More Lauren Fleshman

We also hope you learn to read soon.

I agree. As a woman she shouldn't have anything to do with training men, according to her own statements.

Since when does being "a sports sociologist" endow someone with expertise about how female athletes and females in general are impacted by the ovulation-menstruation cycle that girls and women go through every 28 days on average between the age of menarche and menopause?

AFAICT, most sports sociologists particularly today don't live in the material world of flesh and blood bodies. Since the 1990s, many sociologists who focus on sports have been arguing for the end to sex separation in sports because they claim that human sex is a spectrum rather than a binary, that it's nearly impossible to tell the sex of human beings with any degree of accuracy, and thus it's unfair and unreasonable to continue to have separate categories for males and females.

To wit, Roslyn Kerr, a Senior Lecturer in Sociology of Sport at Lincoln University in New Zealand, who says that in sport, it would

...make sense to remove the label of male or female and replace it with categories based on the ability of bodies to move in that particular sport. This is a confronting notion, as we are not used to thinking about sex and gender as based on particular traits.

In sport, movement is based on physical ability, which is not necessarily linked to sex. In each sport, it would be possible to identify the characteristics which make up a successful athletes and create categories based on those rather than on sex.

For example, for a 100m sprinter, the ideal athlete would perhaps be made up of muscle mass and fast-twitch fibres. Therefore, rather than classifying by sex, sprinters could be classified by their level of muscle mass and fast-twitch fibres.

In another example, in sports such as high jump, volleyball and basketball, athletes could be classified according to muscle mass and height.

Finally, in an endurance sport, athletes could be classified according to muscle mass and lung capacity.

theconversation.com

Why it might be time to eradicate sex segregation in sports

Roslyn Kerr

One way to get beyond gender barriers in sport would be to scrap sex segregation and replace it with a system similar to that of Paralympic disciplines.

Link:theconversation.com/why-it-might-be-ti...

Like many sports sociologists nowadays, Kerr conveniently overlooks the fact that if you divide up adult and adolescent athletes into two groups based on their amount of muscle mass, fast-twitch fibers, height and lung capacity, you'll end up with mostly males on one side and mostly females on the other side, with perhaps a few unusual outliers here and there sprinkled in with the opposite sex.

Seems more like she is apologizing for the fact that trans women might be offended by the aknowledgement that biological women have periods that trans women will obviously never have. Just dumb.

And she still says she wants trans included in womens events "to exclude trans athletes, which is not something I want". Obviously she has some kind of cognitive dissonance when she makes such a big deal about how amenorrhea kept her out of the Olympics but still wants trans athletes included. But what does she care about the future generations she already has her stanford degree, all-american awards and national team kits. Her support for cisgender females only goes as far as participation medals, not getting the opportunities she got.

Is that sarcasm?? If so well done. If not, you may want to consider this is the WSJ.

Ok, just finished the book last night. If your interested about a perspective about life in this sport, it’s definitely worth reading. There’s nothing in it that’s shocking or new, but she synthesizes a lot of important issues very well. The sport has many of the same faults as society in general. There’s plenty of misogyny and some racism, and corporate greed, but there’s a lot of good. You get a tour of her career and get to relive a lot of well known moments and races and meet many of the stars of the sport. There are great wins, bitter defeats, lots of injuries at the wrong time, etc. There are some memorable vignettes, and not all of them reflect well on Lauren. She’s pretty self effacing. There’s a great convo she recalls between her and John Drummond at the world championships. Of course, lots of moments with her training, rooming, racing with the likes of Kara or Shalane or Sara Bei Hall. Good stuff.

There are a few take home messages.

1) The sport is really hard on the athletes, and the farther you progress, the harder it becomes. Athletes are at the absolute bottom of the food chain when it comes to the business of professional running. They are treated like a cheap commodity, easily disposed of and replaced.

2) The plight of women in the sport is particularly fraught because there is a constant tension between being a healthy woman and being a successful athlete. Many woman end up being damaged, kicked to the curb and forgotten. Others barely survive. A few thrive through a combination of luck and being able the thread the needle. Lauren was luckier and more successful than most, but still she suffered. There’s also the sexualization of the woman athletes.

3) There are some gross people in the sport and lots of exploitation, but there are many good people and lots of neutral ones. I’m sure nothing different than life in general. Some gross ones are in positions of power and that sucks.

4) Nike is not so much an evil empire, but impersonal behemoth out to max it’s $. Nothing surprising or any different than any other giant corp.

5) The book has many poignant moments, especially about her relationship with her alcoholic father.

6) There’s not one word about trans athletes, nor PEDs. LRC is mentioned twice. You can tell she’s NOT a fan.

Overall, a god read.

Is there anything about her relationship with Vin Lanana?

Yes, many pages about her and Vin. Overall, it’s seems she views Vin positively and she acknowledges the good he did for her. He comes across as a man of a certain generation, not really willing or able or possessing the tools to understand and mitigate the unique challenges of the woman he coaches, but certainly a more benign force in the sport than many others.

Agree 100%. I did actually read the book. It’s her personal story and a bit about the women in the sport she knows well, like her Stanford teammates. Nowhere in the book does she come across as being a sports physiologist. She has the expertise of a smart, well informed elite athlete who has taken an understandable interest in these issues and most importantly has lived the life of an elite female distance runner. This is not a boring scientific treatise, it’s a good memoir.

hesitant to chime in as I'm not the biggest LF fan, and have difficulties getting past some significant inconsistencies in her stances - that said, I have to point out how hard to swallow her seeming refusal to be harsh on Vin is. Vin is a grade-A jackass, examples of which I've seen (and experienced) with my own eyes/ears, on multiple occasions (only once to myself, several times to others).

Unless you were his fair haired boy (or girl), you didn't mean jack squat to vin and it took very little time for me to see that if you didn't provide a means of furthering vin's career, he would invest nothing in you, whatsoever. I've even seen him go out of his way to threaten to make life difficult for an athlete. I'm not the only one, and I'm 100% positive that LF (and dozens of others) have seen this behavior. In light of that, it's next to impossible to swallow her dancing around being critical of vin, since he treated her so well, when she was able to see him treat others so poorly (I can think of at least two of her stanford teammates as direct examples of this).

If the boys were eating healthy and the girls were eating poorly and disordered it points to the girls self-selecting bad reading patterns. If it were the program or culture you'd see both genders eating poorly.

I'm a little ripped off women blaming coaches or peer pressure for diapers eating. You aren't a kid in college, you are an adult capable of going to eat. Self police your own eating. An adult is in charge of their own health and even if a coach is giving you bad advice you have the power to ignore them.

Wow, that autocorrect sucked.

I'm a little ticked off that women keep blaming coaches or culture or peer pressure. College women are adult women capable of going to war and should be able to advocate for themselves.

If they are too dumb to realize sacrificing your health, which matters, for running fast, which does not matter, it's their own fault. The boys mostly have that figured out it seems.

There is a fair amount of research and evidence that disordered eating patterns affect men, and in some cases in as high of numbers, indicating it IS a systems problem.

The research also very clearly shows that the way women are identified and treated is different than men: leading to an idea/belief this is a "womans" problem

Eating disorders are a human problem, and some of your assertions are incorrect

Speaking of LF, what's up with her narcissists in arms Kara and Pappas?

I used to like Lauren Fleshman but all the far-left victimhood bs is a real turnoff.

That’s really interesting. I’m just reporting how he’s portrayed in the book. She definitely goes easy on him. He’s no hero, but he’s not made out to be a villain either. This book is really not a “tell all” for sure. My sense is that she’s trying to tell her story without throwing too many named individuals under the bus. She gets in the requisite punches on AlSal, but most people are treated gingerly. Rather than a lot of malign characters, you get the picture of a malign system where few if any were willing to stand up and advocate for positive change, even if they are ok as individuals. It’s easier to go along and profit in one way or another. Vin come across that way in the book and so do many others. A brief mention of Whetmore during a recruiting trip and the behavior of the women on the team seems like it was lifted right from today’s headlines. Makes you wonder when that section was written….