Eat. Sweat. Play

by Anna Kessel

  I forced myself to make the decision. I would have the operation. It was the quickest solution, and I needed to be well again for my daughter. I rang my husband. Far away on the other end of the phone he tried to be my support. He had packed his bags already; he was on his way to the airport; he’d sit in departures until they let him take a flight home.

  We wandered out into the daylight, my mum and I, adjusting to the light. A busy street market was on across the road. Plastic bowls of brightly coloured bird’s-eye chillis sat alongside piles of bitter karela and mountains of fresh herbs. Everywhere we looked there were crates of pale-orange Alfonso mangoes, the sweetest and most fragrant you can buy. We took half a dozen, and went home.

  My husband came home late that night, exhausted. But home. We all piled into our bed, our daughter snoring gently between us; we held hands over her. There would be a few days to wait until the operation, we just had to rest.

  But nature had its own ideas. Two days later my body began to bleed heavily. Lumps falling out of me. I always assumed when someone had a miscarriage that there was a body. Sometimes there is, but I just had lumps. What can you do with lumps? They are nothing to say goodbye to, to cry over. They came steadily, like ripe plums slowly falling out of a tree.

  My daughter asked me where the baby was. It was a good question. I didn’t know the answer. In the language of the hospital there was no baby, there was ‘blood’ and there was ‘tissue’. But an unborn baby is more than the sum of its parts. In that baby is vested the hopes and dreams of a family, the excitement, the planning, the worry, the love. Things that leap into life long before an egg is even fertilized by a sperm. My daughter had been planning on becoming a big sister; she was proud and excited, she wanted to hold our baby, tickle it, feed it and rock it to sleep. Now where had it gone? I struggled to explain.

  By the day of the operation I was convinced it had all come out. My husband helped me to the hospital, and I painstakingly climbed the stairs on the Tube, surreally floating through the rush hour with tiny close-legged steps, trying not to let anything more fall out.

  At the EGU they scanned me again, blood dripping freely on the floor this time as I lay on the bed. I glanced down: the grey lino looked like something out of a horror movie. I grimaced. Thank goodness for the chirpy NHS nurse who had done this job for thirty years; she’d seen it all before. She’d fetch me a tea, and a nice chocolate bourbon.

  Until then I sat in a recovery room. Not everything had come out. The nurses were going to bring me some tablets. Five tiny blue ones, three white ones. Take them all, then wait. My body began to shiver, then burn. The room spun. I felt scared and weak. The contractions began; I knew this pain, I’d felt it before. But last time I was standing in a sunny room, at the start of a journey that would end with our beautiful daughter in my arms. The end of this journey would deliver no such joy. I laboured and squeezed my husband’s hand. At the end of this, I said in-between painful contractions, we will go on an amazing holiday. He smiled. Wherever you want to go, we’ll do it, he promised. The nurses were wonderful. Somehow, slowly, I began to recover. I sipped at a cup of overly sugared tea, and managed half the chocolate bourbon. ‘You look so much better now,’ beamed the doctor.

  What has a miscarriage got to do with sport and exercise? Well, this book is the story of a woman’s body – not just mine, all of ours. And the things that happen to our bodies connect and disconnect us from sport and exercise throughout our lives. Pregnancy, childbirth, miscarriages, breastfeeding, abortions, menstruation and the menopause: these are all processes that so many women encounter at some point in their lives. They are the common traumas of the female body, and yet we remain silent about them, reinforcing our own omertà. And in that silence grows myth, and misunderstanding, ignorance, anxiety and confusion. In the process of researching this book I heard over and over again from medics how women do not know their own bodies. Mr Dooley says he speaks to high-powered, intelligent women who don’t understand the basics of their own reproductive health, while an article in the Guardian revealed how another doctor had been asked by a mother of four what a ‘uterus’ was.27 Certainly, most of the time, we don’t even know how to refer to our reproductive organs. But if we don’t know our own bodies, that’s because we are not encouraged to talk about them – from the young woman who posted a picture of her menstrual blood on Instagram only to be greeted by death threats, to the universal absence of periods, childbirth and miscarriages in mainstream media. One in five women suffers a miscarriage, and yet their stories are rarely told.

  And yet as my own story clumsily tumbled out, I was overcome by the number of people – men and women – who told me about losing their babies. Friends, neighbours, colleagues, family of friends, mothers, daughters, dads: they all shared their stories, unprompted. Over the garden wall, at the nursery gate, in Tube carriages, through text messages and transatlantic phone calls. So many stories, whispered, clandestinely shared. There were double losses, quadruple losses, losses that made some give up, and losses that emboldened others to keep trying. There were losses in the early weeks, and losses midway through, women delivering their lost foetus through labour. And, perhaps saddest of all, the loss of a full-term baby, a stillborn, bringing tears to all.

  As I lay in bed wondering how to explain to colleagues and friends that I would have to cancel commitments for the rest of the week, I felt a strange sense of debilitation. And an overwhelming urge to move. Now that I was being ordered to rest, I was desperate to be active.

  I waited two weeks for the all-clear, and then, one sunny morning, set off to the park with my box-fresh trainers and sports bra for my first run in four years. It felt like liberation. Running for my body, running for my life. Running for me. It hurt like hell, of course. My lungs ached, my heart was unused to the pulse. I wanted to stop; everything felt uncomfortable, and I felt self-conscious, my stomach still swollen from what had been growing in there for so many weeks before. But I also felt pretty amazing. Walking back home, my brain was levitating somewhere just above my head, enjoying the early-summer breeze. I felt the power in my legs, striding along, buzzing off the endorphins. For the next six weeks I ran regularly, getting stronger, and loving it.

  That’s how I rediscovered exercise. As a mum I have loved and lost my relationship with exercise countless times. All those interruptions – the baby that grows too big to sit patiently for buggyfit, then starts crawling, then walking, then running; the separation anxiety that stops you leaving your child for any more time than you need to; the new childcare arrangements; using up every childcare favour under the sun; the increasing hours at work. Each and every time you have to make a new adjustment, up your game, reinvent yourself, start afresh. It’s exhausting.

  And all the while we’re raising our daughters and sons to repeat the same mistakes, the same stereotypes. Because we don’t know how to play football in the park together, we’re rubbish at throwing them the ball, we rarely sprint down the road together just for fun, and we don’t encourage them to watch sport. Life cycle, déjà vu.

  As Michelle Obama observed, mums are fundamental in changing the status quo for the next generation, as well as ourselves. The First Lady made a crucial link between mums and exercise, and why that connection is so very important. Because it’s not just about being healthy, it’s about being a role model, and making time for yourself as a woman. And how many mums do you know who do that? ‘When I get up and work out, I’m working out just as much for my girls as I am for me,’ says Michelle Obama, ‘because I want them to see a mother who loves them dearly, who invests in them, but who also invests in herself. It’s just as much about letting them know that as young women it is OK to put yourself a little higher on your priority list.’ Michelle Obama’s campaign to end childhood obesity in America manages to show us why, for women, being physically active is a feminist statement. And she still looks cool at fifty slam-dunking LeBron James in the White House.

  One of the mums I met
at Simone’s boxing class has a simple story that sticks in my head. Her name is Jess, a twenty-nine-year-old nurse from South London, who started exercising again while she was still breastfeeding her second child. Jess was able to go to the class because Simone adapted the exercises around her feeding needs. No other class worked for her – she felt she couldn’t leave her daughter in a crèche – and with a toddler son she was excluded from mother-and-baby exercise classes or buggyfit, which is geared towards one child in a pram. Jess reminds me a bit of Jessica Ennis-Hill: that same naturally athletic physique, a glowing fitness. I assume she’ll tell me she always loved sport, but instead she surprises me and says she hated PE at school. Thankfully for Jess, she had amazing role models in her parents, who both went running every week. ‘My brother did too. That’s probably why I did. It just seemed normal.’

  Those four simple words are so precious. They are what we surely want every girl and woman to feel. To feel normal. To feel comfortable doing something physically active. And that’s where mums come in. Because every time we exercise we are inadvertently showing our children a pathway to a brighter future.

  Sometimes we don’t even know how bright. Take the example of Olympic champion cyclist Laura Trott, who took up the sport because of her mum. Glenda Trott was a size 24 before she started cycling, but being denied entry to a cable-car ride while on holiday with her family in the US prompted her to make a drastic change. Her doctor advised her to start swimming, but she couldn’t bear the thought of braving a public pool and so she bought a bike instead, and began training at the local track in Welwyn Garden City. The whole family went with her. ‘Mum wasn’t sporty and then all of a sudden she turned into superwoman,’ Trott said in an interview with the Telegraph. ‘She’d be on the indoor trainer before work; she’d cycle ten miles in the afternoon with her friends and then when my dad came home from work she’d go out with him, too.’28 Glenda lost eight and a half stone in eighteen months. Little did she know that both of her daughters would become obsessed with cycling, or that Laura would go on to become one of Britain’s most decorated riders.

  The thing is, if Glenda hadn’t been brave enough to get on a bike, or hadn’t had the support of her family to cycle with her, none of this might ever have happened. All these years later, Glenda could still be back at her local doctor’s surgery, upset about her weight, crash-dieting, refusing to go to the pool. Glenda says she put on the weight after having her children, like so many women. It is crucial that we start supporting mums at this critical point in their lives, and supporting them in the right way. It could change the lives of millions of mothers, and it could change the futures of millions of children. And, who knows, we might even produce a few more Olympic champions along the way.

  ‘Are you the tea lady?’ and other common questions

  It’s never pretty, arriving at a press box to write a match report if you’re late. All the other journos are already assembled, packed in together, a musty smell of old jumpers. If curry’s been served as the pre-match meal, there will be at least one colleague with an irritable bowel. Noting your seat number – bugger, it’s right in the middle of the row – you inch your way along, as one after another of Her Majesty’s press pack reluctantly stands up to let you past. In the narrow space you do your very best to avoid all contact with genital areas. A quick scramble around the floor to find a plug socket for your laptop, and, crouching down, you think you’re finally home and dry. Just then you hear a voice. It’s coming from the bloke sitting next to you, who’s old enough to be your dad. ‘While you’re down there, love . . .’ he says, his smut-filled grin prompting giggles from the surrounding seats. Cue face-burn, and ninety minutes of disbelief. Welcome to the male-dominated world of sports journalism, a place that I have called home for the last twelve years.

  On meeting MediaCom’s Sue Unerman for this book, I relayed the same anecdote to her and she laughed knowingly. ‘But what did he mean?’ I ask. ‘He can’t really have meant, y’know? Did he?’ She gives me a look. ‘Haven’t you heard that one before?’ she asks. ‘That’s a classic; I’ve heard it so many times, and yes, that’s exactly what they mean.’ I realize I’ve spent the best part of a decade giving this guy the benefit of the doubt. Because I just can’t fathom why anyone would make a joke about fellatio in a professional situation with a woman they had only just met.

  It wasn’t to be my only encounter. Sure enough, over the years, I heard many other jokes like these, as have so many female colleagues in the sports industry. But what do you say if someone makes such a disgusting joke? No one wants to make a fuss. No one wants to be that victim. No one wants to spoil the party, even if the party isn’t feeling very fun, and you’re not sure you actually want to be there at all. In defence of ‘while you’re down there love’, he was probably still shell-shocked to meet a woman in his world. Yes, there are also plenty of examples of supportive male colleagues, but it is hard to ignore the fact that every woman I know who works in sport – or even just likes it – routinely gets asked if they’re in the right place: ‘Are you the tea lady, love?’ ‘Are you waiting for your boyfriend?’ ‘Do you actually like sport, then?’ Because whether you are a woman working in the sports industry, or simply a female sports fan switching on the telly, the two are not generally expected to mix. Women are accepted as titillating accessories to the sporting action – but as fans? Or journalists? Or match officials? Or CEOs? Not so much.

  As British Formula One driver and playboy Jenson Button famously put it, breasts and periods get in the way of sport. According to him, women and sport are biologically incompatible. ‘One week of the month you wouldn’t want to be on the circuit with [women], would you?’ he told FHM in 2005. ‘A girl with big boobs would never be comfortable in the car. And the mechanics wouldn’t concentrate. Can you imagine strapping her in?’ Bizarrely, I can’t seem to find any instance of Jenson complaining about the Grid Girls.

  And that’s because female totty is seen as so wholly appropriate in sport that we hardly bat an eyelid as TV cameras pan across a sports crowd, searching for a hottie. From Wimbledon to the World Cup, it’s the same story. The underlying message to the viewer is that sport on TV replicates the male heterosexual gaze. If you’re a woman watching you’re simply an anomaly. The trend launched the career of one of the twentieth century’s biggest-ever sex symbols: Pamela Anderson, spotted in the crowd by TV cameras at a Canadian Football League game in the 1980s. Meanwhile, cheerleaders account for the most prominent female figures across much of US men’s team sport. Then there’s the ‘pit girls’ employed to stand about in hot pants with zippable cleavage, holding umbrellas for motor-sport drivers, and ring girls at boxing bouts holding up cards to tell us the number of the next round. Recently, watching Chris Eubank’s son’s fight on TV, I stared in disbelief as the presenter apologized for Chris saying ‘cojones’ on air. Why is that word deemed offensive when employing half-naked women as objects to stare at is not? And if scantily clad ladies are all just a harmless bit of fun, then why – at my first-ever boxing match, Amir Khan’s professional debut – did the crowd around me talk about those women with such sexual aggression? ‘Phwoar, look at her!’ one of them started up. ‘I’d let her piss on my face any day.’ I literally wanted to crawl under my seat.

  Even women’s sport is not immune. At the Flanders Diamond tour during the summer of 2015 four women in tiny bikinis flanked the winners on stage, much to the chagrin of Dutch cyclist Marijn de Vries, who boldly highlighted the issue on Twitter. Brilliantly, US cyclist Anna Zivarts photoshopped some men in Speedos onto pictures of Chris Froome on the podium to ram home the point, and the Belgian organizers apologized for the incident. But the bigger question is: why, in the twenty-first century, does sport need to be sexualized at all?

  I’m not convinced that sport has woken up to this as a discussion point. It remains a blind spot. Take cycling’s global governing body, UCI, getting worked up about a women’s team whose kit accidentally made them ap
pear naked from the waist down. The Colombia Bogotá Humana kit included a strip of flesh-coloured fabric across the midriff which, when photographed in a certain light, looked a bit camel-toe. The images sent the UCI into comic meltdown, with president Brian Cookson labelling it ‘unacceptable by any standard of decency’. The double messaging here is incredible: it is OK to have models in skimpy bikinis on the winners’ podiums, but if it looks too much like the real thing – albeit innocently, and accidentally – then it is a sign of abhorrent indecency.

  I’m often asked if one sport is worse than another. I’m not convinced it’s helpful to compare, and in any case frustrating stories seem to come to light in every sport I’ve come across. People inevitably argue that sport is merely a reflection of wider societal attitudes. True, to some extent. But if we leave the conversation there then we also leave sport with a get-out-of-jail card, the shrug of the shoulders, ‘what can anyone actually do?’ approach. That frustrates me. There’s so much we can do to change things. In Do It Like A Woman, a book about women changing the world, Caroline Criado-Perez explored the full spectrum of feminism and sexism, so I ask her whether sport is different from any other sector. Her response is illuminating. ‘Well, I suppose the same preconceptions and prejudices that discriminate against women in one field is the same in another,’ she nods, ‘but I guess with sport there’s something about the way women aren’t encouraged to be active, the way women are constantly represented as passive. It’s like in films where women are less likely to have the main role, and instead be in a supporting role, often getting in the way of the hero doing his thing. Sport is such an obvious manifestation of that in the way that women are not encouraged to be active.’ And there’s the irony. In sport, the most physically active of sectors, we routinely reduce women to the most passive, nonspeaking roles. When women dare to play a speaking part – a journalist, a manager, a chief executive – or an active part – a player, a referee, a medic – they are going against the grain. And it grates.