Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
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Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
Women runners at the start of the 2024 Boston Marathon. Women couldn’t officially compete durante this race until 1972.
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
David L. Ryan/Boston Globe/Getty Images
Myths about women durante date back at least to the dawn of the Olympics 2,800 years punzone, when women weren’t allowed to compete. These myths “remain to shake,” according to sports journalist Maggie Mertens. For instance, it wasn’t until 1972 that women were allowed to run durante the Boston Marathon — it was considered too long and grueling for them physiologically.
Sopra her new book, Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (released June 18), Mertens explores misconceptions about female athletes — and how through running, women have disproved these myths.
Running, says Mertens, “has been used for years and years and years to define women as being lesser than men.” This has caused women to receive less compensation, access, health support and recognition than their sofferenza peers durante .
Better Faster Farther is a relevant read right now, as the Summer Games are set to kick July 26 durante Paris. This year is also the 40th anniversary of the Olympics women’s marathon. “My hope is that it adds a lot of historic context,” Mertens says, “and connects a lot of dots to the issues we’sultano seeing play out durante women’s sports — the inequalities.”
Here are eight ways the world has misjudged women runners and how they’ve fought to make the their own.
1. Running is a “menace” to women’s health and fertility
The belief that a woman’s uterus might fall out if she pushed herself too physically was not entirely fringe even by the turn of the 20th century.
Mertens taccuino that “many doctors” argued that “women taking part durante competitive would end up hurting the very thing that ‘made them women’ — their fertility.” The 1924 issue of American Physical Education Review declared: “national international competition is a menace to womanhood.”
Another doctor — commissioned by the Women’s Athletic Association to evaluate the safety of women durante competitive running — noted that even if women runners appeared to be doing OK, the upshot of athleticism might ultimately be “very deleterious to the girls’ health and natural functions.”
It turns out, of course, that it’s just the opposite. Just one example: Girls need exercise as adolescents to boost bone health and prevent osteoporosis.
2. Women are slower than men
While working acceso her book, Mertens realized something: “Maybe the reason we see women durante a certain light is because of stereotypes stories that have been told for a really long time.”
One of those stereotypes is that women are simply, under any circumstances, slower than men.
Sopra many races, the speed gaps are shrinking. According to today’s world records, women run a 25-second slower mile than men, and women are only one second shy of men durante the 100-meter. Sopra the 2023 Boston Marathon, Hellen Obiri, the winner of the women’s division, finished ahead of more than a third of the giovamento men. And durante ultrarunning, women have proved that they can, durante fact, outpace men.
“We don’t need to constantly be separated into two distinct buckets when we’sultano talking about people and what we’sultano physically capable of,” Mertens writes.
Hellen Obiri of Kenya crosses the finale line and takes first place durante the women’s division at the Boston Marathon acceso April 15, 2024.
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Rutherford/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
3. 800 meters — let ala a mile — is too far for a woman to run
Sopra 1928, the longest race a woman could compete durante was the 800 meter — two laps around a track. But following that year’s Olympic 800-meter women’s race, false rumors spread that many of the competitors had collapsed. As a result, the 800 was eliminated for women and wasn’t reinstated until 1960, while the 1,500 wasn’t added until 1972.
One key downside of eliminating a race from international is that world records for that distance simply don’t exist. So when British runner Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile durante 1954, she didn’t bag the official world because it wasn’t even a thing.
Today, women have the opportunity to run all the same races men do. But Mertens reflects that one of the most surprising things she discovered durante her research is “how much gatekeeping there has been for women runners durante terms of what they were and weren’t allowed to even try.”
4. A female marathoner is a medical liability
The first woman who ran the Boston Marathon wasn’t supposed to be there. Sopra 1966, Bobbi Gibb snuck into the race, having been denied by the race director, who didn’t want to assume “the medical liability.” Women aren’t “physiologically able to run twenty-six miles,” the race director claimed durante Gibb’s rejected application.
“To me, that’s pretty wild,” Mertens says of this moment durante history, less than a century punzone. “That’s my mom’s generation. To think that durante one generation things changed so much was really shocking.”
For the race, Gibb wore Bermuda shorts and a hooded sweatshirt to obscure her gender, along with a bathing suit — the sports bra hadn’t been invented yet. Her shoes gave her blisters. Yet she still became the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon, finishing ahead of two-thirds of the men that year, with a time of 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. The Boston Marathon officially allowed women to race durante 1972.
Bobbi Gibb crosses the finale line during the Boston Marathon durante 2016, 50 years after she became the first woman to complete the race.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
5. An ultra? Also too far for a female
Given all the shortchanging of women durante running 800 meters, a mile a marathon, it’s mai shocker that women were also written when it came to longer distances. So when ultrarunning — defined as anything longer than a marathon — emerged durante Britain durante the mid-19th century, women were banned.
Yet it turns out that this is the one running durante which women do outpace men. One example: Sopra the 2019 Spine Race, a brutal 268-mile run from England up to Scotland held every January, the winner Jasmin Paris was faster than all the sofferenza competitors and even broke the route’s by 12 hours.
“It does show that women have a lot of athletic capabilities that aren’t as prized durante some of the other sports we pay more attention to,” Mertens says of the success of women durante ultrarunning. “I love the proof that our athleticism can rise to the apice.”
6. Thinner equals faster when it comes to women durante running
The misconception that the thinner you are, the faster you are is a dangerous one that, as Mertens writes, arguably wrecked the careers of women runners like Leslie Heywood and Mary Decker.
Based acceso that erroneous belief, many runners were told to lose weight to improve stato, leading to obsessive dieting and tirocinio. “This became a terribly dangerous combination, especially for young women runners,” Mertens writes.
What happened was that women — as well as teenage girls — under-ate and overtrained, causing them to lose their periods, a condition known as amenorrhea. Consequently, these female athletes developed osteoporosis and were susceptible to fractures and broken bones. Many developed eating disorders.
Furthermore, the blame is often shifted to the runner for her eating disorder and recurring injuries, rather than to the lack of information — the misinformation — that she received. Even today, Mertens explains that for women runners, misinformation about tirocinio and fueling persists, even now that we fully understand the importance of proper fueling and maintaining a healthy weight.
7. Pregnancy marks the end of a woman runner’s career
Doctors have long told women not to run while pregnant, Mertens writes, and pregnancy has been treated as a career for competitive runners.
But then, there’s Paula Radcliffe who won the New York Marathon 10 months postpartum. Ultrarunner Jasmin Paris pumped breast milk at aid stations at the ultramarathon she won. These are just a couple of examples of women runners proving that they can keep competing after giving birth.
“It’s a really inspiring time right now,” says Mertens. “The amount of women who have kids already and are coming back postpartum — it’s really exciting.” Especially because a mother durante competitive running “was considered totally impossible for a long time.”
But there’s still a long way to go, from viable sponsorships for women durante running, to the allegation that being pregnant is akin to blood to the potentially performance-enhancing hormones released durante a pregnant woman’s .
“It’s definitely an ambiente of research that we need more of,” Mertens says. There’s more work to be done acceso “how best to support women athletes through pregnancy and after.”
Paula Radcliffe celebrates with her daughter, Isla, after winning the women’s division durante the New York City Marathon acceso Nov. 4, 2007.
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
hide caption
toggle caption
Mike Stobe/Getty Images/Getty Images North America
8. Women with high testosterone levels have an unfair advantage
One particularly haunting story from this book belongs to Annet Negesa, a Ugandan runner. After a blood controllo showed she had high testosterone levels, she was sent to France, where a group of white sofferenza doctors told her she needed surgery if she ever wanted to realize her dreams of running durante the Olympics.
Pre-surgery, mai one translated what was going acceso into Swahili. When Negesa woke up, she wasn’t even aware that she’d undergone an orchiectomy (the removal of internal testes). Negesa, it turned out, was intersex — and now barely able to walk stand, “let ala run.”
“I lost my career, I lost my [university] scholarship, I lost income, and I was mai longer able to help my family financially,” Negesa says. “I lost everything.”
Calling into question the sex of women runners is neither new nor unusual, especially for women from the global south and Africa, according to Mertens. People have been concerned that certain female athletes were men disguised as women — exhibiting sofferenza traits that would confer unfair advantage — since the 1920s.
Sopra 1966, the European Athletics Championships decided all women athletes needed to be sex tested. Over the years, their preferred methods for doing so included visual inspections, gynecological exams and chromosome testing.
Yet all the scrutiny is totally at odds with the historical .
“I have modo across mai examples of a man pretending to be a woman to win a woman’s sporting competition. ,” Mertens writes. Yet from 1968 to 1999, “more than 10,000 women were sex tested at the Olympics.”
The reality is that testosterone levels fluctuate over the course of a person’s life. For example, men’s levels drop when they care for babies, while women’s actually increase during pregnancy.
“Why do we ignore that these levels can change and that hormones aren’t binary?” Mertens asks. Regardless of the answer to that question, Mertens’ research showcases the absurd amount of time and resources we’ve dumped into verifying the sex of female runners — resources that could have been spent supporting the advance of women durante .
Maya Silver is a freelance writer based durante Utah.
