by Anna Kessel
An interview in the Guardian with Kathrine, dated 1 August 1980, portrays an extraordinary woman ahead of her time. Her slogan for the Avon series, ‘The beauty of women in motion’, catches on to an idea that is only just now being incorporated into the mainstream – that women doing sport is a natural fit, and something we should be celebrating joyously. Sport is not at odds with beauty. Kathrine went a step further still, and waxed lyrical about the amazing smell of sweat. ‘Sweating is one of the most fantastic things that can happen to your body,’ said Kathrine at the time. ‘Fresh sweat doesn’t smell bad at all. And I just love the smell of sweating through perfume.’ Can you imagine anyone saying that now? They’d be socially excluded.
Kathrine had the whole women and body image thing cracked all those years ago. ‘A woman achieves a better balanced self image [through sport and exercise],’ she told the Guardian at the time. ‘She can more easily regard men as friends and vice versa, because a common level of understanding is established. Men and women who run, play and strive for common goals together appreciate each other.’ She also believed in the power of sport and exercise to promote creative and intellectual thinking, ascribing enhanced thinking qualities to the various stages of a marathon, with the final few miles enabling ‘free floating fantasy. That is when people talk about a runner’s high; you’re almost stoned on running. You hear a car honking but it’s like you’re wearing a space helmet. You feel like you could run forever, with the cares of the world away from you, you become part of the Universe.’10 With Kathrine’s help we’re building a picture here: exercise helps you think, it puts you on a level playing field with men, it gives you body confidence, and it even makes you smell great. What’s not to love?
Under Kathrine’s unique direction the marathon series grew, holding events in Germany and the UK, while behind the scenes she lobbied for Olympic inclusion, flying to Los Angeles in 1981 when the International Olympic Committee’s executive board were meeting to vote on the subject. In September of that same year the IOC confirmed that a women’s marathon would be included, and the inaugural race took place at the 1984 Los Angeles Games. The very first female winner was Joan Benoit of the United States, who triumphed in a time of 2 hours 24 minutes and 52 seconds – a mark that would have beaten thirteen out of the nineteen previous Olympic men’s marathon finals.
Thirty years on and, though we might not think of it this way, running is still very much a feminist act. Why else did Nike name their women-only 10km after-dark race series ‘We Own the Night’? A nod to the ‘Reclaim the Night’ feminist marches originating in 1970s Britain and America, supporting the right of women to be safe from violence and harassment at any time of day or night. The same issue of safety continues to affect female runners in the twenty-first century, who are often targeted for assault in parks and open spaces. Running, sport, exercise – in its truest form – is as much about women taking back control of their own bodies as any other feminist act.
Switch on the TV and sport might still look relatively old-fashioned, with female cheerleaders and all-male punditry panels discussing predominantly male sport, but away from the mainstream there is a revolution going on. Women are quietly finding their own entry points into sport, and what’s really interesting is that they are doing it without conforming to stereotype. The idea of the ‘sporty woman’, as a singular type, is slowly being eroded as women are drawn to an increasingly diverse spectrum of activities. Who could have predicted that endurance events such as Tough Mudder, which involves crawling under barbed wire and through ice-cold water and mud, would be attractive en masse to women? These events were originally marketed to male audiences, but women are voting with their trainer-clad feet and bucking the trend, with the ratio of women to men changing radically.
And yet at the other end of the scale there is an increasing trend for women-only participation events. For millennia sport has been set by a male agenda; now women are beginning to define its existence for themselves. It may sound superficial, but the UK-based Cycletta series – aimed at novice cyclists – which ends with massages and beauty treatments for participants is positively revolutionary; or the Nike runs where the winner’s medal is replaced by a piece of limited edition Alex Monroe jewellery for every runner who crosses the line. Women’s participation is shaking up tradition, finding new avenues to explore and defying the age-old wisdom that sporting culture should never be messed with. Proof that the popularity of this approach is actually working is borne out by the numbers: in 2013 over 85,000 women across thirty-seven different countries competed in the ‘We Own the Night’ runs. While Active People Survey data shows that almost a million British women were running at least once a week in 2014 – equating to 3.8 per cent of the female population (as compared with 5.66 per cent of men).
Mass participation events fused with beauty treatments and fashion, like these, are the modern companions helping sport and exercise – for some women – to lose that fear factor. I’m not trying to say that sport is only palatable to women when it’s dressed up in beauty and fashion, but I do think some of those markers help to create a sense of this being a welcoming space for women, whether all women find those elements necessary or not. Personally I’m not sure I really want a facial after a 50km bike ride, but if it gets another woman out of bed and onto her bike that morning then I’m praising it to the high heavens.
Of course, cynics may say that race organizers don’t really care about women, and that it’s just another way of exploiting female bodies. Maybe. But I’m happier seeing a company make money out of female bodies in a way that promotes a positive message to and about women, than seeing women’s bodies heavily sexualized to sell everything from beer to men’s sport. And I’m happy that sportswear for women is finally being recognized as something worth investing in. Several years ago I consulted for a major sportswear brand on their female customer base. At the time they sold two types of women’s sports bras. And both were the sort that gave you a single boob, along with the indignity of wrestling it over your head to get it on. At that time women were definitely seen as second-class citizens when it came to sports consumerism. Fast forward nearly a decade and it’s amazing to see how things have changed. I’m genuinely excited to see all the colours and styles available to women these days. It is a far cry from the era where women, including myself, routinely wore two bras just to get enough support to go for a light jog.
That women can now buy an actual proper serviceable sports bra, in an array of colours, is a step forward. Like it or not, consumerism speaks volumes about the status of gender, race and every other protected characteristic in society today. In the same way that it is now (a little bit) easier to find make-up for brown skin, indicating a degree of normalization around women of colour, it is meaningful that Puma sportswear has invested zillions of dollars in its women’s sports gear by hiring pop icon Rihanna to design its clothing range. Women in sport are worth investing in.
Overall, the landscape of sport and exercise is starting to feel a lot more female. While a Cosmo editor was recently quoted as saying that her readers were ‘scared of the word sport’, women’s magazines across the sector are beginning to challenge that fear and embrace the subject. Glamour has backed Sport England’s This Girl Can campaign, celebrating women with ordinary body shapes discovering physical activity for the first time; the magazine also launched its own campaign, ‘Say No To Sexism In Sport’, in 2015. Meanwhile everyday features, from ‘Five Top Reasons to Play Netball’ (including getting to plait all your friends’ hair) to the best sports bras to buy for big-breasted women, are becoming increasingly common across the top women’s interest publications.
There are a myriad of reasons as to why women are exercising and competing more and more, many to do with health or fitness or losing weight. But the smart ones will have latched on to something far more valuable. That sport and exercise is fun. Not when you’re worrying about losing weight, or toning your thighs, but when you’re running throug
h cold mud with your best friend and laughing your heads off at how ridiculous it all is, or exploding with joy at Zumba because you’re shaking your derrière and you just don’t care. No one tells you about the fun, though, do they? Because fun is a word that women are not taught enough about. When I watch TV with my four-year-old daughter, the adverts tell her that a new pink hairclip or shiny, sparkly shoes will be FUN! But these are lies. Hairclips are not much fun. Not compared to running around a park giggling, waving your arms, rolling down a hill, kicking up leaves, throwing sticks in a pond. That’s fun for a four-year-old. Similarly, women are told that exercise and sport is all about hard work, about getting the perfect body. Grafting for those flawless abs. Shifting that baby fat. We are not told that we might have any fun doing it. After all, this is supposed to be our penance, for having women’s bodies that don’t look right. Isn’t it . . . ? But what is this obsession with women’s bodies having to be the ‘right’ shape, anyway? Surely the whole wonderful thing about sport is that it showcases the amazing diversity of the human body. From pint-sized US gymnast Gabby Douglas breaking race barriers to become all-around Olympic champion in 2012, to the slip-of-a-frame world and Olympic champion rower Helen Glover, or the power of New Zealand’s multi world- and Olympic-medallist shot-putter Valerie Adams.
I phone my friend Kate McKenna. At the age of twenty-five she has recently taken up adult gymnastics at the same gym where Beth Tweddle trained in Liverpool. It’s a scheme that has been rolled out nationally by British Gymnastics in an effort to encourage adults to return to a sport they probably won’t have tried since they were kids. Each week Kate posts a video of herself on YouTube performing jaw-dropping routines. As we chat Kate confesses that it took her a whole year to work up the courage to attend adult gymnastics, which is mixed gender. ‘I knew as soon as I got there that it would be fine, but I was worried about looking silly, people laughing at me. It’s such a difficult age to get fit again. You’re self-conscious in your twenties, I’m the least confident I’ve ever been – struggling to find work, having to move back in with your parents. It’s not an easy time.
‘In my twenties my body changed,’ says Kate, describing an experience familiar to so many women of her age. ‘A similar thing happened to a lot of my friends. I’d never had to worry about my weight before, but everything changed after I finished uni and I remember looking in the mirror and thinking, “This just isn’t me.”’ Kate put herself on a carb-free diet (‘the worst week of my life . . . and it didn’t solve anything’) and watched her body struggle to adapt to the changing demands of a twenty-something metabolism and lifestyle.
Watching Kate’s YouTube videos makes my heart soar. There is this beautiful curvy young woman grinning ecstatically as she nails a full twisting somersault into the pit. Or a round-off backflip tuckback. (Yeah, I had to google it too. It’s gym chat for shit-hot-wow.) I’ve never seen gymnastics like it. We’re all conditioned to view gym as a sport for tiny teenagers. Like, if you didn’t start double piking aged eleven, you can forget about it. That may be the case for someone wanting to win an Olympic medal, but just for mucking about and having a great time? Not any more. British Gymnastics are pushing the trend, and Kate loves it. ‘The best thing about adult gymnastics is that it’s fun,’ says Kate. ‘I literally spend an hour and a half messing about, playing, and the next day every single muscle in my body aches like I’ve done a hardcore workout.’
It took me a while to learn that exercise can be fun. I was a latecomer to the concept of being physically active. I only really started working out in my twenties, a period when my body was changing – like Kate’s – and the days of eating a packet of chips on the way home from school with no obvious effect were definitely over. At the time I was at university, and I felt low. All around me everyone seemed under pressure to perform academically. Undergraduates exchanged gruesome stories about where former students had hanged themselves on the campus. There were long stretches of time on your own, with books that made your brain hurt and never seemed to make any sense no matter how many times you read them.
Finding aerobics changed everything. A chance to jump around, forget about all the weighty cerebral struggles, just physically be and nothing more. I recently heard about a leading adoption expert who insisted that the one immoveable part of his programme for adopting teenage kids was to make sure they do exercise. He says it is a make-or-break element – it’s that effective in determining how they cope emotionally with adjusting to a new home. For me, the emotional tonic I needed was aerobics. What I loved most about the classes was the communal feel of it, all those grey-haired mums and grandmas busting a grapevine or a box step, shaking their hips. It was the older generation who never missed a class, who laughed most, who came with their friends, who worked the hardest. Aerobics was their lifeline: to being active, to being social, to leaving all other responsibilities aside. It was their precious time for themselves, and they loved it. Watching them, I felt inspired. But looking back I can’t help wondering: why are women waiting until their autumn years to have this eureka moment? Why can’t younger women find the same enjoyment?
When I left university and returned to London I had to find a new fitness regime all over again. My best friend Tamzin suggested running a 10km together and promised me I would be able to manage it. I wasn’t so sure. Having been put off running for life by hellish cross-country sessions in PE, I was a reluctant runner. After a few painful jogs around the local park we set off for the British 10km Road Race on a sweltering August day in London. Halfway round I was walking. Hobbling. Swearing I would never run again. I thought that was the end of it, I was clearly a terrible endurance runner.
That’s probably because I didn’t yet know that running involves a degree of pain. Even at my fittest, running still makes my lungs hurt, my heart pound frantically in my chest. I wonder – in the odd paranoid moment – if I am going to die. Of course I have come to realize that is all quite normal. But encountering those sensations for the first time can be terrifying. Years later, working as a sports journalist, I listened with interest as Liz McColgan-Nuttall, Britain’s distance-running luminary of the 1980s and 1990s, talked to me about relocating to Qatar, tasked with finding future female endurance medallists from a nation of girls still unfamiliar with physical exertion.11 Qatar only started to allow women to compete at an Olympic Games in 2012. I sat spellbound as Liz described trawling Qatari girls’ schools for running talent, and finding a generation of young women disconnected from their own bodies.
‘They would get all worried and scared because they had never been out of breath before,’ she said. ‘They’d never had sore muscles or cramp, they didn’t know what was happening to their bodies.’ I rang my editor to give him a summary of the interview; on the other end of the phone he sounded excited. ‘That’s a line, isn’t it?’ he said enthusiastically, ‘“never been out of breath before”, wow.’ I agreed and put down the phone. In the hours that followed I realized my own idiocy. The first time I went for a run I was an adult, and I had never properly been out of breath before. Not really, you know, heaving, head pounding, lungs burning. I too had been scared by the ferocity of those sensations – was this normal? Could my body cope? Would I faint? Was I weak? Perhaps British culture was less enlightened than I thought.
After that terrible August 10km road race I didn’t think I would ever run again. But I did. Inexplicably, something, somewhere, clicked. I began to undertake tiny runs on my own in the park. No more than a mile, baby steps. Then my housemate Elaine said she’d like to join me. She had never run before, and I was thrust into the unfamiliar role of helping someone else to run. There was no aim to it. We weren’t trying to lose weight, or run a race, or beat each other. We were just running for the hell of it. Together, we caught the running bug. We ran in the hot summer sunshine, we ran in the biting wind and rain, we ran in the snow (imagining ourselves as husky dogs pulling a sleigh), working as a team to get us home. We ran down London’s great
Regent’s Canal, past corners that stank of urine, leaping over dog shit, or vomit, ignoring the drunks occupying badly broken benches. We inhaled the woodsmoke, warm and inviting, chugging out of the canal boats, and jumped out of the way of careering cyclists speeding along the banks. One cold winter’s night we were chased through an estate by a group of kids armed with sticks and swear words. And every time we arrived home, gasping, burning, but exhilarated, we’d trudge up the stairs to our flat, rip off our sweaty layers and grin for the rest of the evening.
We felt great. And we talked about that feeling all the time, using it as a reminder to dare the other one to squeeze in just one more run, no matter how uninviting the circumstances (like: hungover on a breakfast of crisps and Lucozade). The one thing we never talked about was our weight, or how we looked, or what we would wear on our runs. We didn’t need to. The feeling we were getting from the run overrode any other consideration that might otherwise dog us in our everyday lives. Feeling great became more powerful than looking great. And that feeling extended beyond just a post-run high on a Thursday night. That feeling had longevity, and impact. It cemented our friendship, it propelled us through career challenges, relationship break-ups, house-sharing squabbles and regrettable one-night stands. Running became a way of boosting life to a previously unattainable level. It was liberating.