Real Women Run

Running as Feminist Embodiment

Sandra Faulkner, Sandra L. Faulkner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315437835
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Real Women Run is an innovative feminist ethnography that consists of a series of linked essays and presentations about women who run at the intersections of queer, feminist, and running identities. Faulkner uses feminist grounded theory, poetic inquiry, and qualitative content analysis to examine women's embodied stories of running: how they run, how running fits into the context of their lives and relationships, how they enact or challenge cultural scripts of women's activities and normative running bodies, and what running means for their lives and identities. During a two-and-a-half-year ethnography with women who run, Faulkner engaged in an intersectional qualitative content analysis of websites and blogs targeted to women runners, a grounded theory poetic analysis of 41 interviews with women who run, and participant observation at road races.

Real Women Run speaks to the call for a more physical feminism. This ethnography sees women's physical and mental strength developed through running as a way to embrace the contradictions between a deconstructed focus on the mind/body split and the focus on individuals' actual material bodies and their everyday interactions with their bodies and through their bodies with the world around them.

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Women Running

The runner begins anew every time she puts on her shoes. (Menzies-Pike, 2017, p. 84)

I run because that is who I am. (41 women runners)

Running and sports in general is transformational. When a woman feels her own strength, it’s empowering. She believes in herself and knows she can do more. It changes everything. (Katherine Switzer quoted in Loudin, 2017, para. 14)

Women and Running

Women are running in record numbers, as evidenced by forums in popular online running sites such as Women’s Running and the emergence of self-made blogs with stories of women who run like Fit and Feminist (https://fitandfeminist.com/about/) and Fat Girl Running (http://fatgirlrunning-fatrunner.blogspot.com/). In the past two decades alone, the number of recreational women runners who compete in racing has increased ten-fold. Women now outpace men who run races, at about 1.19 million female runners total (RunningUSA.org, 2015), and in 2014, 61% of half marathon racers were women (RunningUSA.org, 2014). In 2015, 9.7 million women finished road races nationwide with more women than men running the half marathon, 10K, and 5K distances (RunningUSA.org, 2016). On World Running Day in 2017, Runner’s World, a popular running media source, announced that Betty Wong Ortiz would be the first woman to be editor in chief in the 51-year history of the magazine (Runner’s World Editors, 2017).

What accounts for this surge in women who run? One reason could be the passage of Title IX in 1972, which increased opportunities for girls to participate in sports after making it illegal to discriminate against girls and women in federally funded education. Women were not allowed to compete in Olympic Games and official distance races until 1972, when the women’s 1,500 meter was added at the Olympics; in 1984 the women’s marathon was added; in 1988 the women’s 10,000 meter became an Olympic event; in 1996 the women’s 5,000 meter was added; and in 2008, the women’s steeple chase was added as a woman’s Olympic event (Burfoot, 2016). This also may have made women’s running more attractive to the average runner. Kathrine Switzer, the first women to be officially registered to run the Boston Marathon in 1967, argued that women run for physical and mental reasons, in an interview about her 50th anniversary run at the 2017 Boston Marathon:

What’s changed hugely is women have become empowered from running. I submit the reason women run at all is because of that sense of accomplishment, self-esteem and confidence running gives them. Once you start running, you question other things in your life that don’t make you happy. (Pattillo, 2017, para. 8)

Switzer registered for the 1967 Boston Marathon under the name K. Switzer and ran the race with the number 261. The photo of the race director, Jock Semple, trying to yank her off of the course became iconic of women and running.

Shalane Flanagan, who won the silver medal in the 2008 Beijing Olympic 10,000-meter race and won the 2017 New York City Marathon, credits women who came before her—Kathrine Switzer, Grete Waitz, Lorraine Moller, Cheryl Flanagan (her mother!), Joan Benoit Samuelson—for making running easier for her and all women.

And they didn’t just do it for Olympians like me. They did it for all women runners. Because one of the things they learned is that running improves your self-confidence and can give you a sense of possibility that carries over to all parts of your life. (Burfoot, 2016, p. xi)

Others credit the popularity of running for women to Oprah Winfrey, who trained for and ran the 1994 Marine Corps Marathon.

Oprah’s marathon finish had a galvanizing effect on millions of women runners around the world. Joan Benoit had won the Olympic Marathon a decade earlier, but her great victory produced few women runners … It was much easier to relate to an Oprah than to an Olympic gold medalist. “If Oprah can do it, so can I.” That was the rallying cry that launched the huge boom in women’s running that began immediately after Oprah’s finish. (Burfoot, 2016, p. 240)

Even the marketplace has shifted this once male-dominated field to a focus on products and races aimed at women runners. For example, the Disney Princess Half Marathon and Tinker Bell Half Marathon Weekends (www.rundisney.com/princess-half-marathon/) where women and girls are promised “a storybook weekend chock full of magical runs, spectacular surprises, (and) amazing sights,” the Divas Half Marathon and 5K series (www.runlikeadiva.com/), with the slogan “Run Like A Diva®,” and the Run Like A Mother 5K series (www.runlikeamother.com/) urging women to “Run Like a Mother®,” validate the explosion of women’s participation in running in the past two decades. The Oakley New York Mini 10K (www.nyrr.org/races-and-events/2017/nyrr-new-york-mini-10k) lays claim to being the original race just for women.

As the world’s first women-only road race, the Oakley New York Mini 10K began with just 78 women in 1972, the same year Title IX became law and the Olympics introduced 1,500 meters as its longest distance for female athletes. The Mini, named after the miniskirt, now attracts a sold-out field of 5,600 women who run for personal bests through Central Park alongside Olympians like Paula Radcliffe, Deena Kastor, and Kim Smith, who are vying for the race’s $34,950 prize purse. (Bruning, 2017)

In addition to women-only races, there are shirts, bags, and other products emblazoned with sayings such as “I Run like a Girl. Try and Keep Up,” and “Forget the Glass Slippers. This Princess Wears Running Shoes.” Women can buy running shoes and anti-chafing body glide in pink, made just for women, too. The marketing of running with pink power is in full bloom.

Online running groups and organizations like Katherine Switer’s 261 Fearless® (www.261fearless.org/) support women’s participation in running through the use of communication, running support, and community:

Pronounced TWO-SIX-ONE Fearless, we are a global supportive community which empowers women to connect and take control of their lives through the freedom gained by running. Through a series of non-competitive running clubs and private communication channels, we provide networking, healthy running support and education, and a sisterhood to women all over the world. (para. 1)

Other organizations view running for women as more than just a leisure activity. The “Run Like a Mother®” series proclaims that running is a lifestyle:

“It’s not just a race, it’s our way of life.”

Run Like a Mother

Run Like a Mother® fuels a woman’s journey toward health and wellness. It starts with our Run Like a Mother 5K! (www.runlikeamother.com/)

Of course, there are local running groups connected to specialty running stores or groups like Wear Blue and Frontrunners (see Chapter 3), which women may join to support important causes and be part of a particular running community in their locale.

Real Women Run

This ethnography I call Real Women Run, consists of a series of linked essays and presentations at the intersection of women runners’ stories, feminism, identities, and running in everyday relational life. I investigate how women’s narratives of running subvert mainstream discourses of what being female and being active mean in terms of identity, motivation, and practice. I was a participant observer in running events at the 2014 Gay Games in Cleveland/Akron, OH, USA (www.gg9cle.com) and ran the 5K, 10K, and half marathon road races and 13 other road races in 2014–2017, such as the Flying Pig Half Marathon in Cincinnati, OH and the Munich Marathon 10K.

In addition, I interviewed 41 women across the US who run and talked with them about their experiences of running: how running makes them feel, why they run, what running means to them, how they run, and running and their social networks. I present women’s running stories through a poetic analysis of the interviews (Faulkner, 2009, 2017), my own experiences of running, including my participant observation at the Gay Games and other road races in an auto-ethnographic memoir, and a critical content analysis of websites, running organizations, and blogs targeted toward women runners. I focus on representing women’s lived embodied experiences.

I am interested in women’s embodied stories of running: how they run, how running fits into the context of their lives and relationships, how they enact or challenge cultural scripts of women’s activities and normative running bodies, and what running means for their lives and identities. Through ethnographic work including interviews, poetic inquiry, participant observation, and textual analysis of women’s writing about running, I add to the literature on how cultural and relational processes such as the enactment of values, attitudes, and identities are embodied practices (Faulkner & Hecht, 2011). In short, I argue that women’s embodied experiences matter. I wrote this ethnography on women and running using a feminist lens, because “not many books about running speak to women, and when they do, it’s often about weight loss. As for feminist analyses of running, they were drowned out by exhortations to ‘run like a girl’ (Menzies-Pike, 2017, p. 3).

Reasons Women Run

Women begin running for a variety of reasons, such as for exercise, to lose weight, and because of encouragement from family and friends; women keep running to stay in shape, to be healthy, and to relieve stress (Running USA, 2014). When I talked with women about running, they told me they experienced running as social and solitary, pleasurable and painful, dangerous and empowering. Real Women Run is about women running; about identities in motion, the inseparable mind–body connection, and running as solitude, physical and emotional strength, and community. Their stories of running are detailed in Chapter 3. Talking and writing about running from a feminist perspective helped me to see the importance of embodiment:

The language of running is gendered too. As I ran more, I began to listen closely to the inflections that distinguish cautionary details about women runners from heroic epics about the men who run after them. Subjects versus objects: one runner might experience the thrill of the chase; the other, the terror of being chased. (Menzies-Pike, 2017, p. 6)

Running and Embodied Experience

But here’s the thing—not all of us who run do so because we are trying to look like Kara Goucher. We do it even though we may not be thin or slim-hipped or flat-chested. And not all of us are out there forcing ourselves through the miles because we secretly hate ourselves. We run because we love it. For most of us, running has made our lives better. I know this is true for me. Running has made me more confident, braver, tougher. I suspect that if you go to a road race on any given Saturday morning and ask the women standing around, most of them would tell you the same. (Constantine, 2012)

Perhaps most important are the socio-cultural influences on women who run, how women’s running bodies are embedded in larger cultural discourse about appropriate ways of being (Jutel, 2009). The overwhelming cultural image of a woman runner and the normative running body is that of elite runner Kara Goucher—white, thin, straight, fast, feminine, middle-class and disciplined (Hanold, 2010). We need to acknowledge the bodies and stories of other women and their reasons for running. This ethnography contributes to an embodied feminist project. Embodiment for women who run means self-determination, their choice of identities, and an integration of health and running, even if women must react against the dominant image of a female running body and skirt the dialectic between safety and danger, empowerment and marketing, relationships and solitude (see Chapter 4). Few studies examine women’s experiences of running via their perceptions and bodily experience. Allen-Collinson (2010) argues for a phenomenological perspective, which is “grounded in the carnal, ‘fleshy,’ lived, richly textured realities of the moving, sw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Women Running
• 2 Woman, Running
• 3 Real Women Run
• 4 Women Running Online
• 5 Running as Feminist Embodiment
• Appendix
• Index