by Anna Kessel
As mum to a young daughter, I find Tom’s anecdotes really cheer my heart. This is the modern dad at work. And I want there to be more of them. I remember after I had my daughter a male colleague brought his baby to work in a sling one day. There was widespread comment on this phenomenon, and discussion of whether it should be seen as a brilliant act from a liberated man, or yet more proof that men can get away with things that women wouldn’t dare to. ‘You wouldn’t have brought a baby to a press conference,’ one of my colleagues said, ‘because if you had, well, just think of the furore.’
The comment reminded me of that old Chris Rock sketch about men getting credit for things they should be doing anyway. Men who say, ‘I take care of my kids.’ ‘Yeah,’ Chris Rock retorts, ‘you’re supposed to, you dumb motherfucker!’ That culture makes a lot of women angry. Why should men be praised for doing the things that many mothers do every single day, such as looking after their kids? But while I understand that frustration, I also think there’s something important about the role that fathers can play in creating change for everyone. And what better place to do that than at work? Perhaps we should thank those individuals for leading the way.
I certainly think that what Tom is describing is part of a bigger trend away from the traditional way of working, towards workplace relationships that are more human. But no less sporty. Over the summer a lawyer friend invited me to join a networking sports league for men and women. Usually that sort of thing sends me running. But what was so clever about this initiative is that she chose sports that most people were unlikely to be well practised in – reaffirming the importance of Georgie’s concept in creating a level playing field to make sport as inclusive as possible. Mixed teams took on the challenges, guided by an expert who provided a quick masterclass at the start of each event, including softball, rounders, and my personal favourite: lawn bowls.
If anything, with the rising number of remote workers and increased online communication replacing face-to-face meetings, the work environment needs the human touch more than ever. And as we face issues of burnout and stress and email overload, we need employees to be fitter and healthier, to take mental breaks, to get away from their screens. Sport and exercise are a brilliant way to achieve this. A recent article in Forbes magazine boasted about the six ways that exercise boosts brain productivity – including improved blood flow to the brain for around two to three hours after being active, releasing endorphins which help the brain to prioritize and focus on tasks, and also an improvement in memory. Kathrine Switzer and her 1970s ode to the marathon’s capacity to stimulate intellectual thought are clearly still relevant today in this modern trend where sport, exercise and the workplace are all moving closer together.
Over a decade ago, starting out as a young sports journalist, I was part of the early days of this movement. Along with another young female writer, I signed up to take lunchtime yoga classes at work. The teacher was pretty hardcore about his vinyasas, and I’ll never forget giggling our heads off about one of his favourite sequences which involved putting your ‘heel in your anus’. But the bond we formed in those sessions was much more than learning some crazy yoga moves. Ultimately, putting our heel in our anus enabled us to become a vital support for each other in a very male-dominated sector. I’m not sure either of us would have survived without the other.
Across the workplace more and more organizations are being converted to this way of thinking. Team bonding, greater concentration at work, healthier staff meaning less sick days – from the record companies who hire in Pilates teachers to instruct employees in their lunch breaks, and the city workers heading off to the boxing gym together each morning, to the personal trainers heading into office blocks with kettlebells each day, and the phone companies setting up table-tennis tables for ‘creative thinking’.
The great thing is, you don’t need to be in an office doing sport to feel some of these benefits. Getting your brain going in the morning could be as simple as ditching the car on the school run. Or exchanging your stress-filled daily commute to work by public transport for a forty-minute walk through the city. The health apps on our phones now automatically measure how far we walk each day, down to how many flights of stairs we climb, as even the smallest bit of physical activity sends our brains into appreciative serotonin-fuelled ecstasy. Best of all, exercise makes us feel as though we have accomplished something important before we even sit down to face that dreaded tax return, or endless piles of marking. It gives us that lift to help us get on with the day. With our jobs becoming more sedentary but more mentally demanding than ever, getting away from our desks, cash registers, vehicles and computers is essential. And it works at any time of day. The lunchtime run lifts our energy for the rest of the afternoon, while the after-work dip in the river Thames – taking advantage of the wild swimming craze – is pure magic, the water lapping at your torso as the stress of the day slowly recedes. Ultimately, whether it’s to get ahead in our career, or just to help us stay sane, make no mistake about it: sport and exercise is our lifeline to surviving the twenty-first-century workplace.
Sport and taboos
We should have started talking about periods in sport years ago. The sportswomen were happy to oblige, dropping the hints. Why didn’t we pick up the baton and run with it? Instead there was just this enormous elephant in the room, ignored by journalists, coaches, medics, sports scientists and sports governing bodies.
Serena Williams was one of the first to break the taboo back in 2005 when she revealed that she suffered from menstrual migraines. In the UK the story hardly got a mention; in the US there was more coverage but it wasn’t headline news. Jelena Jankovic then blamed ‘women’s problems’ for her third-round defeat at Wimbledon in 2009. The way the press responded to the former world number one was extraordinary. Despite Jelena expressing concern that she might have needed an ambulance because she felt so dizzy and unwell, journalists accused her of being a drama queen. ‘One year it is parking lots and helicopters; the next year it is “women’s problems”,’ wrote one journalist in the Telegraph, as though the two were interchangeable.15
When it comes to period pains, there’s nothing like telling a woman she’s just being melodramatic. ‘Some doctors tell you it’s mental,’ agreed Serena. ‘One of my doctors actually told me that. “You have to get over it. There’s nothing really wrong with you. You just think it is when it gets to be that time of the month.” I was thinking, “I’ve got to be more mentally tough.”’ When she finally got a proper diagnosis it turned out that she was suffering from menstrual migraines, a debilitating chronic condition for which she now takes medication. ‘I know it doesn’t look like it affected my tennis,’ said Serena, who at that point had already won seven Grand Slam titles. ‘But especially in the sun, playing with a migraine makes it worse. In Australia it’s not that easy. I remember playing Martina Hingis in Sydney, and I was just out of it. You want to just crawl under your bed and stay there,’ she added. ‘I want to tell women my story, to let them know there is hope and they should seek help.’16
A decade on, and society has finally begun to catch up. At the start of 2015 two little words blew open a brave new world for women and menstruation. ‘Girl things’, said British tennis player Heather Watson after she was knocked out of the Australian Open, citing dizziness, nausea and low energy levels so bad she was forced to call a doctor towards the end of the first set.
Thankfully, this time around the press responded in a completely different way, and an avalanche of coverage about menstruation suddenly found its way into the mainstream media, with sports desks frantically calling every female athlete in their contacts book and asking them to talk about that time of the month. For women it was pretty bizarre; after all, periods are not a new development. It still took a little adjustment for some, however. I remember a colleague asking her editor if she could cover the subject and he said he’d need to check that their readers were ‘ready for it’.
Now that we could openl
y talk about periods, we learned just how much sportswomen had been silently putting up with for years. From Wimbledon’s archaic insistence that all players must wear white and only take one toilet break per set, regardless of how long that set lasts, to the embarrassment of providing urine samples for drugs testers at that time of the month – never mind the pain, inconvenience, injury issues and discomfort. The conversation certainly forced me to reassess the famous incident of French tennis star Tatiana Golovin and her ‘saucy red knickers’, as the tabloids breathlessly described them. They looked more like sports shorts, and I’m now wondering if she wore them because she was on her period. I do hope so, because the irony of Fleet Street getting so hot under the collar about some ‘French knickers’, when they were just period pants, is too funny. Thankfully, in amongst all the horror stories there are also some examples of best practice – such as GB women’s hockey, where teammates frequently talk about their periods, while their medical department track their monthly cycles. Unfortunately those examples are all too few and far between.
But if Heather Watson opened the door to talking about menstruation in sport, then Kiran Gandhi, a former drummer with MIA, blasted it off its hinges when she decided to run the 2015 London Marathon without sanitary protection. Kiran had trained for a year leading up to the event, but when her period started the night before the race she had a radical idea. She would run the marathon and free-bleed. It would be a show of support for all the women in the world who cannot afford sanitary protection. And it would do away with the dilemma of whether to struggle for 26.2 miles with a tampon in, or face the chafing hell of sanitary towels.
‘I thought, if there’s one person society won’t fuck with, it’s a marathon runner,’ she later wrote on her blog. ‘If there’s one way to transcend oppression, it’s to run a marathon in whatever way you want. On the marathon course, sexism can be beaten. Where the stigma of a woman’s period is irrelevant, and we can re-write the rules as we choose. Where a woman’s comfort supersedes that of the observer. I ran with blood dripping down my legs for sisters who don’t have access to tampons and sisters who, despite cramping and pain, hide it away and pretend like it doesn’t exist. I ran to say, it does exist, and we overcome it every day. The marathon was radical and absurd and bloody in ways I couldn’t have imagined until the day of the race.’17
Kiran found the experience liberating. Her friends ran the entire course alongside her, as a pool of menstrual blood collected in her leggings, while her father and brother greeted her with a warm embrace at the finish line, congratulating her on the $6,000 she had raised for breast cancer. ‘It’s a radical notion realizing that on a marathon course you don’t have to worry about how you look for others.’
The act attracted national media attention. But while the likes of Caitlin Moran hailed her ‘punk rock’ power, a volley of abusers on social media called her ‘disgusting and unhygienic’. Even within the race itself Kiran was approached by other runners sharing their opinion. ‘Someone came up behind me making a disgusted face to tell me in a subdued voice that I was on my period . . . I was like . . . wow, I had NO idea!’ she wrote on Medium.com.
Ultimately, the disapproval only serves to underline her central point – that women are consistently shamed into hiding their menstrual cycle. While this may be an achievable act for women with average-to-high incomes, the reality is that many women in the world are ostracized from the workplace, from social situations, even from their own family homes while menstruating because of the stigma attached to periods. In India that stigma is captured in the saying, ‘don’t touch the pickle jar’ – when menstruating women are shamed as dirty and impure, banned from the kitchen and places of worship. It’s reported that in India one in five girls drop out of school when they start their periods. In 2015 Procter & Gamble won an award for their advert challenging this damaging tradition, and promoting their sanitary protection ‘Whisper’ (otherwise known as Always). But Kiran writes that just 12 per cent of women in India have access to sanitary pads or tampons; the rest use rags, leaves, even sawdust to stem the flow. To my mind, the Whisper campaign, while admirable to westerners, only further entrenches the idea that disposable sanitary protection is needed for true liberation – as opposed to Kiran’s standpoint that menstrual taboos need to be debunked. Meanwhile, in the US forty million women live on the brink of poverty and struggle to meet the cost of a year’s supply of sanitary protection – around $70 – a sum not covered by food stamps. In the UK, Kiran’s act comes at a timely moment when parliament is debating whether to remove VAT from sanitary protection – a levy that does not currently apply to Jaffa cakes, razors or condoms. In the UK the average amount of money a woman spends on sanitary products is £18,000 across a lifetime. That’s almost a year’s wages for most women.
But if having a period is troublesome in everyday life, it can be more challenging still for anyone engaged in sport or exercise. One of the most powerful stories to come out of elite sport on this subject was an interview with Paula Radcliffe. The marathon world-record holder revealed that she had warned British Athletics over their use of the drug norethisterone – which prevents periods during competition – because she said it had caused problems for herself and Jo Pavey in the past. More specifically, she argued, it had caused middle-distance starlet Jessica Judd to fail in the first round of the 2013 World Championships. It opened up a debate about what advice sports governing bodies should be giving athletes around menstruation.
Curious to know more, I spoke to Great Britain’s Marilyn Okoro, a promising middle-distance runner whose career had too often been plagued by injury. It was years, however, before anyone suggested there could be a connection between her injuries and her periods. ‘I actually didn’t think that my period impacted on me at all,’ she says, ‘but as I got older I’ve learned more about it. For example my hamstrings and long history of tendinopathy. I started to see a pattern just before I was about to come on – the pain in my left hamstring was just unbearable. I would mention it every now and again to my physios and they would shrug it off. It was only when I was being treated by a female physio, Lily Devine, that I ever had a medical opinion on it. She said, oh, well, that makes perfect sense because all this stuff is happening with your hip movement – your hips are getting wider and it has a direct impact on your hamstring tendon, and she advised me on the things I could do to alleviate that. As I’ve got older I’ve realized it affected me a lot.
‘Lily was one of the best physios I’ve ever worked with. She would also know not to put acupuncture needles in me around the time of my period because it would be so painful – normally I can take it but not then. I remember one time she said, “Is it your time of the month? You should always tell me because it’s not a good idea. Everything’s super sensitive.” I’ve got thick fascia and so it was like torture. But the guys would always be like, “Oh come on, you’re just being a wimp,” and whack the needles in.’
In a sport like athletics, where half of the athletes are female, I find it desperately disappointing that there are still so few female personnel. Female coaches, in particular, are vastly under-represented. At the 2015 Athletics World Championships, for example, just two out of thirty-nine British athletes’ coaches were female: Christine Bowmaker and Carol Williams. Marilyn says she has always steered away from female coaches, choosing men instead. It is a preference I have heard over and over again from female athletes, and one that makes me sad. Where does it come from? Athletes tell me it’s just a reflection of the status quo: successful coaches are male, female coaches are – largely – invisible. It reminds me of the video asking young children if Santa could ever be a woman. Apparently not, they say, because she’d ‘get lost in the sky’ or be too busy having babies. Scarily enough, similar stereotypes persist about female coaches and their ability to be authoritative, or commit to an elite role. It’s that age-old dilemma: if you can’t see it, you can’t be it. But times are changing and, interestingly, Marilyn now wonde
rs how much more open a coach–athlete relationship she might have had with a female coach.
I ask Marilyn if her male doctors or physios ever spoke to her about periods. She says the full extent of the conversation was simply filling in forms with the date of her last cycle, or offering her the delaying pill if she didn’t want to be on her period during a major championships. Marilyn always turned the latter option down ‘because I feel the pill messes with my hormones’. She says pretty much every athlete she knows who’s been offered the contraceptive implant – inserted under the skin in the upper arm – has ended up having it removed because the side effects were so severe. ‘The people I spoke to said it made them “crazy” with depression – which is prevalent in sport anyway – anxiousness, heightened irritability, added weight, all of which sounds disastrous to me. I don’t need the implant to experience some of those symptoms. I’m not too sure why it was recommended for athletes but it’s supposed to be a popular choice because it’s tucked away and not invasive.’
Lily aside, did anyone in athletics ever speak to Marilyn about her periods? She laughs. ‘Obviously track is just so dominated by male coaches, and my coach is great but he does not get it. Things like, “You know that’s not an excuse,” and then it’s the other extreme like, “I’ve got to go easy on you guys” – like it’s some sort of disease,’ she says. ‘It feels like male coaches just don’t know what to do, to be honest. When we go away for champs we have all these booklets and stuff to prepare and there’s never anything about that time of the month. The most advice I get is from my nutritionist about diet and how it can help. I get an insatiable appetite craving fried and salty stuff, so I try to eat more greens to counteract that and drink a lot to help with bloating, taking evening primrose oil ten days before it’s due, and my supplements and eating smaller portions.’ Marilyn says the emotional effects of her period are worse than the physical ones. ‘It does make you self-conscious and paranoid, more than normal. I hate it because I feel so bloated I think I look like Michelin Woman, so I worry about stupid things like that my belly will be out [in competition kit], but as long as I don’t feel pain then I know I’m feeling worse than I look. You can usually tell if someone is on their period – like if it’s someone who usually wears knickers and then wears shorts. I always double up and bring extra stuff in my bag just in case. And make sure my racing uniform colour is friendly.’ I ask her if she ever discusses the emotional side of things with her sports psychologist, and she shakes her head. ‘No, but I don’t know if that’s because he’s male.’ She laughs.