Long Run Read online

  This was the third year that a She Runs event had been held in Sydney; similar women-only night runs stamped with Nike swooshes are held all over the world. The emphasis is firmly on inclusion and participation, rather than aggressive competition. You should totally do it, friends told me, you love running. They were right – a night like She Runs should have been just my thing. And yet, why did it have to be a reiteration of the thesis that ladies love pink? What happened in the marketing meeting that turned a running event into a glorified shoe sale? Maybe I’d forgotten how to have fun. But who’d made the decision to give a pair of sexist dirtbags the microphone at a women-only event? I was irked by their assurances that we were all beautiful and amazing and really, really hot. I just wanted to get on with it.

  *

  The day hadn’t begun auspiciously. It was raining when I woke up. Big races require participants to pick up a ‘race pack’ in the week before the event: essentially showbags that are packed with advertising guff, samples of new products for amateur athletes – maybe a sachet of sunscreen or a can of electrolytes – as well as vital items such as timing chips and, in this instance, the pink singlet. Carrying a race pack around is a quick way to signal that you’re a runner. In six years of running, I’d amassed a pretty good collection of them. This time, however, I’d neglected to pick up my race pack and now, to retrieve it, not only would I cop a scolding from irritated officials, I’d also get drenched.

  Home and dry, I ate a late lunch and flicked through the running magazine that had been shoved into the pack, seeking some last-minute training advice. Be thin. Be strong. Be sexy. Be in control. Do it your way. Let yourself lose control. Live a little. Have it all. Eat more carbs, more protein. Top up on good fats. Love yourself, but don’t slack off. Watch out for avocados. Treat yourself sometimes. Wonderfoods, superfoods. Five-minute ab revolutions. New shoes might put the spring back in your step. Romance at the gym. Free workouts. There were so many rules, so many exceptions to the rules. I lacked the dexterity to dodge the cuts and thrusts. And so, rolling my eyes, I chucked the magazine at my recycling pile.

  The rain finally stopped, and I marched through the twilight to Centennial Park. I’d been warned that the event village gates would shut early – if I didn’t appear on time, wearing my uniform, I wouldn’t be allowed to run. These are the injunctions delivered to schoolgirls, not to grown women. I’d layered up: running shorts over leggings, a slippery long-sleeved shirt under my pink singlet. Neither flattering nor comfortable, but I knew that I’d stay warm.

  I felt extremely foolish, but I kept going because I was drawn to the idea of a women-only event. I wondered how it might be different to run in this crowd. The magazine hadn’t given me much cause for optimism, but I hoped that some shared experiences might not, for once, be left unspoken. I can’t remember exactly what I was anticipating. Breasts, bras, bleeding and babies? Hardly. Would an avatar of essential womanhood or a feminist trailblazer be called up to lead us on our way and inspire us to pick up the pace? Maybe the organisers would be bold enough to acknowledge the lived experiences of trans women. I hoped, I suppose, that the event would at least be free of catcalling and pervy bystanders.

  I also hoped that the sense of uneasiness which so many women feel when running in public spaces – especially alone, especially after dark – would somehow be suspended. Running in the dark piqued my interest. I would never run in Centennial Park on my own at night. Years ago, I sometimes cut through the park on my bike after midnight, taking a route home from the pub that mostly wasn’t illumined by streetlights. I was more reckless then, and still it frightened me. I’d grip the handlebars tightly and stare into the short wan beam of my headlight, hoping its batteries would hold out. I told myself that possums were responsible for the shuffling and grumbling in the bushes, and chastised myself for not having taken the longer, well-lit path, even if there were more cars and hills to deal with. Every time I left the park at the Oxford Street gates, I exhaled the tension, shrugged my shoulders, and resolved never to take that path again.

  On morning runs, I have occasionally followed a dirt and sand track that hugs the perimeter of Centennial Park, encountering only a few dog walkers and other runners. Usually it’s spookily quiet, a surprising contrast to the packed main paths of the park. I’d be overstating it if I said that I’ve felt in peril on that sandy track in the early morning, but I am acutely aware of my surroundings there. I get a jittery sense of confinement in sections with a high fence on one side and high shrubs on the other, and mild alarm strikes when the path is too twisty and overgrown to give me a strong sense of who might be approaching. Do I expect belligerent strangers to leap out of the bushes? Perhaps. I grasp at the hope that I’m fit enough and fast enough to run away from anyone now – and that the park is full of friendly people. Whenever another lone runner crosses my path, we exchange greetings, maybe a wave, and carry on. I still often find myself uncomfortable when alone in poorly lit, depthless places like these. And that’s why, in spite of all the pink neon, I was excited to see the park full of people, to see the space cordoned off for a safe communal activity.

  Centennial Park is the largest urban park in Sydney. When it opened in 1888, no one would have dreamed that six thousand women might gather to run its circuit, let alone in the dark. Women running for any reason other than to get out of trouble is an extraordinarily recent phenomenon – not that you’d know it under the pink lights. It’s a shock to discover that only a few decades ago, a women-only distance run would have been highly controversial. In fact, the history of running is shaped by ancient anxieties about women on the move and stern prohibitions on where they could go. The road for today’s women runners was first trodden by brave, rebellious athletes a few generations older than me. They broke rules and bothered race officials, sports commentators, their fathers, moralising tut-tutters, and many other women. Now the objections that were, not so long ago, raised to women running even 10 kilometres – it’s unladylike, it might affect fertility, it might stimulate weight loss, it’s altogether silly – sound preposterous. She Runs is a very well-groomed and well-behaved culmination of this history. That I heard no one mention the past was at least, I told myself, a sign that it had been left behind.

  *

  The title ‘She Runs the Night’ makes the event sound a lot like another gathering of women, Reclaim the Night, and its American sister, Take Back the Night. These explicitly feminist events also involve women and girls taking to public spaces after dark – but marching down streets, not running around parks, in the name of safety for women. When I joined these marches in the late 1990s and early 2000s, they were lit with candles rather than neon tubes.

  It’s thrilling to venture into public places that are normally decreed out of bounds. Protesters and runners both get the chance to take over the roads on foot, sending vehicles into exile. When I first ran in road races, I was vividly reminded of the wonderful city views I’d enjoyed when protests took me off the footpath and onto the bitumen. Familiar sights transform when viewed from the centre of the road. Anyone who’s been scared walking home alone at night can understand how powerful it is to fill dark streets with light and exuberant human bodies.

  I’ve still got a calico bag from a late-1990s Reclaim the Night march, which now stores obsolete computer cables and plugs. (If the She Runs carry bag lasts as long, I’ll be impressed.) The image on the speckled cream fabric is printed in purple ink, of course. When I tip out the junk and smooth the bag on the carpet, I see a woman with Medusa dreads wearing a kaftan and playing a drum, blissed out on the beast, her eyes closed. Next to her is a woman with Gloria Steinem glasses, stripy pants and a guitar. The Harbour Bridge grins in the background. There’s also a ballerina, a woman in a wheelchair with spiky hair and a choker, a woman in a daisy-printed waistcoat with her hair cropped short. Everyone is smiling and holding candles, and someone has brought a confused-looking cat and dog to the party. You can almost smell the nag champa in the air.


  I have to be honest: the bag is an incredibly daggy artefact from feminist history, all right-on hairy armpits, bongos and menstrual dirges. The kind of clichés that I think make young women who are invested in equal pay, safety from violence, and reproductive rights tell journalists that they don’t actually see themselves as feminists. Markers of identity are rendered in thick, earnest strokes. It’s hard to detect any cultural diversity. I think the short-haired women are supposed to be lesbians. In these days of intersectional, trans-positive feminism, the bag strikes me as a friendly but very unsophisticated map of feminist community.

  In the battle over visual identity, Nike clearly has the upper hand. Everywhere I looked at She Runs, I saw slick branding. Pink cranes held bright Nike swooshes aloft. Cheerful PR assistants wore backpacks to which floating, logo-printed balloons were tethered. There were long queues for the enormous inflated trampoline, another unmissable selfie opportunity. The night was a virtuoso demonstration of the marketing sleight of hand that turns participation into consumption. Every orifice was designed to reassure participants that we were sexy, modern and cool. This women-only event wasn’t a gathering of unfuckable angry feminists – it was an empowerment extravaganza. I drafted lines for the twerps on stage: We’re not here for politics, we’re here to pa-a-arty.

  As unstylish as they might have been, it was in earnest and optimistic environments such as Reclaim the Night that I formed my ideas about gender and politics. They made me a feminist long before I was a runner. And so, to me, efforts to separate one section of the community – women, say – from the rest, whether for profit or protest, are inherently political.

  It bothered me that I didn’t hear one word from that pink stage about street safety, about how frightening big parks can feel to women alone at night, how crowds can share not just fun, but also solidarity. No one asked questions about the category of woman or made gestures of inclusion to trans women. If there was a welcome to country that acknowledged Indigenous women, I missed it. Not a word about sexual harassment, or income disparity, or domestic violence. What a downer that would have been. It was just a group of women running in a brightly lit park on a Saturday night, their menfolk relegated to the sidelines. Everyone around me was having a great time. What’s political about that? Grumbling away in the crowd on my own, I didn’t feel like an edgy feminist critic, I felt like the odd one out.

  *

  When I tell people that women didn’t run the Olympic marathon before 1984, that women weren’t allowed to run more than 800 metres at Olympic level until 1960, they’re incredulous. It’s such a tangible exhibit of sexism. But you run, they cry, even you! How could it be that women weren’t even allowed to enter 10-kilometre events? The ‘natural’ order changes fast.

  Women runners now enjoy a visible culture of participation and inclusion, and sponsors like Nike have played an important role in promoting this. They’ve sold a lot of shoes and shorts in whatever shade of tough pink or assertive grey the season favours – and, on the way, they’ve helped to normalise women’s recreational running. When events like She Runs were first organised in the early 1970s, most sports officials were digging in to defend the idea that even elite female athletes shouldn’t run long distances.

  The first official women’s marathon took place in 1973, in West Germany, and the first international women’s marathon was held there the following year. These events utterly confounded the conventional wisdom about women runners. As the 70s got underway, so did women-only distance events – such as the Crazylegs Mini Marathon in New York in 1972, a 10 kilometre run hosted by the New York City Marathon founder and race director Fred Lebow. The event was named after the sponsor’s product, a brand of shaving gel for women. The Bonne Bell Mini Marathon series started in the United States in 1977, another 10-kilometre event. By 1978, the Avon International Women’s Marathon Series was underway too. Over the next eight years, two hundred women-only marathons were raced under the Avon banner in twenty-seven countries.

  That cosmetics companies – the purveyors of shiny lips and glossy pins – were among the key enablers of women’s running seems a little less incongruous in the girlie party zone at the starting line of She Runs. Corporate-sponsored, women-only events are now a fixture of the running circuit and have fostered several generations of women runners with the promise of safe, hassle-free spaces to run.

  Equal running rights for all isn’t the catch-cry of a politically radical movement. When women weren’t allowed to run long distances in the late 1960s and early 70s, campaigners made a straightforward liberal case for equal treatment. They weren’t trying to change the world; they just wanted to run in it. That said, the campaign to allow women access to the Olympic marathon played out in parallel to broader feminist battles over the body. Women wanted sexual freedom, reproductive freedom, access to the workplace – as well as the right to run long distances. In providing a set of new stories about strength, speed and resilience, the women’s running movement was a powerful repudiation of patriarchal claims about women’s bodies: one of the reasons why those guys on stage, going on about how hot we were, got on my nerves.

  There’s a big difference between access to safe, legal abortion and being able to wear a pink singlet that identifies you as a paid-up entrant in a running race, but they both involve women having a say about what our bodies can do. Being able to run in parks without fear of molestation, whether that’s to train for a marathon or to get a bit fitter, is part of a bigger freedom to be safe in both public and private places. The decision to run 10 or 20 or 40 kilometres is a recognition that our bodies are our own, and that we can choose how far we run, whom we sleep with, what we eat, whether or not to take a pregnancy to term, and how we might swing our arms and legs to take us through our days.

  All this might have seemed a bit heavy in that pink arena, were it not that ‘She Runs the Night’ sounds like a feminist slogan, and the organisers were making us wait out in the cold for what seemed an unnecessarily long time.

  *

  We didn’t all start to run at once. No, the women of She Runs were to cross the starting line in orderly waves. We’d been invited to seed ourselves according to how long we thought it would take us to complete the course. There was no need to rush or to push when our wave was called, we were assured. We were all chipped, we’d all be individually timed, and anyway, this wasn’t a race, it was an event, and we were all participants, running with and not against each other. As we waited, the runners in the green wave were called to cheer for their group, and then the red wave, then the purple, and so on. In this state of perpetual encouragement, you might even let yourself believe that a level playing field could yield equal outcomes. God forbid we see each other as competitors.

  I’d predicted a sedate time for myself but, even so, I spent much more time waiting to start than I did actually running. Training runs are nothing like this – it’s off and away, immediately. I watched the crowd as I waited, and I wondered at its identities. What stories might the people around me tell about their lives and their running if I got them at the right moment? That trio of 23-year-olds with matching pearl earrings, were they schoolmates or had they grown into versions of each other working together at a bar? I was too shy to interrupt their giggling and ask, ‘Why are you here?’ like some shonky workshop convenor. Maybe they played in a sports team together and decided this would be a fun way to cap off the season. Maybe a friend had died and they were raising money in her memory. And the woman in her mid-forties with huge burnished muscles wrapped round her arms and a full face of make-up, what drew her to this race? One of the few loners I spotted, she looked like she could run a hundred kilometres and wrestle a python. What did I know, maybe she managed a women’s health centre.

  In that crowd, there must have been mothers, lesbians, rich women, poor women, trans women, single women, women who ran 10 kilometres five times a week, and women who hoped to run the distance for the first time. Some must have been dragged
there by friends or sisters. There were probably a few who, like me, had fronted up out of an intermingled sense of curiosity and gender solidarity, a sense that if you’re going to join any running crowd, it might as well be a crowd of women. I was so engrossed in these reflections that I jumped like a bird when a young woman asked me to help her attach a timing strip to her shoe.

  Looking back, what’s really amazing is that I had the emotional energy to grumble about the usurpation of a particular shade of pink by a corporation – that I hadn’t blown it all on worrying about whether I could run 10 kilometres. I’d become so used to running that I was wondering how many in the crowd were single, instead of flipping out about the distance. In my first races, a more immediate self-absorption prevailed, and it still does over longer distances. I worry about collapsing in knots of muscle pain and dehydration, about tripping on my shoelaces and being too tired to stop myself falling; I used to worry about being able to finish the race.

  I learned to calm myself down with the clichés about individual endeavour that are the natural language of amateur athletes. Just run your own race, I made my inner coach say. Relax, enjoy the atmosphere and take your time. Somehow I found a kind of confidence. I stopped seeing myself as a hopeless case, an injury risk, a likely drop-out, and started seeing myself as a runner. Running transformed me from someone who was terrified of long distances into a woman possessed of the happy certainty she could run 10 kilometres and then walk home to complain about the pinkification of feminist politics.