Content Warning: This section refers to disordered eating as well as female abuse in sports.

“My body remembers the feelings of capacity and possibility that competitive sport gave me for over twenty years.”

Alluding to the pivotal theme of Empowerment and Joy From Running, Fleshman reflects on the opportunities and excitement that she enjoyed through her competitive running career. Although much of her memoir is a critique of systemic sexism, Fleshman also celebrates the fulfillment and happiness that running has brought to her life.

“Even though I no longer race professionally, running will always be home for my body and mind. If I do my job well as their coach, these women will have that, too.”

Fleshman mourns the fact that, through participating in an inherently unsafe and inhospitable environment for their minds and bodies, many female athletes leave the world of sport permanently in their teens or twenties. Instead, Fleshman hopes that, like herself, the women she coaches will retain their inherent love of the sport. Fleshman suggests that running can bring the gift of internal peace, as well as connection to one’s body and surroundings.

“With female puberty framed as a threat to performance, many take measures to prevent or reverse it, often losing their periods and disrupting the hormonal function essential to building healthy bones and a healthy body. Many face pressure by coaches to achieve a body ideal that is nearly impossible during their stage of physiological development, and experience stress fractures at three times the rate of their male peers.”

Fleshman introduces the fact that female puberty—including weight gain and hormonal changes—is viewed as a disrupter to female athlete progress, causing many coaches and athletes to rail against these changes, rather than respecting and protecting them. Disrupting normal female development has a range of negative psychological and physical outcomes, namely disordered eating and menstrual dysregulation, which increase the likelihood of osteoporosis and other bone-density injuries. This introduces the important theme of