Why You Should Read Lauren Fleshman’s NYT Bestseller, Good for a Girl
by GRP Run athlete Elena Horton
I had a million other things to do, but I just couldn’t stop reading. With each turn in Lauren Fleshman’s story (usually left on a cliffhanger at the end of a chapter), I was too enthralled to put the book down. A powerful blend of gripping memoir and solid research on women in sport, Good for a Girl had me crying, raging, laughing, and learning throughout. I’d fully recommend it as a must-read, not just for runners and coaches but for anyone who cares about creating a better environment for girls and women to thrive in athletics.
I first learned of Lauren Fleshman 4 years ago when I stumbled across her podcast, Work, Play, Love, in which she and her partner Jesse Thomas discuss the challenges of running their business Picky Bars, training as athletes, and raising their two children both humorously and thoughtfully. While the podcast is no longer active, I still highly recommend listening to past episodes for some good laughs and lots of life balance wisdom. Her resume is stacked with accomplishments as a runner - she’s a 5-time national champion as a collegiate runner at Stanford and a 2-time national champion as a professional. Many consider her the fastest runner to have never made an Olympic team due to some poorly timed injuries, a story that she fully captures within her book. Many may also know her as the face of Nike’s Objectify Me campaign, another story that she tells with insight and courage within Good For a Girl. She now serves as the brand strategy advisor for Oiselle, a women’s running apparel company, in addition to freelance writing and speaking in between raising her two kids in Bend, Oregon.
Needless to say, Fleshman has seen it all within the running world, both the good - finding her strength through sport, building strong relationships, competing at the highest level, and giving back to women in the running community to name a few - and the bad - the injuries, the normalization of disordered eating, the unfair treatment of female professionals, the coaching patterns that damage girls’ potentials, etc. Her stories, combined with emerging research, highlight how our sporting system, designed for men and boys, continue to harm girls and women by failing to account for differences in physiological development, to protect from external societal standards, and to correct for lasting biases against women in sport.
It's true that I may be seen as the exact target audience of this book - I’m a female runner greatly attuned to the challenges women face in the sporting world. I grew up playing boys’ ice hockey and, as Fleshman discusses, I dreaded the day that puberty would render me so obviously different than my teammates. While I didn’t compete as a runner collegiately, I saw how disordered eating infiltrated the women’s athletic teams in high school, college, and beyond. And while I’ll never be a national champion track runner, I know the feeling of committing myself to training and trying to do whatever it takes to achieve a goal, even if it’s not healthy. Fleshman’s writing is so powerful because she is able to articulate so many of these nuanced experiences in a way that allows every reader to relate and empathize. Empathizing leads to understanding, and understanding leads to advocacy.
After reading, I gave this book to several other friends to read, none of whom identify as competitive runners and some who identify as men. Each friend had a similar review - they tore through it, engrossed by the story and fascinated by the concepts that they had either experienced themselves, noticed and not fully understood, or that had evaded their perception entirely. All found themselves carried through by a genuine desire to see how Lauren would fare in the next challenging race, rooting for her like any good sports fan. But they each also found themselves reflecting on the in-the-moment feelings of an underdog chasing her dreams, which, when told together as powerfully as Fleshman crafts in Good for Girl, manage to inspire, to educate, and to equip readers as advocates creating a better future for the next generation of athletes.
If you’d like to engage more in the conversation, you can order Good for a Girl from a vendor of your choice by visiting Lauren Fleshman’s website. In case it’s not already clear, I highly recommend it!