One of the biggest (if you’ll pardon the pun) double standards we have around body size is exercise. We fatties are constantly told that we should get off our well-cushioned rear ends and “get active”. Yet as soon as we don our Lycra and start bending and stretching, people see it as an opportunity to bully and heckle us for being the “wrong” shape.
So it’s heartening to see Women’s Running UK’s newest star, Lindsey Swift. Swift is the magazine’s first plus-size cover model, spotted after she wrote a Facebook post calling out a man who had shouted abuse at her while she was out on a run. In the open letter, she advised her heckler that, if the sight of her exercising offended him, he should “try driving with [his] eyes closed, into a lamppost”. It went viral, eventually being shared more than 25,000 times, mostly by people who’d had enough of facing ridicule for daring to exercise in a public space.
Like Swift, I am a plus-size runner. I took it up in 2010 while I was dieting and continued to pound the pavement long after I realised that counting my calories was making me neither happier nor healthier. In the five years I’ve been a runner, I’ve lost and regained three stone. I’ve also completed numerous 5km races, two 10km and a half marathon. I’ve schlepped around muddy park runs on muggy Saturday mornings, cantered around Aintree racecourse doing the Race for Life (less Red Rum, more red-faced rum drinker), and burst into tears after completing the Chester Half’s masochist-friendly course with its near-vertical final mile.
While I will never be an elegant gazelle of a runner (my style being something akin to a sumo wrestler battling a high wind), I’ve experienced a freedom in running that I’ve never found in anything else. Like many things in life, it takes time and effort to master. But there’s a moment on a long run when you hit the sweet spot and every part of your body starts working in glorious harmony. It could be when that one perfect heart-racing, blood-pounding song comes on your special running playlist, or when you pass that five-mile mark so full of adrenalin you feel like you could do anything. It’s the runner’s high – the glorious surge of endorphins that makes your body feel incredible. When you’re in the grips of it, you couldn’t give a hoot about what anyone thinks of your limbs wildly flailing towards victory. There’s nothing quite like it, and once you’ve experienced it, you’ll be desperate to get that hit again.
This isn’t to say that running is always easy. When you start out, the process can be frustrating, plodding and painful. While programmes such as the excellent Couch to 5K will support you on your journey to becoming the next Paula Radcliffe, they will never prepare women – particularly plus-size women – for the barrage of harassment and abuse they inevitably encounter for daring to move their body in a public space.
A lot of this is down to how runners are traditionally portrayed, the perception that it’s a sport for the skinny. According to research commissioned by the excellent This Girl Can campaign, millions of women and girls fear any kind of exercise because they’re afraid of being judged, with 2 million fewer women than men aged 14 to 40 playing sport regularly. I’ve certainly put off my fair share of runs for fear of being harassed, or come home feeling lumpen and useless after having a sneering comment hurled at me – usually by someone in a car.
It doesn’t help when the medical profession join in. When I told my GP that I was planning to run a half marathon she strongly advised against it, as running while overweight may cause my knees to cave in. When race day came, I took great delight in proving her wrong, beaming as I was photographed clutching the medal given to those who completed the course. I may not have been the fastest there that day, but knowing that I could run 13 miles (aided by iron-clad determination and a pack of Haribo Tangfastics shoved down my sports bra) was one of the greatest achievements of my life.
It’s sad that seeing a plus-size woman like Lindsey Swift running should be worthy of praise or even comment. But it is a joy to see someone with my body type showing that “plus-size runner” isn’t an oxymoron. Fat bodies can do all sorts of amazing things and running is just one of them.
