(I’m on the road this week with very limited WiFi access. So no “what’s good” newsletter today. Instead, a quick book review.)
I read Martinus Evans' new book, Slow AF Run Club: The Ultimate Guide for Anyone Who Wants to Run, cover-to-cover on release day. Finally, a book about running that didn't make me question if I could really call myself a runner.
While I am brand-new to the sport as a 50+ year old, I am — much to my shock and amazement — not a "back-of-the-pack" runner. And as a person in a small body, no one looks at my size and assumes anything about my health or fitness level — indeed, people often assume I've been running for a long time. I am keenly aware of the ways in which my age puts me at the margins of the sport — particularly among those who privilege youth and speed — but my race and my physique grant me a centeredness that is totally undeserving. Despite all the ways I look like I fit in, I still feel very much on the outside of much of the "running community." To the contrary, the Slow AF Run Club — the book, the club — welcomes every body.
"I wish this book had existed when I was a young fat swimmer," Aubrey Gordon writes in her blurb; and I agree — I wish that I'd felt like my body belonged in the pool, on the track, in the gym when I was younger. But others — teachers, peers — made it clear that my untrained and uncoordinated body was not; and I still carry that shame when I move. Many of us do, and one has to do much much more than simply pay lip service to that phrase "everyone is welcome." Are there time limits on the course? Are there pacers for those who run slower than a 12 minute mile? Do the race t-shirts come in XXXL? You have to design a space or an event with every body in mind — not as some afterthought or add-on.
I've seen the power of this in the gym where I weightlift — Bay Strength in Berkeley. Bat Strength — its policies and practices and pedagogies — were intentionally designed to make "barbell training for everyone" truly for everyone. There's no body talk; there are no diet cops (there are literally no cops). There are no mirrors. Everyone's "programming" is different because every body is different, and no one is left out or left behind.
I've read a lot of running books in recent months — Kara Goucher's The Longest Race, Des Linden's Choosing to Run, Lauren Fleshman's Good for a Girl — and all of these talk about the ways in which the sport has encouraged, both explicitly and implicitly, disordered eating and body dysmorphia among female athletes. These books chronicle the injuries — the missed periods, broken bones — that are the result of the maniacal quest to remain small while training hard and running fast AF; the physical injuries and the mental ones. And yet those are the bodies that society labels healthy; those are the bodies that the sport sees as ideal.
The Slow AF Run Club is, as the subtitle says, a guide for anyone. It isn't a guide for the small bodies or the fast bodies like almost every other "learn to run" book is. But nor is it a book just for fat bodies. It's for all bodies — running can be for all bodies. But there's a ton of work the sport has to do to get there, and running will never be "diverse" as long as it's interwoven with a diet culture that expects the impossible.
I read Martinus Evans' new book, Slow AF Run Club: The Ultimate Guide for Anyone Who Wants to Run, cover-to-cover on release day. Finally, a book about running that didn't make me question if I could really call myself a runner.
While I am brand-new to the sport as a 50+ year old, I am — much to my shock and amazement — not a "back-of-the-pack" runner. And as a person in a small body, no one looks at my size and assumes anything about my health or fitness level — indeed, people often assume I've been running for a long time. I am keenly aware of the ways in which my age puts me at the margins of the sport — particularly among those who privilege youth and speed — but my race and my physique grant me a centeredness that is totally undeserving. Despite all the ways I look like I fit in, I still feel very much on the outside of much of the "running community." To the contrary, the Slow AF Run Club — the book, the club — welcomes every body.
"I wish this book had existed when I was a young fat swimmer," Aubrey Gordon writes in her blurb; and I agree — I wish that I'd felt like my body belonged in the pool, on the track, in the gym when I was younger. But others — teachers, peers — made it clear that my untrained and uncoordinated body was not; and I still carry that shame when I move. Many of us do, and one has to do much much more than simply pay lip service to that phrase "everyone is welcome." Are there time limits on the course? Are there pacers for those who run slower than a 12 minute mile? Do the race t-shirts come in XXXL? You have to design a space or an event with every body in mind — not as some afterthought or add-on.
I've seen the power of this in the gym where I weightlift — Bay Strength in Berkeley. Bat Strength — its policies and practices and pedagogies — were intentionally designed to make "barbell training for everyone" truly for everyone. There's no body talk; there are no diet cops (there are literally no cops). There are no mirrors. Everyone's "programming" is different because every body is different, and no one is left out or left behind.
I've read a lot of running books in recent months — Kara Goucher's The Longest Race, Des Linden's Choosing to Run, Lauren Fleshman's Good for a Girl — and all of these talk about the ways in which the sport has encouraged, both explicitly and implicitly, disordered eating and body dysmorphia among female athletes. These books chronicle the injuries — the missed periods, broken bones — that are the result of the maniacal quest to remain small while training hard and running fast AF; the physical injuries and the mental ones. And yet those are the bodies that society labels healthy; those are the bodies that the sport sees as ideal.
The Slow AF Run Club is, as the subtitle says, a guide for anyone. It isn't a guide for the small bodies or the fast bodies like almost every other "learn to run" book is. But nor is it a book just for fat bodies. It's for all bodies — running can be for all bodies. But there's a ton of work the sport has to do to get there, and running will never be "diverse" as long as it's interwoven with a diet culture that expects the impossible.
