Vegans Who Run

Body politics has been on the radar at least since feminists noticed that fat is a feminist issue.Earlier, Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir contested the Cartesian splitting of mind and body.Their compatriot, Sartre, hung with them at Deux Magots in Paris, where existentialism, stressing personal agency, was born.Even philosophers have to eat.Susie Orbach (1978) penned Fat is a Feminist Issue at a time when the women's movement was differentiating itself from, although borne of, the male New Left.Feminist theory and practice recognized that the personal is political.The so-called private sphere concealed very public and political matters such as who does housework and childcare, how sexuality is transacted, birth control, career primacy, and the objectification and self-objectification of women's bodies.There is by now a vast literature (e.g., Bordo 1993; Hesse-Biber 1996) on the specific issue of women's weight and self-esteem.Feminist studies sprang from feminist practice, beginning with Suffrage.Feminist scholarship was always in service of a personal politics, which helped women negotiate various gender troubles, from sexuality to children to dealing with men.The empowering of sixties women led to legal, economic and cultural changes that, together, have shrunk the income gap, left women as the majority of college students, and led to women's participation in politics and sports.In 1967, Katherine Switzer (2007), who loved to run, crashed the male-only Boston Marathon, leading to Title IX in 1972 and, eventually, to the first women's Olympic marathon in 1984.The race director, Jock Semple, tried unsuccessfully to throw Switzer off the course.(Boston had been completed covertly by a "bandit" runner, Roberta Gibb, in 1966, when she ran the very quick time of 3:21.And Merry Lepper reportedly completed the 1963 Culver City marathon, running unofficially.)The delirious applause awaiting the Olympic winner, Joan Benoit, as she ran into the Los Angeles Coliseum signaled that women had begun to turn their objectified bodies into powerful subjects.Maybe Joanie did not think in these terms, having grown up efficacious in Maine and perhaps not having taken women's studies courses at Bowdoin.Nevertheless, a straight line can be drawn from Switzer, Gibb and Lepper to Benoit (1987) to the massive participation of women today in 5Ks, half marathons, marathons, mud runs, triathlons and nearly every other venue of athletic participation.Showing my age, I marvel at the fact that most of my women college students never knew a world before Title IX.For them, soccer, volleyball, softball and track are unproblematic options.When Switzer blazed the way for women in sports, Gatorade was two years old.McDonald's had not yet opened a franchise in my hometown of Eugene, Oregon, where the Bill Bowerman-coached Oregon track teams were winning national titles and Olympic medals.Bowerman returned five years earlier from a visit to New Zealand, where he met Arthur Lydiard (Lydiard and Gilmore 1978), the father of modern endurance training theory, about whom I will speak later.We had not yet become fast-food nation (Schlosser 2012), with rampant body problems, stemming from inactivity, too many sugar and fat calories, processed food, factory farmed vegetables and meat, fried food.The worst of these body problems include heart disease, cancer, diabetes, autoimmune disorders and obesity.We medicalize and commercialize body problems, giving rise to body industries such as mainstream health care, big pharmaceutical companies, gyms, fad diet plans and drugs, cosmetic and bariatric surgery.The "western diet" makes people sick and then they are healed, for profit.And so, just as patriarchy triggered a feminist politics of the personal, making the private public and political, Vegans who Run