Lauren Fleshman has always had a voice in running. She was emboldened, certainly, by her strong performances, which started early: Her senior year of high school, in 1998, Fleshman was the runner up at the Foot Locker Cross Country Championships. At Stanford University, she won three consecutive titles in the outdoor 5,000 meters.
As a pro, bone injuries popped up at inopportune times—some of them almost certainly because she wasn’t eating enough—and she never made an Olympic team. But she finished seventh in the world championships in 2011 and won two national titles in the 5,000 meters, her specialty.
Along the way, she became one of the truth-tellers in running, whose voice developed along with social media. She tried to say it like it was, whether she was on Twitter, in the mixed zone talking to reporters after races, answering questions for her blog, AskLaurenFleshman, which launched in 2009, or writing for Runner’s World, where she had a popular monthly column. Fleshman exhibited a knack for giving words to what readers and runners, especially women, knew in their guts to be true.
Her memoir, Good for a Girl, published by Penguin Press, continues that tradition.
Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World
Fleshman, now 41, looks back unflinchingly on her career in running, from her early days in middle school racing the boys to the waning days of her pro career, when she went from U.S. title to foot surgery to the top of the podium again. Her trajectory shows the problems in women’s running, “from eating disorders to psychological stress to performance dips linked to puberty.”
The sport’s systems are built for men, who get faster and stronger as they grow and are aren’t fighting their biology, she writes.
But the book has plenty of positive anecdotes, too. Through tender recollections of her interactions with coaches and role models who had Fleshman’s best interests at heart, “the start of some solutions emerge, too.”
Here are three startling moments from her career that Fleshman exposes in her book:
Disordered eating was rampant among top young runners.
Fleshman went to Foot Locker as a junior and a senior. Her junior year, she was unaware of eating disorders and their role in women’s running. When a local champion disappeared from the scene her senior year, Fleshman’s eyes were opened. That year, she watched the best runners in the country at the buffet line before Foot Locker with additional insight.
“The girl across from me was using the other tongs to fill her entire plate with only lettuce,” Fleshman writes. “She drizzled a thin zigzag of fat-free Italian dressing with careful precision, as if an alarm might go off if she drew outside the lines.” Another ate only a dry roll and a couple of cherry tomatoes. “These picky eaters sometimes looked too thin to my newly sensitive eye, but not always, which I found more unnerving. How would I know for sure who was picky and who was sick?”
On her recruiting visit to the University of Colorado, Fleshman bonded with head coach Mark Wetmore. “I sensed a kindred spirit: He was smart, kind, and a bit odd, and loved talking about literature as much as the Lydiard training philosophy that guided his coaching.” But at a team dinner, she felt the “weight of their stares on my burger and fries. A quick scan of the table revealed that the team meal was a salad with dressing on the side. When I held a fry up to my mouth, I was watched so intensely by one woman, I checked to see if there was something gross on it.”
Stanford was a little better, but just barely. Fleshman asked the women’s coach, Beth Alford-Sullivan, about it on her recruiting trip. Alford-Sullivan was frank—eating disorders happened, but overall the team was healthy. (She left Stanford for a new job before Fleshman got there.) At a training camp before Fleshman’s senior year, she could see the evidence in the bathroom that one teammate had been purging. Fleshman confronted the teammate, who replied, “The truth is, I’d rather be skinny and injured than healthy and running fast.”
Later, after she graduated from Stanford and was training for the 2004 Olympic Trials, Fleshman herself fell into disordered eating—losing weight, quickly. In an early season meet, she lacked power in her stride, and a few days later suffered a stress reaction in her foot, causing her to miss the Olympic Trials. Several weeks later, the foot still hurt. An X-ray showed she had broken the bone straight through.
Fleshman was hurt by a gender pay gap.
When Fleshman graduated from Stanford, she had won five individual NCAA titles and been All-American 15 times. Stanford head coach Vin Lananna advocated for her as she talked to shoe companies and agents. He told her to ask agents what they thought she was worth. They estimated about $45,000, but only because she “had the look” shoe companies sought.
She returned to Lananna with her research. He was appalled. Her male teammates were getting offers of two to three times that.
Fleshman tried to represent herself and asked for $60,000 per year. But companies wouldn’t deal with her; they wanted to talk to agents. So she hired Ray Flynn, who promptly signed her to her first Nike deal—worth $60,000. (After an agent’s 15 percent commission, that deal would have been worth $51,000.)
For her second contract, Nike and Reebok got into a bidding war, and Fleshman stayed with Nike for a deal worth $125,000 per year. But when injuries kept her from the Olympic team again, her contract was reduced. Fleshman went to John Capriotti, Nike’s head of sports marketing, “groveling” for half of the contract she had signed for, so she could still make payments on the house she had bought in Bend, Oregon.
She was in the tent when Alberto Salazar yelled at Mary Cain.
By 2015, Fleshman had left Nike, was sponsored by Oiselle, and she was coaching Oiselle athletes. She found herself at a low-key meet in Los Angeles, where athletes tried to get qualifying standards out of the way for U.S. nationals and the world championships later that summer. One of those was Mary Cain, who had turned pro right out of high school to train at the Nike Oregon Project under Alberto Salazar.
Cain ran poorly. Fleshman started to walk toward her, to try to talk to her, but Salazar and psychologist Darren Treasure stood over her as she changed out of her spikes. A sudden storm came up, forcing all the athletes and coaches to huddle together under small tents. Fleshman was near Cain and Salazar.
Salazar “lit into” Cain for her poor performance, “blaming her weight,” Fleshman writes. “Nobody in the tent stood up for her. Nobody challenged Alberto’s power. I felt too frightened to say something while Alberto was there—a shameful weakness of resolve I still regret to this day.”
Four years later, Salazar was suspended for anti-doping violations while coaching at the World Championships in Doha. And a month after that, Cain shared her story with the New York Times, disclosing how despondent she had been on that day. “It wasn’t the first time she was verbally or emotionally abused by NOP coaches, but it was the first time it happened in front of anyone outside her team,” Fleshman writes. “The silence that followed was an industry endorsement of her treatment.”
Sarah Lorge Butler is a writer and editor living in Eugene, Oregon, and her stories about the sport, its trends, and fascinating individuals have appeared in Runner’s World since 2005. She is the author of two popular fitness books, Run Your Butt Off! and Walk Your Butt Off!
