The Crisis in Girls’ Sports with Lauren Fleshman and Linda Flanagan

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.

00:00:22
Speaker 2: Hello, Hello, Malcolm Glable. Here, we're back with another conversation from our Revisionist History Live series on Mastery. This took place at the ninety second Street Y in New York. As many of you know, I'm a pretty serious runner, and like most competitive runners, I was most running crazy when I was a kid. I started at thirteen, ran through high school and a little in college. It was the single most fun thing I did growing up. Sports were my refuge from the craziness of adolescence. But one of the things that has become clear in recent years is that youth sports are no longer the oasis they used to be. That something very troubling is happening. Higher pressure, abusive coaches, over involved parents, and it's worse for girls, eating disorders, distorted body images. So I asked two people to come and talk about all this with me and figure out some answers. Lauren Fleshman and Linda Flanagan, both athletes, coaches and parents who've thought a lot about this problem, and by the way, who happened to have the same initials. So just to be clear, this is Linda.

00:01:32
Speaker 3: That's strangely, when many parents don't step in, they raise hell when you know their child is put in right field. But if there's like just a lot of nastiness and a terrible team culture, they're quiet.

00:01:48
Speaker 2: Linda Flanagan, author of Take Back the Game, How money and mania are ruining kids sports and why it matters. And here is Lauren.

00:01:58
Speaker 4: Truly like my sport experience always felt like it was mine.

00:02:02
Speaker 2: Lauren Fleshman, world class runner, author of Good for a Girl, A Woman Running in a man's world. Linda and Lauren gave me exactly what I wanted. I won't say we fixed kid sports, but I do see a future worth believing in.

00:02:19
Speaker 1: Take a listen.

00:02:25
Speaker 2: For those of you who don't know, Laura was one of the great distance runners of her generation. She is an entrepreneur and now she's a writer. Now she's written this wonderful book. Linda, also accomplished runner. Has done a number of things, interesting things over the course of your career, but of relevance to this evening, you coach for many years at the high school level, and it's really out of those experiences that you came to write your book, Take Back the Game. And I am interested in the two of you for a number of reasons. But I'm also a runner, not nearly as accomplished as either of you. In fact, I thought that we could all go for run this afternoon, and I asked, So I asked first, So I said, let's go for run, say, and so Linda says, well, I'm not running with Lauren. She's world class, so you flake. And then I said, all right, I'll go running with Lauren. And then Lauren says, no, I'm not going right, I'm gonna go for a runner early in the day. And I think, what happened to Krug and found wrong? Lauren, you looked at my strata. You said, he's so slow. Why would I waste a good running day?

00:03:37
Speaker 1: So I ran alone.

00:03:38
Speaker 4: So I said, you should have gone in the morning with me.

00:03:44
Speaker 2: So I'll get over that though. I so both of you have written books about the crisis in youth sports. We said girls sports, and I think probably we should. We're going to talk probably more about girls than boys in this because I think both of you would agree that problems are more acute with girls. And just to set things up, I wanted to I'm going to just describe.

00:04:11
Speaker 1: The manner in which this conversation is going to take place.

00:04:13
Speaker 2: Because we want to play a little game, the Martian game, and the Martian game is that. Imagine there's a Martian who doesn't know anything about America, American culture, sports in America, nothing, just a Martian in one of those balloons, and all he's been given is your two books. So he reads your two books and he reaches a series of He has no context, he has no inhibitions, he's not worried about asking. So I am the Martian, and I'm going to ask a series of questions, unconstrained by any kind of you know, other ideological positions of mine, previous experiences. I'm just drawing what might seem like extreme conclusions from both of your books, and I want you to respond to these conclusions.

00:04:59
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, right.

00:05:02
Speaker 2: The martians first statement is the Martians says, huh, should we ban men from ever coaching women?

00:05:11
Speaker 1: Again?

00:05:15
Speaker 3: It might not be a bad idea. Tell me why, Well, there are too many men coaching women. For one thing, women need women and girls need female role models in leadership positions. Everyone thinks of sports as that's where you learn how to be a leader. And yet you know, very few girls are actually coached by women and even at the collegiate level it's about forty two. High school level it's in the twenties, and in youth sports is twenty five percent. So let's get more women in there so that young girls and teenagers can see that women can be leaders too.

00:06:02
Speaker 1: Lauren, do you have thoughts on the Martians band?

00:06:07
Speaker 4: Well, I like these points.

00:06:09
Speaker 5: I agree, and running only seventeen percent of the coaches and runninger women, which I was really surprised, even lower than the average. I would say, let's not ban them until we've given them a chance to fill the giant gap of knowledge that we all are living with when it comes to female.

00:06:31
Speaker 4: Bodies and how they develop and how they operate. Let's let them.

00:06:39
Speaker 5: Let's give them a chance to learn. Let's see how many of them want to and the ones that want to and are willing.

00:06:44
Speaker 4: To, and we'll do the work.

00:06:45
Speaker 5: Let's let them stay and then let's do all the stuff that Flinda's talking about enlightened.

00:06:51
Speaker 2: I was struck in reading your book, Laurin, by a big chunk of your book is It is a very powerful and insightful explanation of the difference in the physiological trajectories of young women and young men, and you make this, you would talk about your time at Stanford to the young man, are a man or a boar? Whatever they are between of college age is at their physical peak. They get better almost automatically every year. They're full of all the every positive hormone own demand, and whereas the women are going through a much more complicated process. And the reason the Martian asks that question is that Martian says, how can a man ever fully understand what.

00:07:39
Speaker 1: A young woman is going through if he's never gone through it himself.

00:07:45
Speaker 5: Well, I would say to the Martian, we can't apply that logic to the problems of the world, or else the problems would only be able to be solved by people who've had an identical experience. And the problems are big enough that we need everyone involved. And I don't think there's anything that mysterious about the female body that anybody couldn't learn if they wanted to.

00:08:12
Speaker 4: It's just what we've Yeah, but we've.

00:08:14
Speaker 2: Been added for years and years and years now. And you know, just reading that your book and that little section it's not in, you know, there's we have an overwhelming we have a largely male group of coaches, and yet we still have. We have a persistence of these kinds of problems, and I'm wondering whether as the first step in solving the problem is to is to replace them with people who maybe have a better chance of understanding.

00:08:45
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, with women coaches, you have a higher likelihood that they've gone through something similar. But you also have plenty of female coaches perpetuating the same harm that their male coaches you know, passed down to them and repeat the culture. And so there's there's the knowledge is needed by female coaches too. I get a lot of messages of people who've read the book women men who are like, Wow, I didn't know any of this stuff. I feel really bad now. I've been coaching for ten years, fifteen years. I wish I could go back and have some different conversations with my athletes than I had. There was no understanding of why the women were making the decisions they were making, why they were breaking their bodies were breaking down at higher rates than our male peers. And I mean, we don't study female bodies enough. We don't have enough research on femal bodies. So I can't really like blame coaches for not knowing these things. Plus we sexualize most of the things that are specifically female, you know, or we make them dirty, like the menstrual cycle has this reputation for being something you can't talk about without using euphemisms. Breasts are sexualized as soon as you're twelve and a half and get them, so it makes it hard to talk about our bodies and hard to talk about our bodies with ground ups, especially.

00:10:00
Speaker 2: Linda, what did your athlete you coach for many, many years? What did your athletes get from you as a woman that they couldn't have gotten from a man? Or is that or do you think that there.

00:10:11
Speaker 1: Was no.

00:10:13
Speaker 3: I don't think that they got something from me that they couldn't get from a man. In fact, there's a man out here in the audience who I coached with, who is a fabulous coach and role model for me, who was very sensitive to the girls, you know, feelings and wishes and dreams. So I don't. The more I think about it, I have to I have to go back and tell the Martian that we should not We don't need to ban male coaches, but we should be educating them along with women coaches, who, as Lauren points out, are also guilty of a lot of the nonsense that we're reading about. I mean, you look at the Harvard ice hockey coach. I mean, every week there's another story about some egregious behavior on the part of a you know, professional coach, and there are oftentimes women too.

00:11:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, what about this though? The second thing.

00:11:14
Speaker 2: That I took from reading both of your books, was particularly from Lawrence, was this notion, this idea that I talked about Bray briefly before, about that you spent a lot of time on the book that the trajectory of young men and women is different, and that many women have this kind of in their late teens early twenties, have a kind of performance plateau, and so they observe the men getting better and better efforts every year, many of them hit a period of a couple of years where their times are not getting better, in some cases are going backwards, and that triggers all kinds of.

00:11:49
Speaker 1: What is that does? How do you deal with that issue?

00:11:52
Speaker 2: I mean, is it is it? Is there a case to be made for some somehow separating out the cultures of male and female running it out with that age?

00:12:02
Speaker 1: So there isn't this.

00:12:03
Speaker 2: Kind of of the women looking at the men and thinking they should be doing the same.

00:12:08
Speaker 5: I think that it's fine to have different experiences. You just need the different experiences normalized from day one. Like when the coaches are having their conversations with parents and students, that's the time to lay out, hey, we have a cross country team or track team or basketball team, and we are working with thirteen to eighteen year olds, for example, and female bodies are going to be going through something that looks more like this, which is like, if you just look at all the data on performance, really doesn't matter what the sport is. By age sixteen seventeen, female gains performance gains on average or like one to one and a half percent.

00:12:40
Speaker 4: Whereas their male counterparts are they go like this, do do do do do? And the female athletes go like EWW like this.

00:12:47
Speaker 5: But we haven't been telling them during that stage of life that hey, this is temporary. This is like a blip in your long term progression, and your prime is in your mid to late twenties and beyond.

00:12:58
Speaker 4: So really we just need.

00:12:59
Speaker 5: To Every coach of an adolescent female person should should be telling them, hey, this is going to be part of your normal progression. More than likely you're going to have a plateau or even a short term dip. I will be coaching you through that experience as teammates. You're going to be navigating this with your teammates. Some of you will be on this part of the curve, some will you be on this, will be on this. So part of team culture needs to be supporting each other through that rocky road from day one and not looking at it as a bad thing.

00:13:28
Speaker 4: It's just a different path.

00:13:29
Speaker 5: Like, is there going to be feelings of disappointment, sure, you know, and we can make space for that without pathologizing it. And that's what we've been doing, is because we don't recognize that females have this performance wave instead of this performance line when they hit the plateau.

00:13:45
Speaker 4: I mean there's parents who have been like.

00:13:46
Speaker 5: I sent my kid to a sports psychologist because I thought they just didn't care enough anymore, or I sent them to a dietician because I thought that they were their nutrition was sloppy. I'm like, that's just puberty. You just pathologized puberty, you know, Yeah.

00:14:02
Speaker 3: But see the trouble. I totally agree with you, And yet I think that implies that you coaches have room for the time and that athletes are patient and that their parents are patient, and at least in my experience with high school parents, of course, many were wonderful. I love them. I always have to say that you said it, good job. But there's this this drive to achieve and to get results right away, you know, there's not and if they're plateauing or getting worse than again, like what's the problem here? And so it is about coaching education, it.

00:14:40
Speaker 4: Is, and it's also there's some things we can't change.

00:14:43
Speaker 5: I mean, sport as we know it was built around the male body, so high school sports. We invest a ton of money in high school sports and college sports, and that's ages thirteen to twenty two. That's a great time to be a male in sport, right, And that's why they're I'm guessing, so integrated into our education systems. It's like a and why scholarships are given out based on.

00:15:04
Speaker 4: Who's the best seventeen or eighteen year old.

00:15:06
Speaker 5: That's a better predictor for a male body person than a female body person of what your future potential is. But the scholarships and that whole system was created long before female athletes were like up in there asking.

00:15:20
Speaker 4: For their share of the scholarship pie.

00:15:22
Speaker 5: But now there's no getting around the fact that seventeen and eighteen year olds are the ones getting offered the scholarships or not. And so that adds this enormous pressure right during development, right during your puberty experiences of change, where you're like, Okay, you're telling me to accept this temporary state of plateau. But there's a lot on the line, hundreds of thousands of dollars of scholarship and opportunity. And if I just restrict my diet, if I fight puberty, if I try to aim for this body that I've been told is the ideal performance body, now, then I can give myself a chance to have those opportunities.

00:16:02
Speaker 4: But then you pay the price later.

00:16:04
Speaker 2: Well, this brings us to the Martian's second point, which is one that Linda raises explicitly in her book, which when I came to that part of Europe, I was like, Amen, I'm with you on this as both as Malcolm and as the Martian. That is it time to pull the plug on athletic scholarships and preferences. You know, if you're Lord, you're describing this kind of the level of pressure that is brought to bear on the seventeen year old girl at a time in her development when you can't make, you know, a kind of reasonable prediction about where. So this whole we have this whole system in place that's being driven by the enormous cost of college education, by the expectations that come with scholarships. What if we just ended them.

00:16:57
Speaker 3: I'm all for it, And of course, you know, many of the kids going through it now would be like, but wait, that's not fair. I'm you know, that's just what we've been counting on. But you know it would just if there were no admissions advantage and no athletic scholarship of any kind available to college kids, then it would it would completely change the way we provide sports to kids now because there wouldn't be this race, pardon the pun, you know, to achieve by thirteen, because you might all disappear. And also, you know, I love sports and I'm a runner, and I think they're wonderful. But it's not clear to me why a high school athlete should get get an advantage over someone who plays the obo or who's an a choir, Like, why aren't there special dispensations for them? They don't aren't entitled to special scholarships or admissions advantages or streamline admissions process. So I think it's it would be more fair. I think it would also be impossible to claud back, or at least very difficult.

00:18:09
Speaker 5: I love that part of your book though, because I've often thought, man, if we could just get rid of the scholarships, it would release so much pressure on athletes, especially girls.

00:18:20
Speaker 4: I think that the pressures would just go way down.

00:18:22
Speaker 5: We'd be way more likely to allow development and change to happen on its timeline. But reading your book, I was like, oh my gosh, there's this whole other side of it, the whole big business of youth sports that's also driven entirely towards that same aim. And as someone who has a nine year old and a five year old and i'd like them to participate in sports, I don't want to be a part of that mania.

00:18:41
Speaker 4: I don't want to be.

00:18:42
Speaker 5: Having to travel for hours every weekend to give my kids this the top top performance opportunity. I want the kind of sports that you describe in your book as an ideal, and so I am for getting rid of athletic scholarships. But what had prevented me in the past, was what would we replace it with? And in your book you also provide some really great ideas like that there are other models, and I think sometimes we like lack of imaginations helpful to see other ways people are doing it. And I can't remember the one that you described, and you could talk about it.

00:19:15
Speaker 3: I mean, what that would be. No, Well, certainly in Europe they don't do youth sports like we do it at all, so you know, there's no school based sports, it's the after school. It's community based sports. So that also sets up the whole the college level. And when when I was running in England, you know there was there were no teams. It was there were teams, but it was completely alien to the way we do it here, and there was no coach. It was like student led, right, totally student led. It was probably comparable to intramurals here, and it was very serious and organic, and I don't see why that's not you know, replicable here. And I think at the college level. You know, another possible suggestion I had, which will never happen, is well, how about if we just abolished college sports as if? But but I say that, but why not club and intramural. I mean, it's not saying kids can't.

00:20:16
Speaker 1: Why not about it?

00:20:17
Speaker 2: You're talking about intercollegiate sports.

00:20:21
Speaker 5: Like, yeah, well, what's ironic about this is in research for my book, what women had in sports was club and intermural before Title nine. But there was a huge discrepancy. Obviously there was no scholarships for us, but there were for.

00:20:38
Speaker 4: Men in the n C Double A.

00:20:39
Speaker 5: There was more media, all these things that come with that infrastructure from men's sports. We wanted it too, when maybe all along we wanted equality, but maybe they should have followed our lead.

00:20:55
Speaker 4: Maybe we were onto something.

00:20:57
Speaker 5: Well, when Title nine happened, there was a discussion for the first couple of years about will we fold into the existing men's programs or will we run our own show here, Like we've guaranteed we have that the schools need to provide the opportunities, don't necessarily have to run it exactly like the NC DOBLEA, And it took a little bit before the decision was made to join.

00:21:14
Speaker 4: The NC Double A. And like essentially one of the arguments in my book is that we should be recreating.

00:21:20
Speaker 5: Sports with female bodies at the center so that they can have an equal chance to thrive in the sports system, and that we kind of need to take it back and be able to do that, because giving people the same thing the exact same way isn't going.

00:21:34
Speaker 4: To get you the same results, right.

00:21:38
Speaker 2: So how can we level the proverbial playing field and youth sports that's after the break. I mean, one of the things that's along these lines that I've often wondered about it is whether there's an inherent contradiction between designing sports programs for the for the fiftile and designing them for the ninety fifth percentile, and that maybe those two things are in some sense incompatible. So if we do away with high pressure intercollegiate sports and scholarships and things, maybe we produce fewer Maybe we don't, but maybe this chance we produce fewer world class runners she's running as an example, But maybe we also produce way more people who are happy and contented and run their whole lives, and maybe we get fewer you know, two twenty five marathoners and more two fifty marathoners. I mean, I would be happy with that, but you know, a lot there are some people in the kind of elite sports community who consider that a tragedy.

00:22:54
Speaker 3: Well, so few kids, not enough kids participating in sports now, and I think if we can move the model to try to get more participation. I mean, there was just an article on the paper yesterday about the income gap between the wealthy, wealthy families, you know, earning over one hundred thousand dollars, seventy percent of those kids play sports, and in families earning twenty five thousand dollars in less thirty one percent play sports. So I think this is part of the same conversation that the way we have developed the youth sports system, with its high cost and just relentlessness, has pushed more kids out so that there are fewer kids, you know, gaining any advantages.

00:23:44
Speaker 5: Cross country is one of the ones that I think has the least access problems, considering that they generally don't have cuts, and you don't have to have been in the youth sports high performance pipeline to join a team, and often you benefit if you haven't. I mean, I certainly like when I started as a ninth grader running, there had been plenty of people in my town had been running a long time.

00:24:07
Speaker 3: And you were not at a disadvantage.

00:24:08
Speaker 4: I was not at all at a disadvantage of anything. I felt like I was at an advantage.

00:24:12
Speaker 5: That's how it was framed to me, because you were fresh, yeah, and you have plenty of years ahead. It's just like making you know, like recognizing this timeline. But with my kid interested in soccer, I think I spent five hundred dollars for a spring soccer.

00:24:25
Speaker 4: Experience for the kid.

00:24:27
Speaker 5: He's not even leaving town, you know, so I don't really understand.

00:24:33
Speaker 4: He's had one practice.

00:24:34
Speaker 5: He's nine, Like, I don't understand how anyone how people are affording this and continuing to do this.

00:24:40
Speaker 3: Well, if I can just point out that in my town, we have a Junior pre Academy for U fours, which is three year olds. What well, it's a junior pre academy because then there's also the pre Academy, which is for you.

00:24:56
Speaker 4: Five like pre k.

00:24:58
Speaker 3: Yes, But so by the time, you know, there's a junior peer academy, pre academy, then there's academy and futures, and then there's travel by the like they've been playing for six years and they're nine years old, you know, and at each one it's you know, five hundred dollars or more, which isn't you know what the problem we were talking about with the money and I don't know how you do that?

00:25:18
Speaker 2: No, the way, So, the biggest obstacle, and you mentioned this, Linda, and I would like you to be more blunt about this because you're being two. The biggest obstacle to the kind of de escalation of youth.

00:25:31
Speaker 1: Sports is the parents.

00:25:33
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, so, and I'm reminded, you know, anyone who has to deal with parent My brother was a elementary school principal. He's now retired, so I can now say this about him. And he loved his job and loved the kids. It's just the parents that were and he, you know, fifty percent I think of his anxiety and came from parents, not from kids.

00:25:59
Speaker 1: He was prepared for the kids. He wasn't prepared.

00:26:01
Speaker 2: And he also had this is very tangential, had this hilarious riff about how the parent the teachers that the parents think the best teachers are always the worst teachers. So he was like, not only are they paying the ass, they don't know who the good teachers are. It's like there's something so but I want to so Martian says, why don't we ban parents from Jati, Well, you can we give them one.

00:26:26
Speaker 1: They can go to one media or one of them. That's it. They got to kick one and then they're done.

00:26:30
Speaker 3: Okay, Well here's a good model. Is actually the way boarding schools do is because they parents don't go to those because in those sports programs, from what I understand, do pretty well and the kids it's pretty healthy between with the coaches and the players because the parents aren't, you know, standing at the chain link fence observing. But you know, in the absence of that, I think definitely restricting the parents is a good idea. And again I would like to say I had a lot of wonderful parents my mom, but they're handful or not great.

00:27:06
Speaker 5: Well, the stuff that you were talking about in your book about how as parents we get sucked into our achievement as parents is shown in our kids' accomplishments, and that that's a relatively new phenomenon generationally and my parents. My high school coach just retired after thirty years, and at his retirement party, he again he told me this all the time.

00:27:28
Speaker 4: He's like, your parents were.

00:27:29
Speaker 5: My favorite parents of all the parents in the thirty years, because they showed up to the first meeting. They came to like three to five events perfect. They never once screamed, you know, and they never told him how to do his job. They showed up enough, like you say in your book, to get to know the person who's spending crazy amounts of time with your kid. That's important. Get to know them a little bit, and then get out of the way. And truly, like my sport experience always felt like it was mine and that agency, that autonomy kind of leaved me to the sport in a way that I think got me through the ups and downs a lot better. And like they, I don't know, I just I'm like, I was so grateful for my parental experience, and then wanting to your book was very affirming and like, oh, okay, they were actually.

00:28:20
Speaker 4: Doing a good job. So well, I mean, I try to do it.

00:28:22
Speaker 3: Like how you turned out as a runner. I mean, you're the fantastic runner, and obviously you know they were doing something right by just stepping back.

00:28:31
Speaker 2: My dad came to in my entire running curtain high school one event, and he immediately volunteered to help with the long jump, so he was raking the hit and as I was, I will say a modesty that I won. This was the Terror Championships I won that day. And as I'm rounding the final bend on my way to victory, I look into the infield and I see my dad.

00:28:57
Speaker 1: He's raking and then he raises the rake and he goes go. Malcolm rakes the dad. That was the extent of his involvement and I love that.

00:29:05
Speaker 2: But to your point, the thing about them being involved is that it allows you to also frame your successes and failures the way you want to frame them, because the parental frame is very different.

00:29:18
Speaker 1: They're much more they're they're far.

00:29:21
Speaker 2: More sensitive, I think in some ways to set backs to they don't understand the context in which you're operating, the social network that that you're you're competing in.

00:29:32
Speaker 3: You know what has really struck me and both as a coach and since when I've talked to a lot of parents is just how anxious they are. It's all this anxiety about how their kids are going to turn out, which I get, you know, that's what happens when you're a parent, but somehow it's it's played out in sports. It's also played out in school. But because sports are so visible, I think you know, your your value as a parent is so easily measured by how well your child does. And you know, I just I've been over overwhelmingly impressed by how anxious parents are about it. And that's why they're freaking out and you know, complaining and shrieking and you know, trying to get you fired because you know you're not doing enough for your child to get that child to the next level.

00:30:24
Speaker 2: Did that did dealing with parents? How much of an obstacle is that for people? For coaches continuing to coach, deciding to enter coaching, is that constraining our supply?

00:30:41
Speaker 3: Well, I have an important stat here to share as we were discussing this is accurate too. Fifty eight percent of coaches the per surveyed about five years ago, and I'm sure it's gotten worse, said they've thought about quitting because of parents. Two thirds of coaches set in a more recent survey said parents are always criticizing their child, they're criticizing their officials. I mean, coaches are really down on parents right now. And it's well, it's interestingly enough in this Aspen Institute survey that the parents are like, we love our coaches, So there's kind of this weird disconnect there. But coaches are really down on parents.

00:31:21
Speaker 5: And.

00:31:23
Speaker 3: This is unfair, and I think I so many parents are trying to do the right thing and don't want to be that parent. I've heard that so many times. I don't want to be that parent. But can you do more? Mile repeats, you know, But I would like to say though, that there is a time when they should interject, when they should be you know, not complaining, but raising talking to the coach or talking to the athletic director. And that's when there's some funny business going on. And you know, more the kids, the higher the level of athlete the child is, the more elite, the more likely they are to be emotionally abused and physically abused. And I think that's strangely when many parents don't step in. They raise hell when you know their child is put in right field. But if there's like just a lot of nastiness and a terrible team culture, they're quiet as long as the team is doing well.

00:32:26
Speaker 5: And that's it's intimidating, I imagine, you know, because you're like dealing with an expert, you would we tend to assume that they they have a method that's vetted, or they wouldn't have gotten to where they are well.

00:32:39
Speaker 3: And if they're successful in particular, yes, But meanwhile, there's a lot of tolerance of the terrible things that we shouldn't be tolerating just because the coach has a great reputation.

00:32:49
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, that's true.

00:32:52
Speaker 2: No, you talk quite movingly and honestly about your own father in your book, some of the best parts of the book. And in the beginning of the book, I thought, I thought your father, your father came across as a much less sympathetic figure than he does by the And and I'm wondering, how do you judge you're the elite runner here, how do you judge your own parents? Do you think your father's.

00:33:22
Speaker 1: Role in your life.

00:33:23
Speaker 2: Helped you as a runner, was neutral or hurts she as a runner?

00:33:27
Speaker 4: I think that overall he was a really positive force.

00:33:30
Speaker 5: He was an alcoholic for people who haven't read the book, and he worked really long hours as a prop maker, and when he got home there was about a ninety minute window where I could catch him sober before he would have too many drinks, where I didn't know what kind of dat I was going to get. And so I developed this habit of trying to really get his attention through excellence during those ninety minutes, because he really loved excellence, excellence in everything, music, sports, you know, culture, Like he just it lit him up to see people at their peak doing something incredible. So I wanted to have his light on me in that way. So from that respect, I can't even really blame him for that. That's just one of those childhood things where a dynamic emerges. The alcoholism was not ideal. Definitely would have preferred that not to be there, but then gosh, throughout my career he was, so he just had It was a constant positive, like I always knew I'd be loved and matter what.

00:34:30
Speaker 4: The result was when I came home.

00:34:32
Speaker 5: So even though I like desperately wanted to please him and be excellent for him, he never was, Like, he never came down on me when I failed.

00:34:40
Speaker 4: So from that.

00:34:40
Speaker 5: Perspective, I just I would like to be that kind of parent for my kids.

00:34:46
Speaker 1: Wait, the Martian has another question.

00:34:47
Speaker 4: Yes, Martian, this.

00:34:49
Speaker 1: Is the mark.

00:34:49
Speaker 2: This is the martians most trivial, frivolous privilege suggestion, although maybe not. The Martian says, wonders why given the all of the body issues that aflict girls in sports, why female runners wear bun huggers and crop.

00:35:16
Speaker 4: Tops, Well, very easy question to answer for the Martian.

00:35:21
Speaker 5: It's because our culture feels that female bodies are there to be viewed, objectified, commented on, and in order to do that, they need to be wearing less fabric and tighter fitting fabric. And that is how female athletes got their start. Post title nine. Was a movement to make really this is true, to make up for the fact that people would need to be watching inferior performances, and so.

00:35:52
Speaker 4: They needed to be a visual spectacle.

00:35:54
Speaker 5: And that's where the uniform differences came from, and gender specific clothing and sport, which, of course women will say they wanted. They didn't want to be wearing like a men's extra large hoodie necessarily all the time. They wanted things that fit and performed, But it took this esthetic angle that was yeah, so that's why.

00:36:13
Speaker 2: I because I was looking I read your book, and then I was looking at pictures of h I think it was not I think some cross country team. I forgot which women's cross country team, and all of a sudden I was aware of the fact that here are Here were five young women, all of whom had six packs, all of whom had not a stitch of fat on them, all of whom looked shiny and healthy. And I was like, Jesus, that's a high bar for somebody who is not an elite Division one runner or someone if I was an eleven twelve year old girl thinking about running in high school and and I go on line and I see that picture, That's what I'm Can we at least just wear a T shirt and a bear a bag of shorts and just make it just that little bit easier on that eleven year old who wants to join in.

00:37:06
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, the thing is that probably only well, I don't think a six pack is necessary for high performance at all. And there is a fixation with looking the part more than being the part, and the uniform creates that dynamic. I mean that played a huge part in my life. Throughout my whole career. It was like, Okay, my workouts are good, but like, what do I look like in my uniform? I don't look race ready, so I'm not race ready. Or the scale doesn't say I'm race ready, so I'm not race ready. Ors like those are not the most important indicators, not even close. And like, we have these concepts of race weight that are created and perpetuated by men, primarily who have way less monthly fluctuation hormonally, and they are being applied to female athletes as if we can somehow have a magic number on a scale that if we can stay this number, we will perform optimally based on physics formulas.

00:38:00
Speaker 4: But that's not how our bodies work.

00:38:02
Speaker 5: And then it creates this very narrow band that you have to try to exist in and achieve in order to be vsed as elite. And I mean I watched it happen on my teams where women who didn't look like that were shamed, you know, made to feel like they weren't committed enough just because they didn't have the six pack, didn't really matter how fast they were running.

00:38:27
Speaker 3: That's your college team. Yeah, because in our town, the high school girls wear all those uniforms.

00:38:33
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:38:33
Speaker 3: I just think that's terrible.

00:38:35
Speaker 5: I just think that there's not a performance advantage or the or the men and boys would do it.

00:38:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, So it's just at the school you at the school you coached at.

00:38:47
Speaker 1: So you were coaching girls cross country, did they wear.

00:38:50
Speaker 3: Oh no, there's no way I would have let them.

00:38:53
Speaker 1: Oh, you put your foot down.

00:38:55
Speaker 2: The one of my favorite images of Des Linden when she won the Boston Marathon.

00:39:02
Speaker 1: She's wearing those baggy shorts for some reason.

00:39:04
Speaker 2: It's just the whole thing is so fantastic and badass and like, I just really so, it's much It's almost it's much more powerful emotionally to watch her because she's not pretending to be or wearing that uniform.

00:39:18
Speaker 1: She's just sort of being her.

00:39:20
Speaker 4: Yeah, she's just wearing the things she wants to wear. Wasn't she also wearing basically a parachute of a running jacket. I feel she was learning a jacket. Wow, Yeah, there was a time.

00:39:32
Speaker 1: For those of you don't, Des Linden is.

00:39:34
Speaker 2: A very very very very good American marathoner who won the year. There was a year that the Boston Marathon took place in a gale and the only way anyone you could win. I mean it was so nuts that, like, the only way you could win is if you were the single toughest, most badass and DEAs Linden just sailed through.

00:39:57
Speaker 1: I can't.

00:39:58
Speaker 2: I likely wept the last three miles of that watching on TV, I was like, I could not believe how emotional it was.

00:40:03
Speaker 5: She broke an incredibly long drought in the event for American winner.

00:40:07
Speaker 4: And yeah, and her book's coming out in like a week.

00:40:12
Speaker 1: I think that's right.

00:40:13
Speaker 4: We should do it again with day Yeah, definitely, maybe.

00:40:16
Speaker 1: She'll be running with me.

00:40:17
Speaker 2: I'm like, when we returned, we don't find me a running partner, but we do settle on a grand solution to fix youth sports once and for all.

00:40:38
Speaker 1: Oh the Martian wonders. So here's the It's really me, not the Marshal on this one.

00:40:45
Speaker 2: You know, I ran competitively in high school and stopped for thirty five years.

00:40:52
Speaker 1: Let's started again.

00:40:54
Speaker 2: And I stopped because although I was very successful as a runner, the pressure I was thirteen and fourteen and fifteen and I found the pressure of racing it grew unbearable and I just couldn't do it anymore. And I've often and I lost track of how much joy I found in running, and got consumed by the fact that the only measure of me as a runner was whether I could win a race, and that like, and I lost out on thirty five years of pleasure as a result of this is too bad.

00:41:31
Speaker 1: And now I'm wondering.

00:41:35
Speaker 2: Should we should we since we're banning stuff, lots of stuff, should we be should we be banning kind of serious competition until I don't know, fifteen or sixteen or something. Should we push out the Is there any reason why thirteen year old should be competing at.

00:41:53
Speaker 1: The national level?

00:41:54
Speaker 3: No? In my view, Well, you know, I was at the Millrose Games about six weeks ago and noticed that they had a race for the fastest eight year old in the world, and they had these, you know, these tiny children lined up and they you know, from different countries. I don't know where they came from, but they all ran like the same time, like ridiculously fast. And this is one you know we're talking about before you mentioned various models for doing things we don't need to do the national championships at age thirteen and twelve, Like maybe in a lot of sports around this country, there are these ridiculous championships of like little children, and there's just there's no reason for that. And the country that doesn't do this is Norway and they have incredibly robust participation and then like great success with their athletes after So I would tell the Martian. Let's let's forget the championships. You know what I was before fifteen?

00:42:55
Speaker 2: Say I did this, I did this recently and I can't remember what it was. Fifteen year olds with sixteen year olds. Someone made a list of the top English sixteen year old male milers, the enemy runners over the last thirty years somewhat years, and the question raised was how many of them went on to be world class adult milers, And the answer was such a small number that it was like, You're like, wait, what so if we're doing sports at that age, because we're trying to identify people who will be talented as adult athletes, it's just about the worst predictor of imagine, Yeah.

00:43:34
Speaker 4: It's not working.

00:43:36
Speaker 5: When I was just thinking in this story, like the reason why we have the National Championships is for the adults exactly, and for the sponsors and the people want to make money hosting it and getting the.

00:43:46
Speaker 4: TV rights and all that stuff. It's like, show me the eight year.

00:43:50
Speaker 5: Old who's like, you know, I want to raise the best eight year olds in the world, Mom, can you.

00:43:55
Speaker 4: Look that upes that exists? Right?

00:43:57
Speaker 2: You know, hold on, let's go to some questions for Linda how do you as a coach solve the problem that you're more likely to favor the gifted.

00:44:11
Speaker 1: Ones than the not so gifted ones. Is that a problem?

00:44:15
Speaker 3: Well, I don't know exactly. I mean, I think you have to be aware of the fact that you may have, you know, favorites, And I mean, I would say it's more about favoritism because sometimes the best one is not your favorite. So I think it's just takes awareness on the part of the coach to recognize that it's not building the team to to focus solely on the best girls.

00:44:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's hard.

00:44:39
Speaker 2: I mean, Lauren, if I was your high school coach, I would be famous.

00:44:43
Speaker 4: Right, I don't know, do you know my high school coach?

00:44:48
Speaker 1: I mean, I know.

00:44:50
Speaker 2: My point is that there's a natural the kind of the success of the athlete invariably reflects back in ways that it's not always something that's.

00:45:01
Speaker 5: Not always The story didn't make the book, but and I'm still a little bit upset about it.

00:45:05
Speaker 4: No, I'm just kidding.

00:45:07
Speaker 5: But my high school coach, he by the time my senior year came around, he was getting really swept up in the accolades and how it reflected on him. And there was some indoor meet that I really we never focused on from southern California, like, indoor track is not really a thing, but there is this one place that you can do it with a wooden track, and so we would go and.

00:45:28
Speaker 4: Sort of have a relay every year there.

00:45:30
Speaker 5: But he's like, no, you're gonna run the invitational mile and the Invitational two mile. These used to be prestigious races twenty five years ago.

00:45:37
Speaker 4: I want to coach someone who wins these races.

00:45:40
Speaker 5: And so we were training over Christmas break for the first time ever, like doing these hard workouts in a time of year when normally we're just going on fun runs. I was not enjoying myself. I was feeling tired from the cross country season. And when we got there, I ran the first race, did terribly and I was like, I don't want to do the second race, and he's like, no, you need to do the second race. This is a big opportunity. Is like pushing me to do it. And I was like, Coach, I'm not your racehorse. And he loves telling that story to people who'll start bust out laughing.

00:46:05
Speaker 4: He's like, can you believe that?

00:46:07
Speaker 5: Can you believe she said that to me and then but then he apologized in the car later he was like it was he actually said, he's like, I was getting swept up.

00:46:15
Speaker 4: I was making out me.

00:46:16
Speaker 5: I wanted that, and you never wanted it, and I just wasn't listening to you when you were trying.

00:46:21
Speaker 4: To tell me. So it's real. It's a rare pressure, man, that's a rare coach.

00:46:28
Speaker 2: So we had a whole series of things we wanted to ban. Oh yes, can we So we wanted to ban bun huggers and crop.

00:46:35
Speaker 4: Tops around there? What's it man? Around there? I think.

00:46:44
Speaker 1: Parents were banned parents.

00:46:46
Speaker 2: We're banning a competition before fifteen fifteen.

00:46:50
Speaker 1: I think it's a reasonable.

00:46:51
Speaker 3: Realized Christians are okay, just not.

00:46:54
Speaker 2: My running crew was over effectively at fifteen, so you've just erased me from.

00:46:59
Speaker 1: I Now I have nothing.

00:47:01
Speaker 2: You know, the amount of mileage I've gotten out over the years over my running exploits at the age of fourteen is considerable.

00:47:08
Speaker 1: That's now gone. Anyways, I'm fine. I'll take it on the champion of the team.

00:47:13
Speaker 2: What's your favorite band of all the bands? If you could only do one of those, we can bend the parent the Championships, the bun Huggers, and oh and the college scholarships.

00:47:24
Speaker 1: I know, my favorite band.

00:47:26
Speaker 5: College scholarships is my favorite band mine. I think it would downstream solve a lot of the other problems. They could basically neutralize parents most of them.

00:47:36
Speaker 2: Just that expression is so fantastic. Neutralized three parents up on stage talking about the virtues of neutralizing people in our position.

00:47:49
Speaker 5: Yeah, and then there'd be less motivation to host the eight year old World Championships.

00:47:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Yeah. Well here's a good question.

00:47:57
Speaker 2: Does a change in women's girls' sports need to start at the grassroots level or we'll have to or are we talking something has to happen top down? Can there be a can we have a revolution that can change this?

00:48:08
Speaker 1: Or or or do we not?

00:48:11
Speaker 2: Is someone that you talk about it kind of you want a czar? You want you wanted Michelle Obama to kind of step in.

00:48:17
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that would be nice.

00:48:19
Speaker 2: She's so many people have so many czar jobs for her. Yeah, it's like Michelle not like basically every intactical problem America has, we think oo, William, Michelle.

00:48:35
Speaker 3: I think it has to be both. I know that's a bit of a cop out, but Okay, let's start with the top though. If we ban the scholarships, that is going to have this trickle down effect and it's going to you know, permeate all the way down. That addresses the larger issues with you sports more than you know the ones the specific to girl problems. But I think it would transform the whole the whole game.

00:48:58
Speaker 5: And then a similar high level thing I think would be mandatory coaching education for anyone working with female bodied athletes. I think there's I can't think of a single reason why we wouldn't do that with the giant gap and knowledge we have. And then everyone, of course should buy our books because that'll be the grassroots thing that'll create like our own me too moment where you know, I'm not standing for.

00:49:20
Speaker 2: It on the on the grassroots thing the thing and both of you would have way more knowledge about this than me. But am I being overly optimistic if I say that this the change is going to happen when the girls themselves stand up and just say this is nuts.

00:49:39
Speaker 1: It's like.

00:49:42
Speaker 2: If you're the coach of that team and you observe that there are someone's disappeared and no one's really talking about why someone's on her third or fourth unexplainable stress fracture, someone's beliemic someone and then the person who wins the race from the other team is so scarily thin that you're worried about her.

00:50:00
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, you can normalize anything, just going to say in the culture, right, and so yeah, I think, but I don't think that it's fair to put it on the girls.

00:50:08
Speaker 4: I think that I really think parents, you know, parents don't have enough to do if they want to get involved.

00:50:13
Speaker 5: This is how you should get involved, which is like, yeah, like, don't stand for it. Can you talk about that about stepping in, not being afraid to be the parent that says, no, I'm not going to do the extra thing.

00:50:27
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I think, you know, it's funny. In my book, I was trying to kind of both understand where parents are coming from and also be, you know, offer a critique. And I think that it is important that parents recognize they have agency that they don't have to go along with everything that you know, that extra strength and conditioning training or you know, weight workout that might be helpful. The supplemental training like the soccer club in my town that offers six year olds that they can say no to that. It's okay to say no to that.

00:51:04
Speaker 5: And from just the other day, when I drop my kid off at the five hundred dollars Spring Soccer Experience at practice, I'm very annoyed.

00:51:13
Speaker 4: Wait till you hear this part. I was like, see you, Jude.

00:51:16
Speaker 5: And then one of the parents that I know is a parent of another kid in the class, and she's like, you're not staying. God, So it makes it tough to you know, we're giving each other pressure.

00:51:28
Speaker 3: We're staying at a practice.

00:51:29
Speaker 4: Yeah, I wasn't going to stay and watch the practice.

00:51:32
Speaker 1: God, God, this is what I have to look forward to.

00:51:35
Speaker 2: Wait where someone is waving frantically at me from off stage. But I so we got to end soon. But I wanted to fill the runners out there. I wanted to get to toss them a bone. And someone asked this question of you, Lawrence. Since you're you're a you're running. It's so rare that we get to hang out with like it's fun. But I'm still bitter about not getting to go running with you.

00:51:59
Speaker 1: But because you know what, I'll tell you why I was looking for.

00:52:04
Speaker 4: It's not too late.

00:52:04
Speaker 1: What are you doing this? This is the thing.

00:52:08
Speaker 2: The those of us who are just kind of every day runners when we run with people who are at your level.

00:52:16
Speaker 1: You guys, Floatt, and.

00:52:18
Speaker 2: We're running and you look over and you're just sh and it's like magic. It's like watching a magician do a trick, right, And you're like, oh my god, you're not even you're not breathing.

00:52:30
Speaker 1: And not like you're just you're touching the ground and you're like, how is this happening?

00:52:35
Speaker 5: That sounds like you're an intellectually curious person. Most people are like I'd like, I'm like, do you want to run with me? They're like, oh no, no, no, I would never do that. I'm like, I promise I'll run the pace you want to run, and they're.

00:52:45
Speaker 4: Just like, no, definitely, right.

00:52:47
Speaker 2: Well, the question this is really for the two of you, and then we really do have to stop. What did you guys like the most about parathon training? And you start, and then we'll let laurd boy.

00:52:58
Speaker 3: It's a thousand years ago that I ran.

00:53:02
Speaker 2: If I had one two forty nine, I would have a T shirt that said, all right, so like willia own horn here?

00:53:09
Speaker 4: Yeah?

00:53:09
Speaker 5: And in super shoes, I'd be like two thirty.

00:53:12
Speaker 3: Right, Oh, you're right. You know, I had a great group to train with, and the training is the fun part, not always, but it's the camaraderie that I got in the marathon training and you're out there a long time. So for those, you know, the training runs were kind of fun to do too, you know, when they weren't miserable.

00:53:39
Speaker 5: I didn't have a group, but I did get to have my professional coach, Mark Roland at organ Track Club Elite.

00:53:46
Speaker 4: I had always had him in.

00:53:47
Speaker 5: A group setting and I was the only one doing a marathon and that's normally the time year I did in New York when track and field athletes are taking a break, and so I had him to myself and he would ride his bike alongside me and we got to have all these really nice chats, and like, I just loved that was the last year we worked together, so to.

00:54:05
Speaker 4: Have that, I have a lot of fond memories from that.

00:54:08
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:54:09
Speaker 2: I think that's a lovely way to end because it's a reminder we've been talking about what's wrong with running. And the thing that I always try and tell young people when I try to get them to become runners, is that this thing, the camaraderie stuff is something that is just magical, Like going on a long run with a group of people who you are friends with, are close to, and you've worked out with before. There's there's something there that you'll never find anywhere else.

00:54:34
Speaker 5: It's yeah, and I think that that love, like that's what drove our books. It's like when you know that you have something worth fighting for and protecting, and we really just want to remove a lot of the garbage that's getting in the way of that, right.

00:54:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, thank you so much to the two of you, and thank you to all of you, and go get you go buy your books and get them some. This episode of Revisionist History was produced by Sam and Giesto with Kiara Powell, Bendadapfh Haffrey, and Jacob Smith. Fact checking by Kishell Williams and Tally Emlin. Our showrunner is Peter Clowney. Original scoring by Luis Qira, mastering by Sarah Bruguier, and engineering by Nina Lawrence. Special thanks to the ninety second Street Why crew and my panel of potential running partners Lauren Fleishman and Linda Flanagan.

00:55:35
Speaker 1: I'm Malcolm Glappa.