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The Paradox of the Distance Runner
Runners do something utterly natural but they do it in a way that strikes us as superhuman.
What’s more puzzling is Mertens’s presentation of relative energy deficiency in sport, or RED-S, formerly called the “female athlete triad,” a term for the combination of overtraining and underfueling that can lead to reproductive dysfunction, osteoporosis, and eating disorders, among other problems. Mertens blames the male gaze for the proliferation of this disorder, absolving women entirely, and she strangely criticizes the media for promoting research into RED-S. “The stories seemed to say that, for girls, the act of running … is, in fact, a precursor to bodily harm,” she writes, with some sarcasm. Pregnancy and breastfeeding, in her account, are, if anything, advantages for female athletes: In her chapter on , she suggests Paris’s ability to run on little sleep owed something to her experience nursing an infant during the night.
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