The Crisis in Girls’ Sports with Lauren Fleshman and Linda Flanagan
2023-05-25 00:58:56
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Hello, hello Malcolm Gladwell. Here we're back with another conversation from our revisionist history live series on Mastery. This took place at the 92nd Street Y in New York.
As many of you know, I'm a pretty serious runner and like most competitive runners, I was most running crazy when I was a kid. I started at 13, ran through high school, and a little in college. It was the single most fun thing I did growing up. Sports were my refuge from the craziness of adolescence.
But one of the things that has become clear in recent years is that youth sports are no longer the oasis they used to be. That something very troubling is happening higher pressure, abusive coaches, over-involved parents, and it's worse for girls. Eating disorders, distorted body images.
So I asked two people to come and talk about all this with me and figure out some answers. Lauren Fleshman and Linda Flanagan, both athletes, coaches and parents who've thought a lot about this problem. And, by the way, who happen to have the same initials. So just to be clear, this is Linda.
That's strangely, when many parents don't step in, they raise hell when you know their child is put in right field. But if there's like just a lot of nastiness and a terrible team culture, they're quiet.
Linda Flanagan, author of Take Back the Game How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids Sports and Why it Matters. And here is Lauren.
Truly, like my sport experience, always felt like it was mine.
Lauren Fleshman, world-class runner, author of Good for a Girl, A Woman Running In A Man's World. Linda and Lauren gave me exactly what I wanted. I won't say we fixed kids sports, but I do see a future worth believing in.
Take a listen.
For those of you who don't know, Laura was one of the great distance runners of her generation. She is an entrepreneur, and now she's a writer. Now she's written this wonderful book. Linda, also an accomplished runner, has done a number of things. Interesting things over the course of your career, but of relevance to this evening, you coached for many years at the high school level.
And it's really out of those experiences that you came to write your book. Take back the game. And I am interested in the two of you for a number of reasons, but I'm also a runner not nearly as accomplished as either of you. In fact, I thought that we could all go for a run this afternoon, and I asked, so I asked, so I said, let's go for a run.
And so Linda says, Well, I'm not running with Lauren, she's world-class. So you flaked. And then I said, All right, I'll go running with Lauren, and then Lauren says, No, I'm not going to run.
I'm going to go for a run early in the day and I think what happened? Correct me if I'm wrong. Lauren, you looked at my straddle, you said he's so slow, why would I waste a good running day? So I ran alone, so I said.
I should have gone in the morning with me.
So I'll get over that, though. So both of you have written books about the crisis in youth sports, we said girls sports, and I think probably we should. We're going to talk probably more about girls than boys in this, because I think both of you would agree that problems are more acute with girls.
And just to set things up, I wanted to. I'm going to just describe the manner in which this conversation is going to take place. Because we're going to play a little game. The Martian game, and the Martian game is, imagine there's a Martian who doesn't know anything about America, American culture, sports in America, nothing, just a Martian in one of those balloons floating. And all he's been given is your two books.
So he reads your two books and he reaches a series of. He has no context, he has no inhibitions, he's not worried about asking. So I am the Martian, and I'm going to ask a series of questions, unconstrained by any kind of, you know, other ideological positions of mine previous experiences. I'm just drawing what might seem like extreme conclusions from both of your books, and I want you to respond to these conclusions.
Okay, okay, all right. The Martian's first statement is, the Martian says, Huh, should we ban men from ever coaching women again?
It might not be a bad idea.
Tell me why.
Well, there are too many men coaching women for one thing women need women, and girls need female role models in leadership positions. Everyone thinks of sports as that's where you learn how to be a leader. And yet, you know, very few girls are actually coached by women, and even at the collegiate level, it's about 42%.
High school level, it's in the 20s, and in youth sports it's 25. So let's get more women in there so that young girls and teenagers can see that women can be leaders too.
Lauren, Do you have thoughts on the Martian's ban?
Well, I like these points, I agree. And running, only 17 of the coaches in running are women, which I was really surprised, even lower than the average. I would say, let's not ban them until we've given them a chance to fill the giant gap of knowledge that we all are living with. When it comes to female bodies and how they develop and how they operate, let's let them, let's give them a chance to learn.
Let's see how many of them want to, and the ones that want to and are willing to and will do the work. Let's let them stay and then let's do all the stuff that Linda's talking about.
That's very enlightened.
I was struck in reading your book, Lauren, by a big chunk of. Your book is a very powerful and insightful explanation of the difference in the physiological trajectories of young women and young men. And you make this, you were talking about your time at Stanford. The young men are a man or a boy, whatever they are between of college age is at their physical peak. They get better almost automatically every year, they're full of all the every positive hormone known to man.
Whereas the women are going through a much more complicated process. And the reason the Martian asked that question is, the Martian says. How can a man ever fully understand what a young woman is going through if he's never gone through it himself?
Well, I would say to the Martian, we can't apply that logic to the problems of the world. Or else, the problems would only be able to be solved by people who've had an identical experience. And the problems are big enough that we need everyone involved. And I don't think there's anything that mysterious about the female body that anybody couldn't learn if they wanted to. It's just what we've, yeah.
But we've been at it for years and years and years now. And, you know, just reading that, your book and that little section, it's not, you know, there's. We have an overwhelming, we have a largely male group of coaches, and yet we still have. We have a persistence of these kinds of problems. And I'm wondering whether, as the first step in solving the problem, is to replace them with people who maybe have a better chance of understanding.
Yeah, well, with women coaches, you have a higher likelihood that they've gone through something similar, but you also have plenty of female coaches perpetuating the same harm that their male coaches. You know, pass down to them and repeat the culture, and so there's the knowledge is needed by female coaches, too. I get a lot of messages of people who've read the book, women and men, who are like, Wow, I didn't know any of this stuff. I feel really bad now.
I've been coaching for 10 years, 15 years. I wish I could go back and have some different conversations with my athletes than I had. There was no understanding of why the women were making the decisions they were making, why they were breaking. Their bodies, were breaking down at higher rates than our male peers.
And I mean, we don't study female bodies enough, we don't have enough research on female bodies. So I can't really like blame coaches for not knowing these things. Plus, we sexualize most of the things that are specifically female, you know, or we make them dirty, like the menstrual cycle.
Has this reputation for being something you can't talk about without using euphemisms? Breasts are sexualized as soon as you're 12 and a half and get them. So it makes it hard to talk about our bodies, and hard to talk about our bodies, with grown-ups especially.
Linda, what did your athlete you coached for many, many years? what did your athletes get from you? As a woman? That they couldn't have gotten from a man? Or do you think there was no...?
I don't think that they got something from me that they couldn't get from a man. In fact, there's a man out here in the audience who I coached with, who was a fabulous coach and role model for me, who was very sensitive to the girls, you know?
Feelings and wishes and dreams, the more I think about it. I have to go back and tell the Martian that. We don't need to ban male coaches, but we should be educating them, along with women coaches. Who, as Lauren points out, are also guilty of a lot of the nonsense that we're reading about. I mean, you look at the Harvard Ice hockey coach. I mean, every week there's another story about some egregious behavior on the part of a professional coach, and there are oftentimes women too.
Yeah, well, what about this, though?
The second thing that I took from reading both of your books was, particularly from Lauren's. Was this notion, this idea that I talked about very briefly before, about that? You spent a lot of time on the book? That the trajectory of young men and women is different, and that many women have this kind of in their late teens, early 20s, have a kind of performance plateau, yeah, and so they observe the men getting better and better every year. Many of them hit a period of a couple of years where their times are not getting better. In some cases, they're going backwards.
And that triggers all kinds of.
How do you deal with that issue? I mean, is there a case to be made for somehow separating out the cultures of male and female, running it out at that age? So there isn't this kind of women looking at the men and thinking they should be doing the same.
I think that it's fine to have different experiences, you just need the different experiences normalized from day one. Like when the coaches are having their conversations with parents and students, that's the time to lay out. Hey, we have a cross-country team, or a track team, or a basketball team, and we are working with 13 to 18-year-olds, for example. And female bodies are going to be going through something that looks more like this. Which is like, if you just look at all the data on performance, it really doesn't matter what the sport is. By age 16 17, female gains performance gains on average are like 1 to 1.5, whereas their male counterparts are. They go like this, do-do-do-do-do, and the female athletes go like, eeeew like this.
But we haven't been telling them during that stage of life that, hey, this is temporary. This is like a blip in your long-term progression, and your prime is in your mid to late-20s and beyond. So, really, we just need to. Every coach of an adolescent female person should be telling them, Hey, this is going to be part of your normal progression. More than likely, you're going to have a plateau or even a short-term dip. I will be coaching you through that experience.
As teammates, you're going to be navigating this with your teammates. Some of you will be on this part of the curve, some of you will be on this, some of you will be on this. So, part of team culture needs to be supporting each other through that rocky road from day one and not looking at it as a bad thing.
It's just a different path. Is there going to be feelings of disappointment? Sure, and we can make space for that without pathologizing it. And that's what we've been doing is because we don't recognize that females have this performance wave instead of this performance line when they hit the plateau. There's parents who have been like, I sent my kid to a sports psychologist because I thought they just didn't care enough anymore.
Or I sent them to a dietician because I thought that their nutrition was sloppy. I'm like, that's just puberty, you just pathologized puberty.
But see the trouble, I totally agree with you. And yet I think that implies that coaches have room to have the time and that athletes are patient and that their parents are patient. And at least in my experience with high school parents, of course, many were wonderful, I loved them, always have to say that.
You said it, good job, but there's this drive to achieve and to get results right away. And if they're plateauing or getting worse, then again, like, what's the problem here?
And so it is about coaching, education, it is, and it's also there's some things we can't change, I mean sport, as we know. It was built around the male body.
So high school sports, we invest a ton of money in high school sports and college sports, and that's ages 13 to 22.
That's a great time to be a male in sport, right? And that's why they're, I'm guessing, so integrated into our education systems. It's like, a and why? Scholarships are given out based on who's the best 17 or 18 year old.
That's a better predictor for a male bodied person than a female bodied person of what your future potential is. But the scholarships, and that whole system was created long before female athletes were, like, up in there asking for their share of the scholarship pot. But now there's no getting around the fact that 17 and 18 year olds are the ones getting offered the scholarships or not. And so that adds this enormous pressure, right during development, right during your puberty experiences of change. Where you're like, OK, you're telling me to accept this temporary state of plateau. But there's a lot on the line, hundreds of thousands of dollars of scholarship and opportunity. And if I just restrict my diet, if I fight puberty, if I try to aim for this body that I've been told is the ideal performance body.
Now then I can give myself a chance to have those opportunities, but then you pay the price later.
Well, this brings us to the Martian second point, which is one that Linda raises explicitly in her book. Which when I came to that part of Europe, I was like, Amen, I'm with you on this as both as Malcolm and as the Martian.
Then is it time to pull the plug on athletic scholarships and preferences?
You know, if you're going, you're describing this kind of the level of pressure that is brought to bear on the 17 year old girl at a time in her development. When you can't make a kind of reasonable prediction about where. So this whole, we have this whole system in place. That's being driven by the enormous cost of college education, by the expectations that come with scholarships. What if we just ended them?
I'm all for it. And of course, you know, many of the kids going through it now would be like, but wait, that's not fair. I'm, you know, this is what we've been counting on. But you know, it would just if there were no admissions advantage and no athletic scholarship of any kind available to college kids, then it would.
It would completely change the way we provide sports to kids now, because there wouldn't be this race. Pardon the pun to, you know, to achieve by 13, because you might all disappear. And and also, you know, I love sports and I'm a runner, and I think they're wonderful. But it's not clear to me why a high school athlete should get get an advantage over someone who plays the oboe or who's in a choir. Like, why aren't there special dispensations for them? They aren't entitled to special scholarships or admissions advantages, or a streamlined admissions process. So I think it's it would be more fair.
I think it would also be impossible to claw it back, or at least very difficult.
I really love that part of your book, though. Because I've often thought, man, if we could just get rid of the scholarships, it would release so much pressure on athletes, especially girls. I think that the pressures would just go way down. We'd be way more likely to allow development and change to happen on its timeline. But reading your book, I was like, Oh my gosh, there's this whole other side of it, the whole big business of youth sports that's also driven entirely towards that same aim.
And as someone who has a nine year old, a five year old and I'd like them to participate in sports. I don't want to be a part of that mania. I don't want to be having to travel for hours every weekend to give my kid this the top, top performance opportunity. Yes, I want the kind of sports that you describe in your book as an ideal, and so I am for getting rid of athletic scholarships. But what had prevented me in the past was what would we replace it with?
And in your book, you also provide some really great ideas of like that. There are other models, and I think sometimes we like, lack imagination. It's really helpful to see other ways people are doing it, and I can't remember the one that you described.
Maybe you could talk about it.
Well, certainly, in Europe, they don't do youth sports like we do it at all. So you know, there's no school based sports, it's the after school, it's community based sports, so that also sets up the whole, the college level.
And when, when I was running in England, you know, there was there were no teams, it was there were teams. But it was completely alien to the way we do it here and there was no coach. It was like, student led, right? totally student led.
It was probably comparable to intramurals here, and it was very serious and organic. And I don't see why that's not, you know, replicable here. And I think at the college level, you know, another possible suggestion I had, which will never happen, is, Well, how about if we just abolished college sports? As if, you know, but but I say that, but why not club and intramural?
I mean, it's not saying kids can't play sports.
Why not abolish? You're talking about intercollegiate sports like varsity sports.
Yeah, yeah, well, what's ironic about this is, in research for my book, What Women had in sports was club and intramural before Title IX. And. But there was a huge discrepancy. Obviously there was no scholarships for us, but there were for men in the NCAA.
There was more media, all these things that come with that infrastructure for men's sports. We wanted it too, right when maybe all along we wanted equality, but maybe they should have followed our lead.
Maybe we were on to something well, when Title IX happened. There was a discussion for the first couple of years about will we fold into the existing men's programs, or will we run our own show here? Like we've guaranteed we have that, the schools need to provide the opportunities, but we don't necessarily have to run it. Exactly like the NCAA, and it took a little bit before the decision was made to join the NCAA. And, and like, essentially one of the arguments my book is that. We should be recreating sports with female bodies at the center so that they can have an equal chance to thrive in the sports system.
And that we kind of need to take it back and be able to do that. Because giving people the same thing, the exact same way isn't going to get you the same result.
Right?
So how can we level the proverbial playing field in youth sports? That's after the break.
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I mean, one of the things that's along these lines that I've often wondered about is whether there's an inherent contradiction between designing sports programs for the 50th percentile and designing them for the 95th percentile. And that maybe those two things are in some sense incompatible. So if we do away with high pressure intercollegiate sports and scholarships and things, maybe we produce fewer, maybe we don't, but maybe there's a chance. We produce fewer world class runners, as she's running as an example, but maybe we also produce way more people who are happy and contented and run their whole lives. And maybe we get fewer 225 marathoners and more 250 marathoners. I mean, I would be happy with that, but there are some people in the elite sports community who would consider that a tragedy.
Well, so few kids, not enough kids, participate in sports now, and I think if we can move the model to try to get more participation. I mean, there was just an article in the paper yesterday about the income gap between the wealthy. Families earning over $100,000, 70 of those kids play sports, and in families earning $25,000 and less, 31 play sports. So I think this is part of the same conversation that the way we have developed the youth sports system, with its high cost and just relentlessness, has pushed more kids out so that there are fewer kids gaining any advantages.
Cross country is one of the ones that I think has the least access problems, considering that they generally don't have cuts. And you don't have to have been in the youth sports high performance pipeline to join a team, and often you benefit if you haven't. I mean, when I started as a ninth grader running, there had been plenty of people in my town who had been running a long time.
And you were not at a disadvantage.
I was not at all at a disadvantage, if anything, I felt like I was at an advantage. That's how it was framed to me, because you were fresh, yeah, and you have plenty of years ahead.
It's just like recognizing this timeline. But with my kid interested in soccer, I think I spent $500 for a spring soccer experience for the kid. He's not even leaving town, so I don't really understand. He's had one practice, he's nine. I don't understand how people are affording this and continuing to do this.
If I can just point out that in my town, we have a junior pre-academy for U4s, which is three-year-olds.
Are you serious? Wait, what?
Well, it's a junior pre-academy, because then there's also the pre-academy, which is for U5s and U6S.
So this is like pre-K.
Yes, so by the time there's the junior pre-academy, pre-academy, then there's academy and futures, and then there's travel. They've been playing for six years and they're nine years old. And at each one, it's $500 or more, which isn't the problem we were talking about with the money. And I don't know how you do that.
So the biggest obstacle? —and you mentioned this, Linda, and I would like you to be more blunt about this because you're being too. —the biggest obstacle to the kind of de-escalation of youth sports is the parents.
Oh yeah.
And I'm reminded, you know, anyone who has to deal with parents—my brother was an elementary school principal. He's now retired, so I can now say this about him. And he loved his job and loved the kids, just the parents that were. And he—you know, 50, I think of his anxiety came from parents, not from kids. He was prepared for the kids.
He wasn't prepared, and he also had a—this is very tangential. —had this hilarious riff. About how the teachers that the parents think are the best teachers are always the worst teachers. That's funny. Not only are they a pain in the ass, they don't know who the good teachers are. It's like, they're sort of—but I want to—so, Martian says. Why don't we ban parents from participation?
Or you could—we give them one—they can go to one meeting, one event, even that's it. They've got to pick one and then they're done.
Okay, well, here's—a good model is actually the way boarding schools do this. Because they—parents don't go to those because—and those sports programs, from what I understand, do pretty well. And the kids—it's pretty healthy between the—with the coaches and the players, because the parents aren't, you know, standing at the chain link fence, observing.
But, you know, in the absence of that, I think definitely restricting the parents is a good idea. And again, I would like to say I had a lot of wonderful parents, but their handful were not great.
Well, the stuff that you were talking about in your book, about how as parents, we get sucked into our—like our achievement as parents is shown in our kids accomplishments. Yeah, and that that's a relatively new phenomenon generationally. Yeah. And my parents—my high school coach just retired after 30 years, and at his retirement party, he—again, he tells me this all the time.
He's like, Your parents were my favorite parents of all the parents in 30 years. Because they showed up to, like the first meeting, they came to like, three to five events.
Perfect.
They never once screamed, you know, yes, and they never told him how to do his job. They showed up enough, like you say in your book, to, like, get to know the person who's spending crazy amounts of time with your kid, yeah.
That's important, get to know them a little bit and then get out of the way. Yeah, and truly, like my sport experience, always felt like it was mine.
Mm-hmm, and that agency, that autonomy, kind of cleaved me to the sport in a way that I think got me through the ups and downs a lot better. Mm-hmm. And like they—I don't know, I just—.I'm like,—I was so grateful for my parental experience.
Mm-hmm. And then wanting to—your book was very affirming in, like, Oh, okay, they were actually doing a good job, so maybe I should try to do it like that.
Well, I mean, look how you—look how you turned out as a runner. I mean, you're this fantastic runner. And obviously, you know they were doing something right by just stepping back.
My dad came to in my entire running career in high school, a one event, and he immediately volunteered to help with the long jump. So he was raking the pit. And as I was—I will say in modesty that I won—this was the Interior Championships—I won that day. And as I'm rounding the final bend on my way to victory, I look into the infield and I see my dad.
He's raking and then he raises the rake and he goes, Go, Malcolm rakes again. That was the extent of his involvement.
And I love that.
But, to your point, the thing about them not being involved is that? It allows you to also frame your successes and failures the way you want to frame them. Because the parental frame is very different. Mm-hmm, they're much more—they're far more sensitive, I think, in some ways, to setbacks. They don't understand the context in which you're operating, the social network that you're competing in.
You know, what has really struck me, both as a coach and since when? I've talked to a lot of parents is just how anxious they are. It's all this anxiety about how their kids are going to turn out, which I get, you know, that's what happens when you're a parent. But somehow it's played out in sports, it's also played out in school, but because sports are so visible. I think, you know, your value as a parent is so easily measured by how well your child does.
And, you know, I just—I've been overwhelmingly impressed by how anxious parents are about it. And that's why they're freaking out. And, you know, complaining and shrieking. And, you know, trying to get you fired. Because, you know, you're not doing enough for your child to get that child to the next level.
Dealing with parents. How much of an obstacle is that for people, for coaches continuing to coach, deciding to enter coaching, is that constraining our supply?
Well, I have an important stat here to share as we were discussing. This is accurate, too. Fifty-eight percent of coaches surveyed about five years ago—and I'm sure it's gotten worse—said they've thought about quitting because of parents.
Two-thirds of coaches in a more recent survey said parents are always criticizing their child. They're criticizing their officials. I mean, coaches are really down on parents right now. And interestingly enough, in this Aspen Institute survey, the parents were like, we love our coaches, so there's kind of this weird disconnect there.
But coaches are really down on parents and this is unfair. And I think so many parents are trying to do the right thing. And don't want to be that parent. I've heard that so many times, I don't want to be that parent.
But can you do more mild repeats?
But I would like to say, though, that there is a time when they should interject, when they should be not complaining. But talking to the coach or talking to the athletic director. And that's when there's some funny business going on and the kids. The higher the level of athlete the child is, the more elite, the more likely they are to be emotionally abused and physically abused. And I think that's strangely. When many parents don't step in, they raise hell when the child is put in right field.
But if there's just a lot of nastiness and a terrible team culture, they're quiet as long as the team is doing well.
It's intimidating, I imagine, because you're dealing with an expert. We tend to assume that they have a method that's vetted, or they wouldn't have gotten to where they are.
Well, and if they're successful in particular? But meanwhile, there's a lot of tolerance of just terrible things that we shouldn't be tolerating just because the coach has a great reputation.
Yeah, that's true.
Lauren, You talk quite movingly and honestly about your own father in your book, some of the best parts of the book. And in the beginning of the book, I thought your father came across as a much less sympathetic figure than he does by the end. And I'm wondering, How do you judge you're the elite runner here?
How do you judge your own parents? Do you think your father's role in your life helped you as a runner, was neutral or hurt you as a runner?
I think that overall he was a really positive force. He was an alcoholic for people who haven't read the book, and he worked really long hours as a prop maker. And when he got home, there was about a 90-minute window where I could catch him sober before he would have too many drinks. Where I didn't know what kind of dad I was going to get. And so I developed this habit of trying to really get his attention through excellence during those 90 minutes, because he really loved excellence, excellence in everything.
Music, sports, culture. It lit him up to see people at their peak doing something incredible. So I wanted to have his light on me in that way. So from that perspective, I can't even really blame him for that. That's just one of those childhood things where a dynamic emerges.
The alcoholism was not ideal. Definitely would have preferred that not to be there, but then gosh. Throughout my career he was, so he just was a constant positive....
I always knew I'd be loved, no matter what the result was when I came home. So even though I desperately wanted to please him and be excellent for him, he never came down on me when I failed. So from that perspective, I would like to be that kind of parent for my kids.
Wait, the Martian has another question.
Yes, Martian.
This is the Martian's most.
Trivial, frivolous, frivolous suggestion, although maybe not. The Martian wonders why, given all of the body issues that afflict girls in sports, why female runners wear bun huggers and crop tops?
Well, it's a very easy question to answer for the Martian. It's because our culture feels that female bodies are there to be viewed, objectified, commented on. And in order to do that, they need to be wearing less fabric and tighter-fitting fabric, and that is how female athletes got their start. Post-title IX was a movement to make, really. This is true to make up for the fact that people would need to be watching inferior performances, and so they needed to be a visual spectacle.
And that's where the uniform differences came from, and gender-specific clothing in sport, which, of course, women will say they wanted. They didn't want to be wearing a men's extra-large hoodie necessarily all the time, they wanted things that fit and performed, but it took this aesthetic angle.
That was, yeah, so that's why.
Because I was looking.
I read your book and then was looking at pictures of. I think it was some cross-country team, I forgot which women's cross-country team.
And all of a sudden, I was aware of the fact that here were five young women, all of whom had six-packs. All of whom had not a stitch of fat on them, all of whom looked sort of shiny and healthy. And I was like, Jesus, that's a high bar for somebody who is not an elite division. I runner. If I was an 11 12-year-old girl thinking about running in high school and I go online and I see that picture, that's what I'm. Can we at least just wear a t-shirt and a pair of baggy shorts and just make it just that little bit easier? On that 11-year-old who wants to join in?
Yeah, well, the thing is that probably only.
Well, I don't think a six-pack is necessary for high performance at all. And there is a fixation with looking the part more than being the part, and the uniform creates that dynamic. I mean, it played a huge part in my life throughout my whole career. It was like, Okay, my workouts are good, but what do I look like in my uniform?
I don't look race-ready, so I'm not race-ready, or the scale doesn't say I'm race-ready, so I'm not race-ready. Whereas those are not the most important indicators, not even close. And we have these concepts of race weight that are created and perpetuated by men primarily, who have way less monthly fluctuation hormonally, and they are being applied to female athletes. As if we can somehow have a magic number on a scale that if we can stay this number, we will perform optimally based on physics formulas.
But that's not how our bodies work. And then it creates this very narrow band that you have to try to exist in and achieve in order to be viewed as elite. And I watched it happen on my teams, where women who didn't look like that were shamed, made to feel like they weren't committed enough. Just because they didn't have the six-pack, it didn't really matter how fast they were running.
That's your college team, Yeah, because in our town, the high school girls wear those uniforms. Yeah, I just think that's terrible.
I just think that there's not a performance advantage. No, or the men and boys would do it. Yeah, so it's just....
Linda at the school you coached at, so you were coaching girls cross-country, did they wear.. .?
Oh, no, there's no way I would have let them.
Oh, you put your foot down.
One of my favorite images of Des Linden when she won the Boston Marathon. She's wearing those baggy shorts. For some reason, the whole thing is so fantastic and badass. I just realized it's much more powerful emotionally to watch her because she's not pretending to be or wearing that uniform, she's just sort of being her....
Yeah, she's just wearing the thing she wants to wear. Wasn't she also wearing basically a parachute of a running jacket? I feel like she was wearing a jacket when she won the marathon. I was like, wow.
Yeah.
There was a time for those of you who don't. Des Linden is a very, very, very, very good American marathoner who won. There was a year that the Boston Marathon took place in a gale. And the only way you could win, I mean, it was so nuts. The only way you could win is if you were the single toughest, most badass runner. And Des Linden just sailed through.
I lapped the last three miles of that. Watching her on TV, I was like I could not believe how emotional it was.
She broke an incredibly long drought in the event for American winner.
To win it.
Yeah, and her book's coming out in like a week, I think.
That's right, we should really do it again with DES.
Yeah, definitely.
Maybe she'll go running with me, unlike the two of you.
When we return, we don't find me a running partner. But we do settle on a grand solution to fix youth sports once and for all.
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Oh, the Martian wonders, So here's the It's really me, not the Martian on this one, you know? I ran competitively in high school and stopped for 35 years and started again, and I stopped because although I was very successful as a runner, the pressure....
I was 13 and 14 and 15 and I found the pressure of racing, it grew unbearable and I just couldn't do it anymore. And I've often. And I lost track of how much joy I found in running and got consumed by the fact that the only measure of me as a runner was whether I could win a race. And I lost that on 35 years of pleasure as a result of this.
Thank you, Ben.
And now I'm wondering.
Should we?
Since we're banning stuff, lots of stuff, should we be banning kind of serious competition? Until I don't know 15 or 16 or something? Should we push out the is there any reason why 13-year-olds should be competing at the national level?
No, in my view. Well, you know, I was at the Millrose Games about six weeks ago and noticed that. They had a race for the fastest 8-year-olds in the world and they had these tiny children lined up and they, you know, from different countries. I don't know where they came from, but they all ran like the same time, like, ridiculously fast.
And this is one, you know, we were talking about before, you mentioned various models for doing things we don't need to do. The national championships at age 13 and 12, maybe in a lot of sports around this country, there are these ridiculous championships of like little children, and there's just no reason for that.
And the country that doesn't do this is Norway, and they have incredibly robust participation. And then, like, great success with their athletes after. So I would tell the Martian, let's forget the championships at least before 15, say.
I did this recently and I can't remember whether it was 15-year-olds or 16-year-olds. Someone made a list of the top English 16-year-old male milers 1,500-meter runners over the last 30-some-odd years. And the question raised was how many of them went on to be world-class adult milers? And the answer was such a small number. That it was like, you're like, wait, what? So if we're doing sports at that age?
Because we're trying to identify people who will be talented as adult athletes. It's just about the worst predictor imaginable.
Yeah, it's not working. So I was just thinking in this story. Like, the reason why we have the national championships is for the adults, exactly, and for the sponsors and the people who want to make money. Hosting it and getting the TV rights and all that stuff. It's like, show me the 8-year-old who's like, you know, I want to race the best 8-year-olds in the world.
Mom, can you look that up? Does that exist?
Right?
Hold on, let's go to some questions.
For Linda, how do you, as a coach, solve the problem that you're more likely to favor the gifted ones than the not-so-gifted ones? Is that a problem?
Well, I don't know exactly. I mean, I think you have to be aware of the fact that you may have favorites. I would say it's more about favoritism, because sometimes the best one is not your favorite.
So I think it just takes awareness on the part of the coach to recognize that it's not building the team to focus solely on the best girls.
Yeah, I mean, it's hard. Lauren, If I was your high school coach, I would be famous, right?
High school coach.
I mean, my point is that there's a natural kind of. The success of the athlete invariably reflects back on the coach in ways that is not always sometimes fair, but not always fair.
The story didn't make the book, and I'm still a little bit upset about it. No, I'm just kidding. But my high school coach, by the time my senior year came around, he was getting really swept up in the accolades and how it reflected on him. And there was some indoor meet that I really, we'd never focused on from Southern California. Like, indoor track is not really a thing, but there is this one place that you can do it with a wooden track.
And so we would go and sort of have a relay every year. There. He was like, No, you're going to run the invitational mile and the invitational two-mile. These used to be prestigious races 25 years ago. I want to coach someone who wins these races.
And so we were training over Christmas break for the first time ever. Like doing these hard workouts in a time of year when normally we're just going on fun runs. I was not enjoying myself, I was feeling tired from the cross-country season. And when we got there, I ran the first race, did terribly, and I was like, I don't want to do the second race.
And he's like, No, you need to do the second race. This is a big opportunity. He was like pushing me to do it, and I was like, coach, I'm not your racehorse. And he loves telling that story to people.
He'll start bust out laughing. He's like, Can you believe that? Can you believe? She said that to me, but then he apologized in the car.
Later, he actually said, I was getting swept up, I was making out me, I wanted that and you never wanted it.
And I just wasn't listening to you when you were trying to tell me, so it's real. It's a rare pressure, man.
That's a rare coach.
So we had a whole series of things we wanted to ban.
Oh, yes.
So we wanted to ban bun huggers and crop tops.
Men, I think, were on there. What's that? men were on there, I think.
Parents, we're banning parents, we're banning competition before 15 15, I think, is a reasonable....
Championship competitions are okay, just not championship.
My running career was over effectively at 15.
So you've just erased me from. I have nothing. The amount of mileage I've gotten over the years over my running exploits at the age of 14 is considerable. It's now gone.
Anyways, I'm fine, I'll take it on the team.
What's your favorite ban of all the bans? If you could only do one of those, we could ban the parent. The championships, the bun huggers and the college scholarships. I know, my favorite ban.
College scholarships is my favorite ban.
Mine, too.
I think it would downstream solve a lot of the other problems, it would basically neutralize parents, most of them.
Just that expression is so fantastic. Neutralize parents Three parents up on stage talking about the virtues of neutralizing people in our position.
Yeah, and then there'd be less motivation to host the eight-year-old world championships.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, here's a good question. Does a change in women's girl sports need to start at the grassroots level, or are we talking something that has to happen top-down? Can we have a revolution that can change this, or do we need someone else you talk about? You want a czar, you want Michelle Obama to step in?
Yeah, yeah, that would be nice.
People have so many czar jobs for her.
Yeah, I know.
Does Michelle know who doesn't want Michelle in charge? Basically every intractable problem America has, we think, well, if only Michelle.
I think it has to be both. I know that's a bit of a cop-out, but okay, let's start with the top, though. If we ban the scholarships, that is going to have this trickle-down effect and it's going to permeate all the way down. That addresses the larger issues with youth sports more than the ones specific to girl problems. But I think it would transform the whole game.
And then a similar high-level thing, I think, would be mandatory coaching education for anyone working with female-bodied athletes. I can't think of a single reason why we wouldn't do that with the giant gap in knowledge we have. And then everyone, of course, should buy our books. Because that will be the grassroots thing that will create our own me too, moment where people just, I'm not standing for it.
We need that on the grassroots thing, the thing, and both of you would have way more knowledge about this than me. But am I being overly optimistic if I say that the change is going to happen? When the girls themselves stand up and just say, this is nuts, it's like, if you're the coach of that team and you observe that there are.
Someone's disappeared and no one's really talking about why, someone's on her third or fourth unexplainable stress fracture, someone's bulimic. And then the person who wins the race from the other team is so scarily thin that you're worried about her.
Yeah, well, you can normalize anything.
I was just going to say, yeah.
In a culture, right? But I don't think that it's fair to put it on the girls. I really think parents, you know, parents don't have enough to do. If they want to get involved, this is how you should get involved. Which is like, yeah, don't stand for it.
Can you talk about that, about stepping in, not being afraid to be the parent that says, No, I'm not going to do the extra thing.
Yeah, well, I think it's funny. In my book, I was trying to kind of both understand where parents are coming from and also offer a critique. And I think that it is important that parents recognize they have agency, that they don't have to go. Along. With everything that extra strength and conditioning training or weight workout, that might be helpful, the supplemental training. Like the soccer club in my town that offers six-year-olds that they can say no to that, it's okay to say no to that.
And from just the other day, when I dropped my kid off at the $500 spring soccer experience.
At practice, I'm very annoyed.
Wait until you hear this part. I was like, See you Jude. And then one of the parents that I know is a parent of another kid in the class, and she's like, You're not staying. I was like, God, so it makes it tough, we're giving each other pressure.
You weren't staying at a practice.
Yeah, I wasn't going to stay and watch the practice.
Oh my god.
This is what I have to look forward to. Wait, someone is waving frantically at me from offstage. So we've got to end soon. But I wanted to, for all the runners out there, I wanted to toss them a bone. And someone asked this question of you, Lauren, Since you're our running star, it's so rare that we get to hang out with real stars.
It is, it's fun.
But I'm still bitter about not getting to go running with you because you know what, I'll tell you why. I was looking forward to it.
It's not too late.
What are you doing tomorrow morning?
This is the thing those of us who are just kind of everyday runners. When we run with people who are at your level, you guys float and we're running and you look over and you're just going.
And it's like magic.
It's like watching a magician do a trick and you're like, Oh my god, you're not breathing.
You're not touching the ground and you're like, How is this happening?
That sounds like you're an intellectually curious person. Most people I'm like, Do you want to run with me? They're like, Oh no, no, no, I would never do that. I'm like, I promise I'll run the pace you want to run.
And they're just like, No, definitely not.
Well, the question, this is really for the two of you, and then we really do have to stop. What did you guys like the most about marathon training? Linda, you start and then we'll let Lauren finish.
Boy, it's a thousand years ago that I ran 249.
If I had run 249, I would have a t-shirt that said 249 on it.
So, like, blow your own horn here, yeah, and in super shoes, that'd be like a 230..
Right, Oh, you're right.
You know, I had a great group to train with and the training is the fun part.
Not always, but it's the camaraderie that I got in the marathon training and you're out there a long time, so the training runs were kind of fun to do, too. You know when they weren't miserable?
I didn't have a group, but I did get to have my professional coach, Mark Roland at Oregon Track Club Elite. I had always had him in a group setting and I was the only one doing a marathon, and that's normally the time of year I did. New York when track and field athletes are taking a break. And so I had him to myself and he would ride his bike alongside me. And we got to have all these really nice chats and I just loved that was the last year we worked together.
So to have that, I have a lot of fond memories from that.
Yeah, I think that's a lovely way to end because it's a reminder. We've been talking about what's wrong with running. And the thing that I always try and tell young people when I try to get them to become runners, is that this thing? The camaraderie stuff is something that is just magical. Like going on a long run with a group of people who you are friends with or close to and you've worked out with before. There's something there that you'll never find anywhere else, it's just a....
Yeah, and I think that that love, that's what drove our books. It's like when you know that you have something worth fighting for and protecting. And we really just want to remove a lot of the garbage that's getting in the way of that.
Yeah, well, thank you so much to the two of you. Thanks and thank you to all of you. And go buy your books and get them sung.
This episode of Revisionist history was produced by Lehman Gistu, with Kiara Powell, Ben Nadaf-Hafri and Jacob Smith. Fact-checking by Kishel Williams and Tali Emlin. Our showrunner is Peter Clowney. Original scoring by Louise Guerra, mastering by Sarah Bruguier.
And engineering by Nina Lawrence. Special thanks to the 92nd Street Y crew and my panel of potential running partners, Lauren Fleshman and Linda Flanagan. I'm Malcolm Glaubo.
When I woke up, very confused, he said, You almost died last night. In fact, no one can believe you were alive.
Change is very scary.
As humans, we just hate uncertainty.
My name is Chris Irwin. I'm a Seal veteran and the communications director for the Navy Seal Foundation. Now, on our new podcast, I'm speaking with renowned scientists, world-class practitioners, best-selling authors, elite athletes and others who help shape our way of thinking and what we do. You have to start somewhere.
We just sensed that it was out there.
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