Category: Gender equality

Women, we don’t have to look good while running.

All my joy in running comes from the world outside my body. The sun on my back; the dirt under my feet; leaves brushing by my legs. Traffic lights changing to green in the twilight. A glimpse of swifts overhead. The muffled thump of footsteps in the snow.

Joy comes from how my body reacts. The thrill of clearing a big puddle at the last minute. The gradual unclenching of my shoulders as I’m warming up. The moment when I can’t tell raindrops from sweat any more and give in to being soaked. As gravity takes over on a long downhill and my legs freewheel like they belong to someone else. The triumph of getting control of my breathing and knowing that I’m strong enough to start running again.

I run with my body, but experience it with my mind. When I’m running I can see so much, experience so much, and it is a liberation. My body and my senses are taken up with the act of running. I am freed from myself.

It’s strange that this feeling of freedom is rarely reflected in the images we share of running, and that the opposite is true. We seem confined to our bodies. We share photos of ourselves, staged or taken many times, with filters and flattering lighting. We cut out the backgrounds, we wipe away the sweat and salt from our skin. Sometimes, photos of people running do convey the joy or pain that we’re feeling, or record what we’ve achieved, but mostly they’re just poses, faces and clothes.

I don’t care how runners look. I want to know where they’ve been, what they’ve seen, and what they’ve done. When I see a sweaty, salty selfie it makes me smile, and I love a good race pic as much as the next runner, but I worry that with every image I share of myself I might be erasing a tiny bit of what running really means to me. What if all our running selfies are creating a Perfect Beauty Standards Running Monster that makes other women and girls think running is not for them?

It’s not how we look while running that matters, it’s how we feel. Our appearance to others is fleeting, passing in the blink of an eye. For me, it’s not what running is about. I want to see and understand what running means to other people, not what it makes them look like. More reflections. Fewer mirror selfies.

The sharp end

This Saturday, at parkrun, shifting from foot to foot about three rows from the front, checking out the Helpston Harriers vests ahead, a fellow runner said to his friend, “Woah, we really are at the sharp end!”

I was standing there too. A quick blast on the horn, a broken chord of garmin beeps, and we were running. Sprinting kids, grizzled guys gurning by the first turn, sharp elbowed men cursing the plodders in search of a pb. And me, failing not to go out too fast, again.

There are not many women at the sharp end. I knew a couple were ahead of me but I couldn’t spot them – too small, too slight, to be noticed in amongst the sea of men.

At that parkrun, 7 out of the first 100 to finish were women or girls, but we made up nearly half (48%) of everyone who walked, jogged or ran around Nene Park that morning.

Parkrun is not a race. Our local cross-country league, on the other hand, is. It starts in three weeks’ time (oh god), and I just received this message about it from my club:

“More often than not“? This guidance is new, I think. I’ve always understood it to be fastest 7 men, and 3 women. And that’s what it will be. In the first race of 2017/18 season, 5 women finished in the top 100, and only 20 in the first 200.

So why not 5 men and 5 women to score? What is the argument against it? I guess the rules originally reflected the number of runners of each gender a team could field. And they do still mirror them – in that first race last year 38% of runners were women, 62% men. But there were 195 women, more than enough to score. If the teams have the runners, why isn’t the scoring equal?

Could it be elitism, rather than sexism, that drives this choice to hold onto old rules? Elitism is what competitive sport is built on. Rewarding the performance of the very best – who push themselves to their limit – over the mid-pack runners who’d rather hold onto their breakfast and not break their ankles. Prioritising the sharp end, over the fun-runners.

How do we get more women at the sharp end, though? Maybe by not treating them as fun-runners, and giving them an equal chance to score.