When Olympic heptathlete Chari Hawkins was competing in college she says she constantly judged the way her body looked.
“What’s so crazy is how much it got in the way of my performance,” she told the Voice in Sport podcast in 2022. “I was so worried about what my body looked like that I wasn’t focused on what it could actually do.”
When Hawkins hits the track this week in Paris, though, she’ll do so with a changed mindset. She's said she now values nourishing her body’s capacities. “As a human being, I move, I glide, I jump, I throw. Being able to make that shift really allowed me to flourish,” she said in a YouTube video.
For decades, the idea that “lighter is faster,” was the reigning mythology passed on by most track coaches when it came to conditioning, especially to endurance athletes. Coaches would encourage young female runners, who often have higher body fat percentages than their male counterparts, to lose weight to improve performance.
Today, many women runners are flipping the script. They’re discovering how dangerous undernourishment can be – including the risks of disordered eating – and are seeking out coaching that supports proper fueling. The old model of coaching for thinness is gradually giving way to an emphasis on strength and stamina.
“My whole perspective on how to deal with being an ally and partner to athletes who have body image issues or eating disorders is completely different than it was 10 years ago,” Hawkins’ Olympic coach Shelia Burrell said.
Fueling for performance, not ‘looking like a runner’
Many coaches now say focusing on lowering body fat percentages can cause far more harm than good. When female athletes lose too much weight, it can cause bone loss and fractures, amenorrhea (loss of a menstrual period), and harm to all sorts of other major bodily systems, from neurological to cardiovascular function.
And it puts them at risk of a condition called Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport, or REDS. When an athlete training at a high level deprives their body of the fuel they might see a very short-term performance advantage, but often this won’t last, and physical and mental harm can pile up.
Allie Ostrander, a former NCAA Division I three-time champion in Steeplechase, has been public about undergoing inpatient treatment for disordered eating in 2021, after experiencing multiple bone stress injuries and a missing period for years. As she began to recover, she sought coaching that would support a healthy approach to body image and fueling.
“I used to think my body needed to change for my fitness to change, but this year has taught me that isn’t true. I’m better at running now than I was in January because my training improved, not because I ‘look more like a runner,’” Ostrander wrote on her Instagram this summer. In fact she set a new personal record in the 3,000-meter Steeplechase in a 7th place overall finish at the U.S. Olympic Trials this year.
Ostrander’s coaching team, David and Megan Roche, have made a point of helping their athletes hone this kind of mindset.
David Roche didn’t grow up in the running world. He went to college as a football player. In graduate school he got into endurance running, and questioned the seemingly universally held belief among running coaches that athletes should be restricting their food intake.
“It seemed ridiculous that the sport was pushing athletes to do long-term damage to their bodies in a really specific way through disordered eating,” he told me.
So he did the opposite. He fueled the way that made him feel strong and perform well, which included eating often and never restricting the type of foods his body craved. He ended up a 2014 USATF Trail Runner of the Year at the sub-ultra distance. His wife, Megan, a physician and epidemiologist, has a similar approach to fueling. She was a five-time national champion and the 2016 USATF Trail Runner of the Year at the ultra and sub-ultra distances.
Helping runners be 'their strongest selves'
Though the research on REDS (also called the Female Athlete Triad) began in the 1990s, it's taken years to for coaches and runners to change the way they talk about the issue. One 2022 study surveying collegiate cross-country athletes, coaches, and trainers, showed that 84% of athletes, 89% of coaches and 71% of athletic trainers reported receiving no training from their current institution on the Triad or REDS.
Today, the Roches work with hundreds of ultra, trail, road and track runners. And some seek them out specifically for the way they coach about food. “Sometimes I think the sport forgot that runners need to be their strongest selves,” David Roche said.
When Roche works with athletes who have a background of disordered eating, he reframes the idea of food as a way to show yourself respect and love, and as a way to give your body what it needs to perform at its best, and he backs all of this up with lots of research studies. In fact, Roche often says that eating enough is the most important part of training as an endurance athlete.
Studies on this topic have multiplied in recent years. Many have shown that underfueling, even for a day, can have negative impacts on the endocrine and nervous systems, reproductive health, and impact mental health and performance. These effects can be exponential when athletes experience underfueling for months and years, as many athletes have experienced.
Along with research advances, recently coaching programs around the country have started to shift away from the old messages that track coaches have often leaned on around food and body size.
This year, University of Colorado let go its track and field head coaches from their long-time positions after a 2023 internal investigation showed the program had required and overemphasized body composition testing for all athletes, often telling the athletes that their body fat percentages were second only to training in driving performance, which investigators said led to “an unhealthy environment.”
Several other programsaround the country have come under similar accusations from current and former athletes, a sign that there is a generational shift underway.
A new way of talking about athletes’ bodies
Heptathlete Chari Hawkins’ coach, Shelia Burrell, a former two-time Olympic heptathlete herself, in 2000 and 2004, said the coach-athlete relationship has changed immensely since she was a competitor. “Coaches were allowed to say and do anything they wanted,” she said.
A few years ago, however, Burrell, who is head coach of track and field at San Diego State University, learned she needed to change the way she talks about fueling and body image with the people she coaches. One of her top college athletes had an injury and had to take some time off so Burrell brought her in for a motivational chat and mentioned that the young woman could spend this off-season getting back to training, including losing the weight she’d gained during her time off. .
The athlete responded by seriously overtraining. “She overdid it. Which was not my intention, but her desire to please me pushed her a little too far,” Burrell said.
The experience led Burrell to update her coaching tactics, to learn more about REDS and nutrition, and start to “pay closer attention to my words.”
Even the way Burrell talks about her own body in front of her athletes has changed. “The way you talk about your body, too, can negatively impact the way your athletes feel,” she says. She’s working with her staff and athletes to not associate the way a runner looks with the food they eat or being “fit” or “in shape,” so that athletes don’t mix up aesthetic goals for performance ones.
When Burrell coaches Hawkins in Paris this week, she says she’ll be focusing on the whole athlete: performance, mood, self-talk, and strength. And when it comes to food and nutrition, she follows Hawkins’ lead, instead of proclaiming anything from on high. She says her new approach is to be more responsive as a coach than prescriptive.
“A lot of these athletes are so knowledgeable now about their own bodies and what a healthy diet can look like,” she said.
“Allowing an athlete, a female athlete in particular, to explore and figure out what works for them and what doesn’t, is a much better path nowadays than just telling them what to do. It doesn’t work that way anymore.”
Maggie Mertens is a journalist in Seattle and the author of Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women.
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