In 2011, one of my friends appeared on a Women Talk Sports podcast on the topic of eating disorders along with a professional runner and the host, Ann Gaffigan. The audio portion of the podcast itself been lost, but some of the professional runner's impressions of the discussion, and of eating disorders among runners as a whole, remain online.
Lize Brittin was on the show mainly because she'd written a memoir about her own experiences as a top runner whose entire career was affected by bulimia and anorexia. In it, she describes the role of her coaches and other mentors—fewer in those days, and apart from her peers and idols behind the starting line, all men—in her successes and her disease in as nonjudgmental a way as anyone could, given the scope of the events she describes.
The pro runner proved to be something of a foil to the notion that eating disorders are really as much of a problem as is popularly believed. After the podcast was posted, she characterized EDs as "a subject that is shaped everyday by millions of women doing the best they can to stay fit in a food-overloaded country."
While allowing that she was aware of holding a perhaps unpopular opinion about such matters, she suggested that the "female athlete triad" (low bone mineral density, amenorrhea and negative energy balance) is, if not a nothingburger, flung around carelessly, and expressed annoyance at her own various doctors' asking about her eating habits when she was visiting for an unrelated complaint.
She opined that "Someone just needs to write a tiny little book titled 'How to adjust your weight as a female distance runner without getting an eating disorder.'” She described her frustration in dealing with eating-disordered teammates, mainly because they refused to get the message about what was healthy and what wasn't, and she found their fundamental incorrectness exhausting.
She even said that only by withdrawing emotionally from people with EDs could she foster any real empathy for their struggles.
This athlete did allow that college coaches absolutely need to take control of their teams as much in this area as in others by establishing a sound culture. But overall, she didn't exactly come off as a friend of anyone with EDs. She in effect said that those girls had chosen their path and she was grateful that she'd been able to choose a healthier one instead.
After the stories of the systemic mistreatment of some—hell, maybe most—of the runners formerly on the roster of the symbolically dissolved Nike Oregon Project started to emerge last month, it was only a matter of time before the words of those who by constitution seek high profiles started popping up in high-profile places, such as this editorial by former professional runner Lauren Fleshman.
Fleshman’s prose offers the impression of someone releasing years of pent-up frustration: A male-dominated system had ultimately led her succumb to the pressure to lose weight at age 21, while she was still in college, despite her already galactic success at Stanford. This led to skipped periods and injuries, curtailing the first half of her post-collegiate career.
Now retired, Fleshman has been thinking for years about how to Fix The System, and it needs to be rebuilt to accommodate girls, full stop. In fact, when she retired over three years ago, a NY Times profile described her responding to a 2008 setback by "pursuing interests related to the sport but not integral to performance and talking about things she worried about, like athlete pay, doping and eating disorders."
The ideas of the pro runner interviewed with Lize are, while perhaps more dismissive of a serious problem than one would expect of a longtime female professional distance runner, not altogether at odds with most people's experiences. It is no fun dealing with someone who has an eating disorder, and if that person is a sports teammate it's all the more difficult.
By the same token, Fleshman makes good points about the need for seriously reforming a system that is, in fact, both-male dominated and a precarious environment health-wise. She appears to imply that if she'd had different role models as a late collegian, she wouldn't have caved into the ambient pressure to be leaner.
As I have perhaps given away at some point, however, the pro runner who in 2010 didn't seem to think that eating disorders were that big a deal in this overfed country, and that more people needed to somehow get with it, was Lauren Fleshman.
The comments I drew on are here, on Fleshman's site. Note that while she linked to the since-deleted podcast, she more or less told her readers not to bother listening to it, an unusual PR move whatever its inspiration.
The fact that someone had what can only be called regressive views about eating disorders in the running world eight years ago doesn't disqualify her from being an advocate now. But Lauren Fleshman apparently had an undisclosed woke moment sometime in the past seven years, maybe before she started warning people that "the mortality rate from anorexia is 12 times higher than any other cause of death" for college-age women.
At some point, Fleshman decided maybe that not only were EDs a major problem, but that someone other than people with EDs were primarily to blame for EDs. Like men.
Lize's memoir stresses exactly the things Fleshman is agitating for in her editorial, and does so both based on personal experience and in, as I noted, as fair-minded a way as one could imagine. But Lize doesn't have Fleshman's platform; few do. And really, I think that Fleshman owes it to people to convey that her views have changed (again, maybe she has, but if so I didn't see it).
I stress that this isn't because she deserves to be flogged, but because other women in college are thinking the same contemptuous thoughts she did about eating disorders and who "gets" them—"gets" in both primary senses of the word. If the idea persists that team culture is solely the responsibility of the coach, and not also in part the combination of ideas and attitudes a bunch of unusually driven women bring to any team setting, then nothing will change.
This is my attempted segue into the part where I note that a hugely disproportionate fraction of the people who wind up on college cross-country teams bring either active eating disorders or a strong propensity for one to college with them. This means that even the most attentive, compassionate and determined coach as invented by AI technology is facing a monumental battle, especially but not only at the D-1 level. A lot of this is in fact the result of how women (and plenty of men) relate to male authority figures, whatever the genesis of this trait, and I'm not sure there is a way to solve the problems this creates on running teams without doing more or less what Fleshman and others suggest and getting men out of positions coaching women altogether.
The problem with this idea, even if it appears to qualify as "harm reduction," is that women are adept at mistreating and misjudging each other, too. If you have ever spoken at length with anyone who has ever been on or coached a successful college women's sports team, you will find that virtually all of the coaches have usually appeared a lot more prepared for the experience than they have felt. There is something about managing the brand of interpersonal conflicts that arise in this niche that poses a special challenge. So I would classify putting more women in coaching positions to be a necessary step, but a far-from-sufficient one.
One of the 10,000 or so former collegiate All-America selections who lives in the area told me that the idea of a group of women runners standing up in any material way to a male or female college coach who was taking teams to Nationals every year was a non-starter. Or even a coach who was plainly mediocre at best. The only two realistic fates of members of these teams, she figures, is to survive the system as it is or quit at some point along the four- or five-year journey.
This echoes my own, far more watered-down experience, which saw me run for two years at a non-scholarship, very bad D-1 school that had an abysmal coach—one whose comprehensive futility, I must stress, had no role I am aware of in my discovering the joys of bulimia (and alcohol abuse) at age 19 and quitting the team at 20. I brought that psychological powder keg with me. And I wasn't even a good high-school runner, just a bag of sizzling inner imperatives.
Distance running is never going to not select for people more or less like me, Lize, and at least a half-dozen or more people you can name before you finish this paragraph. In truth, I don't know what the implications of this are in terms of establishing more favorable coaching environments. Neither does anyone else, obviously, or at best, the people with the best ideas who are also current competitors are not inclined to put those ideas out there.
Fleshman is retired from running now, and despite being gregarious by nature, she not only didn't say what she's saying now when she was still a pro runner, but she actively pooh-poohed a great deal of it. Thus just makes me wonder if some outwardly self-assured, but quietly suffering and compliant, 25-year-old is going to come out of the woodwork 10 years from now hollering about how much change was needed in 2019.
Again, rather than simply try to hold one person to account, this is an attempt to show just how hard it is and presumably will always remain, for whatever combination of reasons, to curb the sum of the physical and mental damage that distance running does to human beings with eating disorders every year and every season.
The only thing that's plain is that eating disorders are clearly too difficult for people to confront in real time no matter who is involved—be it negligent or even conspiratorial coaches, caring counselors and friends or both—to expect a flood of reform measures. And really, it can do no good at all when longtime voices of occasional denial are not just yelling the loudest about the need for those measures, but pretending their own attitudes haven't contributed to the problem they are properly decrying.
Fleshman adds at the end of her post about the podcast: "Feel free to disagree with me people; I love to discuss more than I love to be right."
I am unconvinced of the second part of that. A lot of commenters disagreed as strongly as they dared with Fleshman's take on EDs, but she only responded to a few comments and these responses conformed to the exasperated tone she had set in the post itself. But I really hope that all of this energy being put forth by Fleshman and others really is more about improving the sport than self-promotion, because at this point it will take a lot more than post-hoc preaching to get anything done.
I do wonder what will happen in 25 years when most college women's running programs are presided over by women and EDs are still a major problem in NCAA distance running. That seems like plenty of time to produce a new scapegoat for a complex problem that is always going to be a factor in distance running and other sports and claim a certain number of lives.
Asshole coaches are only the most visible part of this problem. Unless society can weed out imperfect parenting, the realities of interpersonal competition, and all sorts of other features of everyday life, EDs are here to stay. It would be nice to see fewer people in the grip of their misery, just as it would be pleasant to see doping and injuries disappear too. But in truth, I am no more cynical about this whole scene than someone who spends an entire career at the top level pretending it's a non-issue and then telling a completely different story after the fact.