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It’s been a big year for women in running.
Hellen Obiri became the first woman to win both the New York City and Boston Marathons in the same year since 1989. Courtney Dauwalter won three iconic ultramarathons in just ten weeks. Faith Kipyegon, Gudaf Tsegay, and Tigist Assefa all set new world records in the mile, 5K, and marathon, respectively. And that’s just the beginning!
It’s also been a big year for books about women running—from compelling and vulnerable memoirs by legends of the field to insightful explorations of the sport’s intersection with cultural and social issues. Here, we put together our top reads of the year.
7 Top Running Books About Women By Women
Choosing to Run by Des Linden
American distance runner Des Linden is best known for her gritty Boston Marathon win in 2018 in brutal conditions. In her memoir, Choosing to Run, she recounts that day in great detail—how she almost dropped out around mile six, how she was convinced it would be her last major marathon, how she collaborated with longtime rival Shalane Flanagan. But she also shares the lesser-known story of the leadup to that race, and of the illness and injuries that almost ended her career. Co-written with sports reporter Bonnie D. Ford, the memoir shines with Linden’s signature dry wit and pearls of inspirational wisdom on what gets Linden out the door to run every day.
RELATED: Women’s Running Book Review: Choosing to Run
Money, Power, Respect: How Women in Sports Are Shaping the Future of Feminism by Macaela MacKenzie
When Alysia Montaño and Allyson Felix went public about their stories of being denied fair maternity pay from their sponsors during their pregnancies, it wasn’t just a story about how elite athletes who want children often pay a motherhood tax. It was two extreme examples of the fact that nearly all mothers in our economy are penalized, losing out on wages and opportunities and often being seen as less valuable post-pregnancy.
The idea that women athletes often embody the issues facing all women in heightened ways is at the heart of Macaela MacKenzie’s Money, Power, Respect, which zooms out from some of the biggest women’s sports stories in recent history to demonstrate how women’s sports both exemplify the issues facing women at large, and how they can be catalysts for changes far beyond the world of sport.
Fair Play: How Sports Shape the Gender Debates by Katie Barnes
Track athletes—from high schoolers in Connecticut to professional middle-distance runner Caster Semenya—have been at the center of many recent debates about gender and sport, and the bad-faith efforts to “protect” women’s sports by excluding trans, nonbinary, and intersex athletes. In Fair Play, Katie Barnes traces how we got to this moment, and how ever-shifting attitudes toward gender have shaped our approach to sport. Barnes, who is nonbinary, never shies away from difficult questions, but is unapologetically clear that trans athletes belong on the track, in the pool, or wherever they choose to be, offering solutions for how to make sports more inclusive and more “fair.”
Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World by Lauren Fleshman
Decorated distance runner Lauren Fleshman has long been one of the sport’s most vocal athletes, unafraid to ask difficult questions and to critique the running world’s systems and practices. (It helps that she’s also long been a skilled writer.)
It’s no surprise, then, that Fleshman’s memoir, Good for a Girl, powerfully weaves together her own story with research on the myriad ways in which the sport of running is not built for women and girls, spotlighting the many moments in her own life and career—like her struggles with disordered eating and her fights to be compensated fairly—when the sport failed her.
It’s not all sexist doom-and-gloom, though—Fleshman is generous and funny, honest and optimistic, and always clear that she wants better for the sport because she loves it so much.
RELATED: Women’s Running Book Review: Good For A Girl
Up to Speed: The Groundbreaking Science of Women Athletes by Christine Yu
You could see Up to Speed as the scientific complement to Fleshman’s personal manifesto. Deeply researched and compellingly reported, Yu examines the ways in which sports science has ignored and misguided women athletes, and shares recent developments in the field that offer hope and insight. With Yu, a frequent contributor to Women’s Running, it never feels like homework.
RELATED: Women’s Running Book Review: Up To Speed
The Race to be Myself by Caster Semenya
You should know South African runner Caster Semenya’s name because she’s an Olympian and a World Champion. It’s a shame—and the impetus for this memoir—that many of us know her name for other reasons.
Since she was 18, Semenya, who is intersex and has naturally-occurring high testosterone, has been subject to public debates about her gender and sex, invasive testing, and limitations on her ability to compete in her sport.
In The Race to be Myself, Semenya breaks her silence, sharing what those years of speculation and discrimination cost her and maintaining her right to compete in her own body, as it is, and as a woman, as she’s always been.
The Longest Race: Inside the Secret World of Abuse, Doping, and Deception on Nike’s Elite Running Team by Kara Goucher
You may think you know the story of the Nike Oregon Project, and of coach Alberto Salazar’s alleged doping violations and culture of body-shaming. But as Mary Pilon, sports reporter and co-author of Kara Goucher’s The Longest Race writes in her introduction, you don’t know the full story until you’ve heard it from Goucher.
In her memoir, Goucher bravely and searingly shares her experience with Salazar, which included sexual abuse and extreme control over all aspects her life, seemingly coming to terms with all she endured in real time in the pages of the book. Pilon’s influence is felt in the meticulous details—she researched and fact-checked it like a piece of her own reporting—and the page-turning storytelling.