I’m going to write about something I care about A LOT today–body image, weight, and how it correlates with running.

First off, you should probably know a little bit about my history with my body. It’s not a great one. In college I started to open up about the fact that I had struggled with an eating disorder (anorexia) for many of my pre-teen and teen years. I wrote a piece about it one of my first creative writing classes and was published in my college’s journal (The Mercury–actually fun fact, if you Google me it’s still on the first page of results! Forever a part of my internet identity!).

All jokes aside, living with an eating disorder left a very real and lasting mental and physical impact on me. The most obvious one is on my height. I’ve reached my adult height (just shy of 5’2″) at age 11-12 because I restricted myself to a SEVERE low calorie diet–we’re talking like 500 calories a day here–for months and months at a time. I was so food deprived that I looked forward to–nay, fantasized about!–eating a can of green beans. Like, who does that? And yes, I lost my period for a long time (my first menses came at age 10)–which does mildly concern me that I’ll have trouble having children someday if I choose, but hopefully not.

Besides being a shorter than expected human–yes, I firmly believe my genes say I should be taller since my mom is 5’10” and my sister 5’6″–my metabolism was screwed up for years. When I got to college and started eating campus food my waistline ballooned. Ok, yep, I did have beer too but based what I was eating I really should not have gained as much weight as I did my freshy year. I believe it took a few years for my metabolism to “self-correct” once I started eating more normally.

And all this is not to mention the warped perception I had of my body for years, and still have to some extent.

So, how does running fit in with all this? When I was a kid I saw exercise as a means to an end (weight loss). And that blew up disastrously for me because it gave me a bad relationship with running. I ended up doing 2 years of middle school track, once in 7th grade and once in 9th grade, in part because I thought it would make me thinner. I didn’t eat enough to fuel my workouts, and I wasn’t very fast. But I didn’t get any thinner so I said f*** it–if I’m not any good and this is not helping the way I look I would be better off focusing on my music. So I did. And that was fine. And at that time I had no idea that if I trained year-round in a responsible manner I would eventually improve, but that’s another story.

When I was 26 years old I was arguably in the worst health of my life. I slept very little as I was working full time and going to grad school for music. I skipped meals. I ate most of my meals out. And I was super inactive. I knew I needed to make a change so I started running in earnest. And this time I fell IN LOVE with it.

Fast forward to fall 2016 when I ran my first half marathon. I’d never loved my body more for giving me the strength to run 13.1 miles without stopping. I started to learn to care less what my body looked like and more what it could do. Running gave me such a gift in showing me to love and respect my body. As I met more runners I learned that a lot of them had a similar experience when they found long distance running.

But eating disorders and poor body image are also rampant in the running community. This is a complicated issue, but at the heart of it is the largely outdated, even misguided, idea that being leaner makes you faster.

Talk to any college women’s cross country team and you’ll learn they’re under pressure to look a certain way. They’re told being thinner is the ticket to being faster, even if they end up with stress fractures from being underfueled. Several women–who have later become professional runners, looking at you Allie Kieffer–found that out of college when they stopped obsessing over the number on the scale and more on eating healthy, they got faster and stronger than they even imagined.

Ask any normal looking woman how many times she’s been told she “doesn’t look like a runner” because she “isn’t thin enough.” Runners are not immune to the pressure to be thin in spite of doing incredible things with their bodies, and to be frank I’m fed up with it. Being thinner doesn’t make you faster. Training, recovering properly, and living a healthy lifestyle does.

Recently another runner posted a story about seeing the possibility to register–as a recreational runner, mind you–in the “Athena” category at a race for “larger women” over 150 pounds. Yep, 150, lower than the average weight of an American woman.

Doing a little research about this designation, I found that the “Athena” category came about in a seemingly random attempt to make running and triathlon more inclusive. Any recreational runner over 150 can presumably choose to register for this category, regardless of muscle mass, athletic background, age, or even height. Admittedly, I didn’t look that hard but I could not find definitive scientific evidence that being over 150 pounds presents any sort of handicap to a female runner.

Logically speaking, yeah if you have more fat it might be more difficult to run faster, but what if most of your weight is lean muscle mass in your legs? I know that for myself and SO MANY other women, gaining weight just happens when you get fitter because you gain muscle mass. And for taller, buffer women I bet sub-150 could even be unhealthily thin. How many women fear “bulking up” from lifting too much weight? (I know MORE THAN A FEW myself.) And why much stronger could those women be if they just said f*** you, scale?!

AND YET in spite of all this, more and more races seem to be adding weight categories… here’s what I found when looking at the Phoenix Marathon page.

I’m disappointed. If we really want to make the sport of running more inclusive, let’s get rid of the idea that you have to look a certain way or WEIGH a certain number to be strong and faster. Not strong and fast for your weight. Strong and fast period. Every woman (and man) deserves to love their body for what it can do.

In the spirit of transparency, here are some untouched photos of me after some difficult races. I weigh more than I ever did before but I am also the strongest I’ve ever been.