This is almost more interesting to me than the Salazar ban. I was running in high school during Mary Cain's reign and I'm pretty sure we were at some of the same meets. Every month for the past 4 years one of my runner friends will always ask, "What's up with Mary Cain recently?".

That said though, this really seems like more of a Nike problem than a sports problem. Obviously this situation is extreme and f***ed up, but anyone in any sport vying for an olympic medal is going to be making some kind of sacrifice for the bodies. Nike just takes it way too far. I haven't heard similar allegations from any of the other elite teams even after the Salazar ban, which is when you'd expect anyone wronged to feel empowered to come out against their own programs.

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Benjamin Deal - Professional - Instagram - TriRig - Lodi Cyclery
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I feel like this is a tough one, for sure it is terrible that she wasn't taken seriously when she started having negative thoughts and even cutting herself, but the weight issue seems like it is quite universal, and it obviously works. Look at Hasan who has lost a lot of weight after joining NOP and Koko who is also crazy skinny. Bekele reportedly ate 2kkcal/day in his marathon build in order to lose weight, and Jager also eats very small amounts every day. That is just how you have to live if you want to be the best, and sure a lot of people aren't going to handle that and their bodies will break down instead, but those who make it will end up faster.

With that said, I think it is crazy and awful what she went through at such a young age and wonder where her parents were and why none of the other teammates did anything to try and help.

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Terrible Tuesday’s Triathlon

i don't know that there's any strong evidence that amenorrea is a good thing in female distance runners. in mary's case it's obviously not. i always felt that this was more an alarm bell than a good sign.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

or osteoporosis.

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No, neither do I, and no where in my post did I indicate that amenorrea was a good thing.
Just shooting from the hip here, but could be that certain athletes like Koko and Hasan can handle being low 15.x BMI without getting amenorrea, while others can't and maybe should be around 17 for their optimal performance.

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Terrible Tuesday’s Triathlon

Cut and paste article here? Requiring subscription..

The article is actually short and mostly fluff. The video is the primary story.

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Benjamin Deal - Professional - Instagram - TriRig - Lodi Cyclery
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If you watched the video even a bit closely, you'd notice that she is addressing the very issue that weight and performance ARE of course linked. But her point is that Nike oversaw her HEALTH via a bunch of male coaches who were Salazar fans. No nutritionist, and certainly no-one commenting on the women's health implications of the over-the-top advice of the male coaches.

This distinction is worth noting, not collapsing into a "but losing weight works" argument.

i'm just going to make an uneducated guess that you have a "weight meter" to guide you and it's not the scale, it's your cycle. lose your cycle, you're too light. but i'm not the expert. unfortunately, based simply on mary's video, i would've been the most "expert" person on that subject who was part of the nike project team, and i'm no expert! also, i'm going to hazard a guess that when your athlete starts cutting herself that's also a gauge that should tell you something about your athlete and perhaps your program.

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Dan Empfield
aka Slowman

Not just that, but things like daily mood self-assessments. Those start to crater, you have a problem. Because if you're not reasonably happy, you're not fast.

And of course performance itself. If you lose weight and go slower, that's an indication of something. And Mary was going slower.

Agreed.

This is certainly an illuminating element and opens up dialogue for a completely different discussion beyond Salazar's ban. However, the sad truth is that you don't need to make it to the elite status of ONP to find this happening. Just find your nearest division 1 university or big time high school programs, and I guarantee it's commonly happening there as well. As a collegiate athlete myself, I saw many friends who were women going through the same struggles. Random protocols, serious red flags being ignored, questions not being answered, "Here. Take this and go home and rest."-type attitude.

Many parents of student-athletes drop their kids off at college of these reputable universities thinking they are being taken care of, but many times, the university sees them as a disposable asset. (i.e., Let's bring in 20 freshman and train them into the ground. If 2 or 3 them make it and become studs, it's a success and we'll just bring in 20 more freshman next year.)

Can't speak for her parents because I know zero information about them, but I would imagine any parents would at least marginally assume being a part of something like ONP, one would have the best resources of everything including medical, nutritionists, athletic trainers, etc.

Damning.
Damaging.
Heartbreaking.
Her story could be the tip of the iceberg. History shows us the horror inflicted upon young athletes (ice hockey, gymnastics, swimming, volleyball...to name a few) and how NGBs and other organizations are slow to act. I hope the USOPC & USA Track & Field take notice.

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#swimmingmatters
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The Doctor (#12)

Also, I heard similar stories about triathlon coaches pressuring female athletes about weight.

this is the point of the story for me, seems like it explains a lot about how children and especially girls end up abused and exploited:

“America loves a good child prodigy story, and business is ready and waiting to exploit that story, especially when it comes to girls,” said Lauren Fleshman, who ran for Nike until 2012. “When you have these kinds of good girls, girls who are good at following directions to the point of excelling, you’ll find a system that’s happy to take them. And it’s rife with abuse.”

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"one eye doubles my eyesight, so things don't look half bad" John Hiatt

seems like more of a Nike problem than a sports problem

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No. Exhibit A: follow Lauren Fleshman on twitter. She speaks and writes about this often far before her Nike sponsorship. Mario Frioli speaks about it as a male athlete. I have friends obsess about in bike racing...at a masters level!

To say a Nike problem minimizes the issue. Its a huge issue. Weight as a driver of performance has breaking points. RED-S a big one. Eating disorders...etc...this is a Nike issue, but also a sporting issue of much larger scale.

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@rhyspencer

I've found myself thinking about this a lot in recent years and have actually been pleasantly surprised by the wave of fertility among current/former professional female triathletes. We certainly don't know the backstory behind each pregnancy. For ex: whether the pregnancy was planned (many top athletes shun hormonal birth control or BC completely) or how long they were attempting to conceive, but in general it suggests that these women are overwhelmingly healthy enough to maintain normal-ish menstrual cycles and fertility. That means that while they are toeing a fine line of pushing themselves to the edge of their physical limits, respect is also being paid to issues of nutrition, body composition and overall well-being.

Totally agree here. At the start of my tri career all I heard/read about was losing weight to raise watts/kg and to make you run faster. I had an eating disorder. Not close to as serious as many but if I had a bad meal or a bad eating day I would beat myself up. I ONLY ate salads when we went out. I obsessed about my weight and it was not healthy. And 6 years or so later I don't weigh myself often and kind of eat what I want when I want. And the great part is I am about the same weight as when I was logging all of my food but I feel a lot better mentally and never beat myself up.

I could not imagine being in her situation or having my daughter be in that situation. Weight and women is a societal issue and becomes even more heightened when athletics become involved.

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Twitter - Instagram

 


Here you go:


https://www.letsrun.com/...nd-endorsed-by-nike/



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Once, I was fast. But I got over it.

Well Cain didn't drop out of High School. She graduated from Bronxville High School and then moved to Portland to train full time and attended University of Portland. During her Freshman year at Portland she dropped out to "focus on running".

Although many sports coaches can be "predatory" in individual sport, htf did her parents think sending their 17 yr old to a professional environment with no support system was even a good idea? Human brains continue to develop until we're about 25 for most of the population. Mary Cain is 23. She got robbed of an NCAA running experience because a lot of people around her that were supposed to protect her failed. Is that because her salary at Nike was huge?

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Washed up footy player turned Triathlete.

Strongly disagree that this is a Nike problem... they are one of the more severe offenders here, but this is rampant in distance running... I remember seeing a t-shirt at a collegiate meet back in the early 2000s on a hammer thrower warming up stating "I'd rather throw and eat, than run and chuck...", hinting at the pressure that many collegiate coaches put on their athletes to be as thin as possible and to win at all costs. I was lucky that I raced for a school where we never had those pressures (it's far worse in women's track/XC, but you see it in men's running as well, the obsession with thinness, because that's what the kenyans look like), and we focused on developing to our potential while being healthy. I didn't realize how rare that was at the time (although we did have a few transfers on our team that had run with other programs before and had to red-shirt a season or two to recover from the damage they had done to their bodies at their previous schools, from coaches with that mentality).

I suspect with her stepping forward around this, we might start to see more athletes come forward as well, and can hopefully start a dialogue than can start to shift things in this regard... Ammenorhea is not a positive thing for female athletes, and certainly not osteoporosis (and I suspect this would highly correlate with the incidence of stress fractures in young runners...). There's a difference between being lean and strong, and just being skinny, but it's a fine line for an athlete to find, especially with social and coaching pressures around this (a classic example of this mentality in coaches was the famous quote "a distance runner should look like a skeleton with a condom stretched over top", which I believe was said by Mark Wetmore).

htf did her parents think sending their 17 yr old to a professional environment with no support system was even a good idea?
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Probably the same thought philosophy that is used by thousands of parents annually who send their kids away at the age of 17/18 to go to college and participate in sports programs.

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Take a short break from ST and read my blog:
http://tri-banter.blogspot.com/

The support systems in NCAA athletics at the power 5 level are immense. There's Sports Psychs, Docs, Nutritionists, Strength Coaches, teammates, professors...the Oregon Project? Salazar and his goons.

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Washed up footy player turned Triathlete.

I am a dietitian in collegiate sports and a graduate researcher focused on RED-S. This is absolutely not just a Nike problem or just a running problem.

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http://www.extramilenutrition.com

Eff that. If I'd been offered a spot at NOP out of high school there's nothing my parents could have done to stop me.

Quote:

Is that because her salary at Nike was huge?

Win the Olympics, dude.