throughout the month, which on the surface makes sense. If you're thinking about a scientific study, if you're trying to understand how a specific hormone or molecule or molecular mechanism works, you want to try to eliminate as much noise in your data or external variables in your data that could affect what happens. It makes sense in a way that you don't want a fluctuating hormonal environment.
00:32:15
Speaker
in the background because that makes it harder to then interpret the results. But I feel like that's become a pretty blanket excuse, if you will, or a lazy excuse for not including women because, you know, frankly, that fluctuation A could be potentially interesting, but it could also speak that you're maybe kind of being a lazy scientist, right? Because it is more cumbersome. It does require a little bit more work and planning and logistics.
00:32:44
Speaker
to account for those hormonal differences. But it can be done, and people do do it. But yes, that's kind of the traditional reason why. But there's a lot of other kind of factors, I think, that play into it as well. If you think about funding and who's funding sports science research, it's largely institutions like the NCAA or the NFL or NBA.
00:33:09
Speaker
who tend to prioritize male sports, right? Because that's their main revenue stream. So they want to understand how male athletes can perform and how they can keep them healthy. But if you also just think about the history of the sports science field itself and how it's set up,
00:33:26
Speaker
And it was mostly men who were scientists leading these studies. And again, they were mostly studying the athletes around them who at the time were men. And so it just created the standard methodology that gets passed down through the years that we don't even think about. Right. Like that's just the way things are done. So it just becomes the way things are done.
00:33:48
Speaker
Yeah, to your point about lazy science or lazy scientists, I feel like they're doing the research on men. They're like, all right, women are just little men. We're just going to overlay our results on that. And it doesn't work or compute. And sure, I guess in the initial goings, when you're trying to establish some degree of baseline, yeah, maybe at first there's going to be some growing pains.
00:34:14
Speaker
You need to like put in that foundational work and then you can start to ratchet up and maybe get a bit more nuanced with the with those studies. But I guess they're using complication as a as a as a crutch to just not to not start. And I'd like to think and I think your book reveals that at least we're starting to get past that right.
00:34:32
Speaker
Yeah, I think we definitely are as more people recognize the importance of studying women, studying other populations, as well as the limitations of these studies when we only include, you know, one gender, one sex.
00:34:49
Speaker
So it's been really exciting to see how much interest there has been in studying female athlete health specifically and the number of researchers that are starting to go into the field that are really trying to expand the evidence base and literature in this area. It's been super exciting, not only in terms of the work that they're doing, but also the work that they're trying to do in terms of changing some of those systems.
00:35:18
Speaker
that might make it hard for a scientist to want to study women. What I mean by that is providing standardized definitions of what different menstrual cycle phases mean or including suggestions for how to standardize protocols or methodology so that it's right there in front of you. You can't say, I don't know how to do it because people are suggesting this is the gold standard for how to account for menstrual cycle.
00:35:48
Speaker
in these studies. So there you go, right? It's right there for you. Maybe you can define for us the female athlete triad and how that tends to shape women's performance, what happens when those things can be exploited to turn the dial on athletic performance, but often and almost exclusively at the detriment of the individual athlete.
00:36:16
Speaker
Yeah, so the female athlete triad is this constellation of three kind of areas. One is bone health and bone mass density. The other is like nutrition or what's called energy availability, which is essentially, you can think about it as like the fuel you have in your gas tank to power your daily activities as well as your exercise and training. And then the third piece of it is really around hormonal health, and that usually is
00:36:45
Speaker
thought about in terms of like menstrual cycles. And again, if you have a normal menstrual cycle or if there's any menstrual cycle dysfunction. And so what scientists have realized at first, they noticed that for some kind of high level athletes, they started noticing these like menstrual cycle dysfunctions, right? Like that the menstrual cycle would be absent or very irregular.
00:37:08
Speaker
And they also noticed that these athletes tended to have pretty low bone mass density and were at risk of osteoporosis at a pretty young age and also experiencing stress fractures and the like. And what they noticed was that when they looked at the blood of these athletes, it looked like they were starving. So then that made scientists start to look into what role this nutrition play. And so what it turns out is that when the body doesn't have
00:37:36
Speaker
enough energy, not only to live but to exercise and train, it's smart. It thinks it's starving and it starts to shut down non-essential systems and really focus on the systems that it needs to survive because our bodies want to survive. One of the things that starts to shut down are things like the reproductive system and growth
00:38:00
Speaker
you know, in growth systems and the like. And so the problem is, is when you start to shut down the reproductive system, you're shutting down the menstrual cycle. And so you're also you're starting to lower the levels of hormones in the body. And the reason that's important is because hormones like estrogen and progesterone, yes, they coordinate the fertility cycle in a woman's body
00:38:23
Speaker
but they have really important jobs in other systems. So it affects things like bone health and your ability to maintain bone mass. It affects things like cardiovascular health and muscle mass. So all of these things that potentially have long-term health detriments
00:38:41
Speaker
And that's why people are really concerned and really kind of focused on the menstrual cycle is because, sure, it may mean that you might not have a period, which on the surface seems like no big deal. But the fact is, is that it can lead to these longer term health problems. It can lead to early onset osteoporosis. It can lead to cardiovascular disease. And these are all major issues, but we don't
00:39:07
Speaker
think about it in that way. We only think about the menstrual cycle in terms of, like I said, reproduction. And I think that that's one of the big misconceptions out there is that people don't realize how important these hormones are to overall health as well as to athletic performance.
00:39:25
Speaker
Yeah. And Lauren Fleishman's book that came out this year, you know, Good for a Girl, you know, she talks about how, you know, for a time she had good eating habits and stuff, stuff of that nature. But she might be racing against someone who she could tell was disordered eating and and, you know, she couldn't beat her. And it's like, OK, well, now here comes the arms race. Like, OK, now I need to starve myself to maybe clip off three pounds and
00:39:55
Speaker
or whatever, and yet you get a short boost. But as you've described, that short boost is at the detriment of so many other functional systems in the body, and it just, it starts to spiral, and we see just total body breakdowns. And Lauren, she writes about, she had it all, the loss of menstrual cycle, disordered eating, and she was developing foot injuries and bone breaks, and it's just like, wow.
00:40:22
Speaker
for the short term, yeah, maybe you get a little speed, but in the long term, you know, look what it does to a career. Yeah. And I think that that's one of the hardest things, right? Is because, you know, we want or we see that short term boost or that, that initial boost in performance and it's so attractive, right? Like it's, it's, you know, so appealing and it's what we often chase. Like, especially if you are an elite athlete or performance driven in any sort of way, you're chasing those
00:40:51
Speaker
you know, those margins, those wins and all of that. And yeah, not necessarily always thinking about in the longer term, how that might actually be setting your body up for a big breakdown in the end, right? And so if we think about
00:41:06
Speaker
If we want people to be athletes over the span of their entire life, if we want them to progress more than just their high school years, then we do need to think about these longer-term health.
00:41:24
Speaker
Issues right we do need to think about how we can set you know girls and you know women and frankly boys to write how we can set them up for this longer term development and not always chase that shiny gold star that's just you know on the horizon.
00:41:42
Speaker
Yeah, because that short term stuff, it's what's maddening about it. You kind of saw this with baseball, too. It's just like, well, that guy ahead of me is taking steroids. Like, I don't want to. But if I don't, I can't keep pace. And then I'm going to I'm not going to get called up on my career will end because some guy ahead of me was cheating. So now I have to cheat just to keep pace.
00:42:01
Speaker
And you kind of see that with the running too, because maybe if Lauren or Kara Goucher and Allison Phoenix is behind someone, like if they don't beat that person, then maybe they lose their endorsements or something. And all of a sudden, it's like my career is over because I was trying to treat myself with a bit more respect in my long term health. But if I don't do this in the short term, even at my own physical detriment, I might be out of a job, essentially.
00:42:27
Speaker
Yeah. And I mean, I think you also see it now in youth sports too, right? Like with all of this focus on early specialization and I mean, you have like six year olds, eight year olds playing in like travel teams and like, you know, like traveling, you know, to these tournaments and stuff. I'm like, well, can we, can we just have rec leaks for our little kids? But like you see it then too. And it's, it seems like it's,
00:42:53
Speaker
that drive for success in that competitive environment is being pushed down younger and younger. And I worry about that. I worry about what that's setting this generation of kids up for in the longer term.
Impact of Gear on Women's Sports Participation
00:43:11
Speaker
As a parent, I want my kids to be happy and healthy, but I want them to love sports and moving their bodies for the long term. I don't want them to be burnt out by it. I obviously don't want them to be injured either, but I worry that the system that we have now is setting that up because we
00:43:33
Speaker
we focus on things like, oh, the, you know, the college scholarship or, you know, this person is the best at 10 years old or something like that, which I don't, I mean, frankly, don't think it means that much.
00:43:47
Speaker
Intuitively, as a woman, I'm sure you just knew a lot of these issues were ignored or brushed under the rug or dismissed more or less. But as you dove into the research and were really embarking on this project, to what extent did your research just start to maybe, I don't know, it just confirmed what you kind of intuitively knew, but also probably pissed you off.
00:44:14
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think for sure the kind of ignorance maybe around the menstrual cycle was something that kind of made me mad. It's something that I, you know, I really wish that I knew earlier how that and how good nutrition and all of that could potentially affect my bone health, right? Like rather than learning about it when I'm like in my late 30s or 40s, because I can't do anything about it now.
00:44:41
Speaker
And just, you know, I think the other piece that made me really mad is just the disservice that we do to girls and women because we don't educate them about their bodies, just in general, even, right? We don't give them the tools and the knowledge to know what's going on, to feel, you know, confident that they know what's going on with their bodies, too, because
00:45:06
Speaker
so often those experiences are dismissed, right, as either one-off situations or, you know, oh, that's not a big deal. Like, for example, I spoke with a cyclist, Alison Tetrick, who, you know, was a pro cyclist. She does mostly gravel races now. But when she was coming up in the ranks, you know, she would often complain about her bike saddle being uncomfortable.
00:45:32
Speaker
and her bike fitters and the staff around her who were mostly primarily men, we kind of just look at her and be like, it's cycling. It's supposed to be uncomfortable, you know, and just kind of that's accepted. That's what it is. And so she just accepted that. But it ended up leading to, you know, pretty major problems in her general area, which required surgery, right? Which we shouldn't have to
00:45:54
Speaker
That shouldn't be, you know, something that we have to resort to. So that, you know, definitely it's that piece of it that makes me mad is that we don't empower people to know and feel confident about what's going on in their bodies so that they can advocate for themselves, so that they can make the best decisions for themselves, you know, whether it's in terms of training or injury prevention or even, you know, just how they go about their sport, right?
00:46:21
Speaker
There was a part in the book to where you can where when you're talking about just the you know the estrogen and progesterone you know the way the way they kind of flip-flop in terms of the how they ramp up and ramp down and then in the like periodically there you can. There are certain elements where you might have better performance or lesser performance and you can kind of like.
00:46:43
Speaker
Almost leverage the psych the hormonal cycle as a way not performance enhancing but you'd be like you know in this period here we can be training a certain way in this way we need to dial it back and I think in an individual sport I think that can be it can be leveraged as like a strength and not it not like the weakness that is just like blanketly categorized as.
00:47:04
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it just speaks to that ability to tune into what your body is doing and trying to tell you how it does respond to things like the menstrual cycle, what symptoms you might be experiencing at different parts of the cycle or across the month.
00:47:24
Speaker
Because those are things you can pay attention to and those are things that you could potentially, you know, mitigate some of those symptoms, you know, as simple as, you know, sleeping a little bit more or paying a little bit more attention to your recovery routine if you are, you know, you find that you, you know, have a harder time recovering at certain parts or like right before your period, say, or you're more sore at that point.
00:47:47
Speaker
But those are things that you can actually be proactive about versus where right now I feel like a lot of the the attitude is kind of like, well, you just got to suck it up. Right. Right. That's just part that's just part of it. And you have to suck it up. There's nothing you can do about it because, you know, there is no.
00:48:04
Speaker
not even cure, but there is there is no good kind of symptom management protocol right now for like, you know, menstrual cycle related symptoms or PMS or any of that. It's just something women just you just have to deal with. And that's what we just expect is we just have to deal with it.
00:48:21
Speaker
And there's a moment in the book, too, where you talk about sports bras. And I think Lauren writes about this, too, in her book. And it ends up becoming like a barrier to entry, especially for women of different shapes and sizes and backgrounds and being self-conscious and everything.
00:48:42
Speaker
I wonder if you can speak to maybe that as a barrier but also other ways that to lower the barrier and to keep women and girls engaged with their sports longer so they get the lifetime benefit of it instead of abandoning it maybe when they're 12 or 13.
00:48:57
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you know, sports bar is a huge barrier for like one into adolescent girls, they've cited that breasts and like, whether it's breast pain or embarrassment about how their breasts move when they're active, not having access to a sports bar, they've cited that as like a reason why they don't participate in sport or why they've dropped out of sport.
00:49:20
Speaker
So that's pretty significant, right? But I often think that, you know, when girls or women cite breasts as a reason why, it's kind of, again, it's written off as like, oh, you're just being, you know, silly or vain, or it's not that big of a deal. But the reality is, is that breast pain and breast biomechanics
00:49:42
Speaker
a hundred percent affects, you know, your experience and it can affect everything, you know, even like your biomechanics when you're running, if you're not wearing a good sports bra, you might shorten your stride so that you're not somehow like lessening the impact with the ground. Right. So that your your boots don't bounce around as much. You might kind of draw your
00:50:06
Speaker
your arms closer into your chest again so you can kind of minimize some of that side to side movement, but all of those things means that you're not running necessarily very efficiently, right? So it's all of these things, but the thing that kind of struck me the most when I was researching this is the fact that
00:50:25
Speaker
we really haven't paid attention to breast biomechanics until the late 2000s, 2010s. That's when scientists really started to get the technology they needed to study the very intricate and complex patterns in which breasts move. And if you don't study that movement, it makes it really hard to then design a garment that can then
00:50:52
Speaker
support you well or be comfortable or you know to minimize some of that pain. So yeah I mean that's that's one of the areas where like it's always it's just been written off as like why would we need to study that boobs just go up and down up and down like what else do you need um so it's it's it's you know kind of funny but also not
00:51:12
Speaker
Right? That it can be dismissed as this, but it can be such a huge barrier. I mean, to your other question around what else we can do to help women kind of get involved and stay involved in sport. I mean, I think this also speaks to, you know, the question around gear too and clothing, because again, the traditional way has always been to take kind of the men's design, you know, grade it down in size.
00:51:39
Speaker
And then maybe add some frills here or there to make it a little bit more feminine, change the color and then be done with it without really paying attention to what women need or want from these products.
00:51:54
Speaker
And I think that for kind of straight size women, so kind of like, you know, women who fit in kind of traditional sizes, that you can kind of get away with that in a way, right? Like you can mostly fit in those, in those clothing sizes. It'll mostly work for you. But for folks who make, maybe in bigger bodies, right? Like that doesn't work.
00:52:17
Speaker
And so we also need to think about how we can expand size offerings so that, again, we can encourage a more diverse group of people to participate in sports and physical activity. If we really mean it, if we really mean that we want a more diverse range of people in the outdoors or doing sports, if we really mean it that we care about
00:52:41
Speaker
all people's health, right? Like we need those aspects as well, the gear and the clothing and the shoes to be able to support people to do that. Because if you're uncomfortable, you're not going to do it. If you can't find the gear, you're not going to do it. If we can expand kind of how we think about those types of offerings, I think that would be a big deal.
00:53:01
Speaker
Not to mention that a good sports bra might be as much as a week's worth of groceries. Yeah. That's a huge piece of it. I'm hoping that some of those price points start to decrease as more brands use the science. Some of the technology starts to become a little bit more affordable.
00:53:24
Speaker
But that's a big piece of it too, is that we need affordable gear because that also creates a huge barrier, right? If you can't afford it, you're definitely, you know, if that's going to be your choice between a sports bra and your groceries, I'm pretty sure most folks will choose their groceries.
00:53:42
Speaker
Yeah. And what got me thinking, too, in this book is like oftentimes, you know, talk about like overlaying the male sort of rubric over, you know, a woman's athlete development. It's like, OK, so like men go through the puberty and teenagers years, they're starting to
00:54:03
Speaker
grow their athletic performances spiking and they tend to peak in your early 20s you overlay that over over women and what's happening to their bodies physically and you know and endocrinology and physically and it just it
00:54:21
Speaker
that they don't align and yet like women are still on the kind of like the same athletic timeline as men and it is that is that something you'd love to see addressed more with it. I don't know what parameters or how that could even be enforced but to have the women on the same timeline as men is is just patently foolish when you really look at the science and performance.
00:54:42
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's a really great question and actually something I've been thinking a lot about because I think when I first started working on this book, I almost assumed that it would be these like two separate buckets, right? Like the men's stuff and like their timeline in training would be over on one side and women would be on this other side and they'd be totally separate.
00:55:06
Speaker
I think in an ideal world, obviously everything would be much more individual because every individual's experience and development is going to be so unique that there isn't necessarily going to be one blueprint or one size fits all situation that's going to work for everyone, whether men or women. But I think where I'm starting to land and starting to understand a little bit is that
00:55:36
Speaker
there's actually a lot more overlap between men and women than we might assume. Because I think in our society we think so much about sex and gender as very binary things, right? But we all exist more on a spectrum, if you will, right? And that there is a lot more overlap between men and women and male and female bodies because
00:56:02
Speaker
we're human. Of course, there are going to be differences. Like there's, you know, for sure there are differences. But I feel like we're, and one of the reasons why more research matters is because when we research, when we include women and study with women more or other folks more, we can learn more about that overlap that could potentially
00:56:26
Speaker
impact everyone. You know what I mean? So like, because we've only studied men right now, yes, it is that we've developed this very specific timeline or training protocol, if you will, that is based on a very specific set, you know, of men. And that's, I think, part of the reason why it doesn't always fit with women's experience. But when we
00:56:49
Speaker
expand that participant population, we can expand our understanding of humans as a whole and see that, oh, maybe there are more similarities than we might assume. Maybe there are ways that do work for men and women together, and maybe there are ways that
00:57:08
Speaker
that don't, right, that are going to be specific to men versus women. But right now, we've only just started asking those questions and trying to figure that out. So I mean, I'm very excited to just kind of see where all of this ends up and what we learn from this process. But yeah, it's a very, it's a tricky question.
00:57:29
Speaker
Right. Yeah. And I have to I have to think too that as you're starting to see the the ratchet turn, you know, as an athlete yourself, you must be like, damn it, like, why couldn't I have benefited from this 20 years ago or 30 years ago when I was getting into sports and like seeing that benefit? It's got to I think on some level, you know, you know, women of a certain age must be like, God damn it. Like, I wish I wish I could have had some of this knowledge back then.
00:57:56
Speaker
For sure. I mean, even for me, as simple as I wish that I had started strength training earlier or had been encouraged to do that more. I mean, I think I started really doing that maybe in college, but I was following like, you know,
00:58:11
Speaker
whatever program was in the women's fitness magazines and who knows. I didn't have an actual program or protocol that was progressive that would actually help me build the strength that I actually needed. But yeah, I feel like something as simple as that has so many benefits in terms of not just athletic performance, but in terms of just making your body more resilient.
00:58:38
Speaker
and preventing injury and just having those habits set up from the beginning that it's just part of what you do as an active person.
00:58:47
Speaker
Yeah, specifically with weight training and women, for generations, it's like strength training is just going to make you bulky, which just really isn't true. Even if you feed yourself well, it's just not going to happen. It's going to help with bone density. It's going to help with so many other things. But societally, it's like, no, you're going to look like Arnold if you live too much. And it's one of those deals where hopefully the culture can shift over time, glacially.
00:59:16
Speaker
where something like that will just be like, oh my god, I can't believe we used to think like that. But now we're here. We've moved the ball a bit.
00:59:25
Speaker
Yeah, no, I definitely am really hopeful that some of these social cultural issues or norms start to shift because in a way, I mean, not only with what you just said about strength training, but even when we think about messaging around nutrition and what to eat, right? I feel like women are constantly told that don't eat so much, but if you don't, you're digging yourself into this hole and then you can't perform.
00:59:52
Speaker
or lift weights, but don't do so much that you look masculine or whatever it is. You're constantly trying to thread this super fine line between what you're supposed to do and what society deems as okay for you to do. It's a wonder to me in a lot of ways that women athletes have been able to accomplish so much and to do so much given all of these pressures that are on them.
01:00:23
Speaker
Very nice. Well, Christine, I'd like to bring these conversations down for a landing. I always love asking the guests for a recommendation of some kind. Just anything you're excited about that you'd like to recommend to the listeners, and I'd extend that to you as we bring our conversation to a close.
01:00:37
Speaker
Um, so I just finished watching shrinking on Apple TV, which I don't know if you've watched, but it's fantastic. It's hilarious. It's with Harrison Ford and Jason Seagal. Um, the cast is amazing, but what I really appreciated it's treatment of, um, grieving. So Jason Seagal, you know, his wife had passed away kind of before the show starts, but it's just, it's really funny, but yeah, kind of their treatment of grieving. And, you know, as a parent, as you know, a child was
01:01:06
Speaker
was really great. Oh, that's fantastic. Well, Christine, thank you so much for coming on the show and for sharing your insights into how you go about the writing in this wonderful book you've written. This was really great, and I really appreciate your time. No, I appreciate you having me. Thank you.
01:01:24
Speaker
ACNFers, thanks for listening and thanks to Christine for making the time. We actually share the same agent, small world. Head to BrendanOmero.com for show notes and consider signing up for the Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter for book recommendations, a short essay, writing inspiration.
01:01:43
Speaker
and a series of links that go up to 11. First of the month, I think. No spam, can't beat it. Hey, no parting shot this week, CNFers. I gotta get back to work. I've wasted enough time today. And I'm running out of time. And just typing that line and now reading it gave me some serious chest tightness every day. And the 2 a.m. book panics. Hey, stay wild, CNFers. And if you can't do interview, see ya.