The sports world is still built for men. This elite runner wants to change that

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/01/10/ [login to see] /sports-world-still-built-for-men-elite-runner-wants-to-change-that
Champion distance runner Lauren Fleshman still remembers the first time she lost a race to a boy. She was in middle school, and had developed a reputation as the fastest overall runner, the one who consistently won the mile. Until one day, she wasn't fastest.

"When I first got beat by one of my male peers ... it was because he hit puberty and kind of skyrocketed his performance in the mile in a very short period of time," she says. "It was very disorienting to find out that puberty was going to create two different paths for my male peers and my female peers, and that I was on the one that I wasn't so sure I wanted to be on."

Growing up in what she calls the "girl power revolution of the '90s," Fleshman had been led to believe that she could do anything that her male peers could do. But as an athlete, puberty hit hard. She describes getting her period as an impediment, an "added burden that my male peers didn't have to deal with." The development of breasts and hips, she says, felt "scary, like they threatened the future that I wanted in sport."