Two of My Heroes
As a man, I will never know what it is like to be a woman in our society. Period. But it's my responsibility to try to understand, be curious, and listen. To learn as much as I can. To be inspired by women who have endured and overcome things I will never have to endure or overcome.
One of the most powerful ways I have found to do all the above is to listen to women's memoirs read aloud in their own voices. I usually do so while working out to focus on the story. I used to go at 1.5x speed, but recently, I have slowed down the speed to think about each sentence and word. In one of the books I am about to describe, the author takes a deep breath between each sentence to give the listener a chance to soak in what she just said, which I appreciate since it is all new territory for me.
As my athletic passions have recently moved towards running and ultra trail running, I have found plenty of women with remarkable and important stories to tell. Off the top, let me say that Courtney Deauwalter is the Greatest of All Time (GOAT) in any sport at any time. Period. But let's put her aside for the moment, even though she represents everything right about the world to me.
Today, I want to talk about Des Linden and Kara Goucher whose books I have just listened to. I have been a fan of their podcast, "Nobody Asked Us" for some time. It's part two awesome moms, wives, athletes, people catching up on life and part deep dive into the current running scene as both do commentary for various international competitions. The pod started on a humorous note since the two were rivals for many years and while they respected each other, didn't know one another. So the first episode is a true introduction, putting down of swords, and starting to compare notes on their mutual running history together. We listen as they discover how much they have in common and become best friends through successive weeks.
In some ways they are an odd couple, polar opposites, which makes the pod and their friendship work. Des is just a badass. Deeply introverted. She has a dark side. She's be the first person you'd pick for your team in a knife fight. She's always been a fan of Bourbon even while training. She doesn't particularly like people and only does press etc when absolutely forced to and understands that it will take energy away from her pre-race and she has to account for that fact.
Kara is simply the nicest human you will ever meet. Growing up in Duluth, raised by her mom and her grandfather (her dad died in a car crash when she was 4), she has a heart of gold. She seems to love people and love life and comes at everything with a contagious giggle and maximum joy.
Both women are among the best U.S. runners in history.
In the introduction to Kara's book THE LONGEST RACE , co-author Mary Pilon, a long-time New York Times reporter, starts off by talking about how her favorite memoir and model for the work is David Carr's THE NIGHT OF THE GUN , which also happens to be my favorite memoir (so I knew I was in for something special). Carr's premise is that memory is fleeting and often wrong and any real memoir should be viewed as an investigative reporting job like any other story with facts double and triple checked from multiple sources. He famously discovered that the most important facts of his remembered life were exactly wrong (his best friend didn't threaten to shoot him with a gun, HE threatened to shoot his friend with a gun).
Pilon took the same approach to Kara's story. They worked for four years together on book, combining through thousands of source documents, developing a 40-page time lines, and getting second and third sources on every single fact in the book. This is important because Kara, the bubbly midwest women with the heart of gold, was the whistler blower on the biggest icon and company in the sport, Alberto Salazar and Nike. Talk about guts. Yeah she was a world champion but this goes way, way deeper. And required character to expose doping and sexual abuse by the most powerful men in the sport.
Again, I have no ability to begin to understand what it must have been like to be Kara going through such horrific treatment, nor the courage it took to go public with the truth of the situation which ultimately resulted in a lifetime ban of Salazar and exposing Nike for what they had fostered. But I want to hear the story, to understand as much as I can. And to be inspired by Kara, and by Pilon's diligence. This goes on the list of books that every man, every male athlete, needs to read. I cried with her. And so admired and loved her strength of character. And wondered at her ability to emerge from so much suffering, the same big hearted woman from a small town who ran her first race with her grandpa with a skinned knee.
Des's book CHOOSING TO RUN is the story of how she overcame all the odds to achieve her lifetime goal of winning the Boston Marathon. The story is told in two strands, one that race day and the other her back story, which come together as she crossed the finish line on the horrific cold, rainy, windy day that she finally was crowned champion. Honestly, I relate to Des more than Kara on a personality level. Des has a massive chip on her shoulder. She trains where no one knows who she is. She literally almost dies because she will not believe the doctor's who are telling her that her thyroid condition is causing her organs to shutting down. That's how high her pain threshold is. And her stubbornness.
On the day she would ultimately win, Des is unsure she will even finish because her training has been inconsistent and her injuries still not healed to the point that her trusted trainer is actively telling her not to run. She kind of hangs around for a while in the race, dropping out a forgone conclusion. She tells her friend, and recently NYC marathon winner Shalane Flanagan, if there was anything she Des can do to help her Shalane before she dropped to let her know. Flanagan needed to take a bathroom break so Des literally stopped her race to wait for Flanagan to finish and run her back to the lead pack.
Des ultimately decides to do the work at the front of the pack for others. She doesn't pull off the course because she figures it will be too hard to get a ride back to the finish line and just running it in is actually the easiest way to get home. Then she slowly begins to realize that maybe she has a chance...badass through and through. And my kind of introverted, chip-on-the-shoulder, fuck-you to the world win. I love her too, but for different reasons than Kara.
Other books in the genre of amazing woman runners (who are talking about their sport in the context of being a woman in a patriarchal society): GOOD FOR A GIRL and BRAVEY . The one memoir I suggest every man, particularly young man, read: KNOW MY NAME .