Keith Strudler: Running With The Boys

Perhaps the most painful athletic experience of my life came throughout college track in something called interval work, where we’d run a set of repeats of a certain distance – say, 400 or 800 meters – and do it over and over again at an uncomfortable pace. That usually ended with most of us lying down on the track in some kind of listless agony before we went out to jog a few miles to “cool down.” Such is the virtue of youth.

While these track sessions were training, not races, they still held a competitive quality. Everyone wanted to enforce their place in the team hierarchy, even if it technically meant nothing. So, say you were the third best miler on the team, you didn’t want the sixth best miler on the team to finish ahead of you. That relative order was enforced through a general unwritten code. In other words, you didn’t try and show up the star of the team. And if you did, you were accused of leaving too much on the track at practice, which should be saved for when it really matters – like at actual track meets. It’s all part of the odd set of relationships that maintain the fragile construct of team, one that could implode at any moment.

For example, when women entered the mix. Allow me to explain.

Every so often, our coach would create a mixed gendered training group for track intervals. So instead of five guys running eight by 400 meters, it might be three guys and two girls. It was rare, since there was generally a relative gap in pace that made mixing men and women on track workouts fairly unproductive; but on occasion, perhaps because it was sprinters running with distance runners, or because a top woman on the team was doing an all-out effort – whatever the case, it occasionally happened, and it almost universally brought out the worst in the male runners in that particular group – myself included. We always ran too hard, too fast, and with far too much intent. We were, through years of gender stratified sports involvement and spectatorship, both overbearing and defensive. For the most part, the female runners were generally unfazed. They usually simply wanted to get in a fast workout – although I do think some took a certain joy in challenging the men’s team, particularly since our women’s program was far more successful nationally than our men’s.

Such a long introduction leads me to the case of Lindsey Vonn, the longstanding champion downhill skier who is currently petitioning the International Skiing Federation to compete in the men’s division at the 2018 World Cup Alpine downhill event. While the Federation hasn’t said yes, they didn’t say no either, which, if you have kids, you know is virtually the same thing. They’ll hold a hearing next calendar year for a verdict, but for now, it’s certainly in the realm of possibility.

Unlike many sports, it’s reasonable to predict how Vonn may fare, as men and women often compete on the same course. While she wouldn’t win, she’d be competitive, even if at a lower tier than her normal dominance of the women’s field. That is, to be clear, an anomaly. In the sports world, there generally is a more pronounced divide between men and women atop their respective sport.

There will be calls from various constituencies that this is both a vanity play and an affront to women’s sports, which could theoretically suffer in the shadows of Vonn’s efforts. Some of that dissent may be based on Vonn’s tendencies towards self-promotion, including her seemingly too convenient relationship with Tiger Woods.

I can't say whether it's better for Vonn to dominate the women's field as she has her entire career or pursue competition with men. That's like telling someone whether they should stay in their job or go back to graduate school. And as Danica Patrick has shown, Vonn’s entrée into men's sports is not likely to forever change its landscape. More likely, it will be an asterisk, more remembered for commercial appeal then athletic impression.

What is interesting, though, is how this could ever so slightly alter the way we think about fair competition. We almost instinctively divide people in sport by gender, so quickly and without thought that we rarely even stop to wonder why all of the girls disappeared from a soccer team. There are some sound reasons for this, many based on physiology as kids age. Yet as Lindsay Vonn demonstrates, sports performance isn't entirely binomial, just as gender isn't as well. Perhaps Lindsay Vonn’s efforts in men's sport should be a reminder that competition is competition, something that should be based on skill sets, not the at times confounding construct of gender. That, of course, would make sports, from youth to adult to spectatorship, far more challenging to our existing biases – biases that extend well outside the field of play. It’s also not likely to happen, not in our current environment. But it certainly would make track practice, like mine years ago, far less contentious.

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