More Lauren Fleshman

To me the most glaring omission in the book is not one mention of PEDs. Certainly she must have encountered them or had suspicions. So much emphasis is placed on the unreasonable expectations placed on the women and the push explicitly or implicitly to engage in dangerous behaviors like starvation to get an edge. You’d think the natural extension of this might be PED use, or at least a consideration of its use. I was surprised to read such a detailed account of the difficult if not downright toxic culture of elite running and not even a single sentence about PEDs and their role in all of this. I’m not saying Lauren had anything to do with PEDs, but surely she was exposed peripherally if not directly.

runningmagazine.ca

Lauren Fleshman and Stephanie Bruce sell Picky Bars for $12 million - Canadian Running Magazine

Brittany Hambleton

The nutrition bar company has been acquired by Laird Superfood

Link:runningmagazine.ca/the-scene/lauren-fl...

She's pretty much hit the lottery now and if she does a book and it fails, no big deal. She's a millionaire and then some.

"Hitting the lottery" is when you don't do anything to deserve your success. You are insulting the decades of hard-work that people put into their athletic, academic, and business success if you call things like winning national titles, getting into (and through) a Stanford education, and building & selling a successful business "hitting the lottery."

Here in America people have to self-promote and hustle; nobody gives it to you. Men do this and women do this. But part of the sexism on this board is reflected in the fact that people hate it when Betsy Andreu, Kara Goucher, Mary Cain, or Lauren Fleshman do it but don't seem to mind when men do it.

Normally, people in America love the idea that you can get rewarded for working hard and closing the deal. ABC - Always be closing! This is true with sports competitions, prestigious college degrees, and business. And it should be as true for women as it is for men.

Male coach, "I'm going to coach you just as hard and with the same energy and enthusiasm, and I will expect as much from you as the men I coach."

Female runner- "Why am I being discriminated against for being a girl?"

No. They are the PRIVILEGED who were born into it. Fleshman has worked no harder than 99 percent of College Grads in this country. Getting into Stanford doesnt mean youre the smartest, it means you're smart but you git lucky being chosen because of...athletics perhaps?

Someone started a business and had luck on their side. She did NOT work harder than most College. Having a company being bought for millions IS hitting the lottery. How dumb are you?

The poster is correct, you're wrong.

You are surely one of the woke ones that people snicker at. Congrats 👏

Because women aren't men. You might be one of those "pro trans" people who thinks the female and male body are the same, but they aren't. You have to expect that when you coach a girl going through female puberty there will be ups and downs tied to those changes.

Yet as you said, the coach "will expect as much from you as the men I coach." That shows that you missed her whole point. The point is that you can't expect a girl to respond to a hard workout the same way as a boy depending on where she is in her development. Boys and girls are different - sexists and pro-trans-inclusion people are just being obtuse when they try to deny this.

We had a girl on our local team that got slower each year as she progressed through HS. She made State as an individual freshman year, made it with the team sophomore year, struggled all junior year, and didn't even make varsity as a senior. She hated her body and the coach had no clue how to help her. He certainly wasn't going to talk about the fact that her body was developing into a woman's body with hips and breasts. What could/should he have even said?

The boys team, on the other hand, chowed down on Burger King every day after practice, barely did half the workouts, and still were way faster (and stronger) by their senior year compared to their freshman times. It was the exact opposite for her.

I didn't know that being pro-education, pro-business, pro-expertise, and pro-hard work made a person woke, but thank you. I'll take a complement wherever I can get one.

But seriously, I see your point. You think she was just genetically gifted and thus "lucky" to be super fast, which gave her the "in" for Stanford. That is not impossible. You could be right.

Personally, I think there is still a lot of "free will" involved and choices that she had to make (about training super hard, pushing through the workouts, doing the homework, acing the tests, etc.) that meant she "earned it." But you are right, that is just my opinion.

Why the heck would you want an athlete that is declining? The whole point of the sport is winning. It doesn't matter why a runner is declining, if they can't put up the W they get the bench.

Imagine a pitcher that goes from a 0 loss freshman season to a 0 win junior season keeping his starting gif just because his body is "changing".

Boys and girls should be treated equally and that means you put up or sit it out.

If you want the best outcome from a group of female runners, treating them as if they were slower male runners is not the best way to achieve that goal. You need to understand how female bodies respond to training differently.

Read the recent Runner's World article linked to the front page. NC State and BYU both stopped mandate body composition tests and they are seeing positive results. Both teams are coached by women, and it's no accident.

Do you think those teams would be more successful if their coaches treated their runners like male runners are treated?

I will also add this. College and HS coaches should be interested in more than what their athletes could do within the 3-4 years under their coaching. They should be concerned about how their athletes would develop both as human beings after their graduation. That includes their long-term health. They are not coaching professional athletes.

The problem isn't that female runners in their preteen, teenage, college and adult years aren't willing or able to work as just hard as their male counterparts. Nor is that they can't meet the high expectations of their coaches, themselves and others.

The problem is that most male coaches and blokes generally are unaware that it's totally inappropriate, unfair and often downright harmful to approach the training and coaching of female athletes using the same exact standards, methods and expectations that are suitable for, and most effective on, male athletes.

Male coaches like the hypothetical one you quote - and uninformed males like you and so many of the blokes on LRC who get a kick out of sniping at and complaining about girls and women in sports and life generally, constantly accusing us of "victimhood" and worse - are so stuck in myopic, male-centric mindsets that they/you are ignorant of, and utterly blind to, the fact that particularly in adolescence and adulthood, female athletes are physically different to male athletes in myriad significant ways that have a huge bearing on the two sexes' athletic potential, performance and training.

Track and field and pretty much all other sports were originally created and designed exclusively for male participants for the express purpose of highlighting, testing and showing off boys' and men's prowess at the specific kinds of physical feats that human male bodies have evolved to be good at. And until pretty recently in history, girls and women were given little or no chance to participate in sports in US schools and many community settings, and we were officially banned from certain sports like US road running, FA soccer in the UK and Little League around the world.

Not surprisingly, then, the training and coaching philosophies, training routines and regimens, schedules and dietary standards that have developed and been used over time for athletes in nearly all sports including running have all been devised almost exclusively not just by men, but by men who regard male bodies as the human norm and ideal. These men long have mistakenly assumed that what's applicable to athletes with male anatomy, male physiology, male metabolism, male sex hormones, male respiratory, digestive and immune systems etc is applicable to females as well. Whether they are coaches, athletes, refs, physios, sports scientists, sports policy makers, sports journalists and commentators, fathers, or blokes bloviating on LRC, most guys in the world who know about sports, sports training and the physical capacities of athletes have obtained the bulk of their collective knowledge from looking at and focusing on males.

As a result, even today in 2023, most of the ideas of how to go about coaching, training and feeding athletes that hold sway in the male-dominated world of sports are all based on what men and boys have found is suitable for, and works best on, athletes who are male.

appreciate the earlier observations, I readily admit I haven't read the book (and don't plan to), so thanks to those who've chimed in with their notes on the book.

as far as peds, I have zero reason to suspect LF but another blinding inconsistency in her life was the fact that she, by her own admission, sought out salazar about "a breathing problem." WTF? I understand we all mature (hopefully) as we age, and LF is no different, I assume. However, we've all known AS played in the grey area long before she visited him, so I've always found that episode difficult to square with her "staunch" anti-peds stance, as it's a tough explanation of why you sought out the one coach known for being further into the grey area than any other, for a medical issue.

To the posters above bitching about luck for picky bars: yes, they did get lucky but they also promoted the hell out of them, and that's what often drives sales in this country, so I have to give them kudos for trading on LF's name and having friends promote with/for them, then eventually making a crap ton off of the sale to Laird/Gabby. They certain had many things fall into place, but they also seemed to put in a ton of time into that venture, especially in the early days, so good for them.

Because we are talking about middle and high school sports, not pro athletes. We want kids to do well in sports in the long haul not just this year. The whole point of sports is not just "winning." If a coach cares about the athletes and the community, that would be obvious.

The goal of a good coach is to make sure his athletes are at their best Senior year, not just squeeze the most out of them in the moment for a short-term win.

And if you are great coach, your athletes continue to be life-long runners who are healthy, fast, and who can grow the sport in the next generation.

Pushing girls to weigh less, train through their periods as though they don't matter, and "git 'er done" is not a recipe for greatness.

You greatly compensate for the changes in females bought about by puberty by working to increase strength to weight ratio. A large part of the reason why puberty causes females to slow down fat gain with minimal increases in strength. Males also gain weight as a result of puberty but get faster due to increased strength. Doing resistance training alongside running would allow for females to recomp some of that weight into muscle in a healthy manner and enable increased strength in relation to body size.

I wholeheartedly agree that well informed coaching can lessen some of the unique athletic issues confronted by girls as they mature. Many coaches are ignorant, and sadly many others know better and simply don’t care. They are willing to pursue short term success at the expense of being a good steward of these athletes mental and physical health long term. Some athletes pass successfully through this gauntlet to the other side. Elite or not, they eventually continue to improve and to have joy with the sport. Mostly this is Lauren’s story. Sadly, many do not. We know many of the names of the most “talented,” like Amber Trotter or Claudia Lane, but there are thousands and thousands who suffer this fate anonymously because they were not quite such phenoms at the start. These athletes still suffer, though thankfully they are spared a thread on LRC. Bad coaching certainly makes this worse and more likely, but sometimes the biology is just overwhelming. The most important criteria for coaching young women, imo, is empathy and kindness. The bottom line is that many young women irrevocably lose their ability to “run fast” because of the biological card they are dealt even if the training has been optimized for the situation. There’s a lot of heartache and loss for the athletes and family and treating these situations with care is often lacking. At worst there is a “blame the victim” attitude, and more often there is just the casual disregard and ignoring of the athlete and the circumstances. It’s hard to overstate the devastating toll this takes on the athlete, only compounding the distress that already exists because of prs never to be matched again. This kills the joy and is the final nail in the coffin that drives the athlete from the sport for good. That’s unfortunate and an outcome that everybody should work to avoid.

"expect as much from you as the men"

-show up to practice on time, every day.

-be prepared to work hard on the days that call for it.

-compete hard on race day.

If you cant do these things, you shouldnt be involved in sports. That goes for men and women (shame I had to say that.)

So you are saying that women and girls are so totally different from men that they must be treated like children, mentally they cant handle the work or the stress of competition, and their bodies are so delicate and frail that they cannot be expected to work hard in practice and race hard on race day.

You would fit in well in the 1960's. What very very old school traditional way of thinking.

Come on

This is so dumb and such an oversimplification.

First off: I personally challenge the very idea that you posit that "everyone must come and meet the standard of work MEN set" as good, hard, the way.

And "if you can't you shouldn't be involved in sport." This represents the VERY PROBLEM. So good job setting it up perfectly.

Second: its cute you boiled this down the basics, but then left out things like...female bodies go through minthlt hormone changes every single month that impact energy use and availability. This is a fact. So any coach who..like tells a female athlete at certain points, "you arent WORKING HARD ENOUGH!!" Based off their eyes alone and worse a judgment of "just come do the work," is most certainly risking being wrong, causing harm, decreasing motivation and. Looking like an idiot. Like you do. Here.

Any coach who does not evaluate both performance increases and decreases critically is not doing the very purpose of their job to get to the "Wins" and probably needs a performance improvement plan before they find another line of work because they didn't understand the assignment. Another silly response that tries to put blame on the athlete while absolving the supposed "expert."