'Good For a Girl' explores the hazardous lives of young women track athletes in North America

Good For a Girl: A woman running in a man's world.

by Lauren Fleshman

Too many publishers include "I could not put this down," among their jacket quotes.

This memoir/manifesto for women and girl runners turns the time-worn praise on its head: I kept putting this book down.

The message is urgent, the story telling is vivid, but whenever Lauren Fleshman describes a good day of running, the reader is overpowered by the urge to get outside and stretch their legs for the sheer joy of it. 

If Good For a Girl makes weekend runners try harder, that's a bonus. The book's purpose though, is less "just do it," and more persuading elite runners to take their foot off the gas, strategically. 

Fleshman might be best known for her fierce image in Nike's celebrated "Objectify Me" advertisements, but for the sporting record, she was the 5,000-metre U.S. national champion in 2006 and 2010, and a great cross-country and 10,000m athlete.

She is also a serial entrepreneur, coach, mentor and advocate for women's sport. So she's an accomplished all-rounder, but when Fleshman describes her own life, it becomes a cautionary tale. Her story is mostly about the brushes with disaster she encountered as a female competitor.

Good For a Girl tackles a foundational problem in athletics: competitive track and field was developed by men, for men.  But this is no doctrinaire "men are the problem," rant. Fleshman is thoughtfully guiding men and women readers through detailed and specific missteps and misunderstandings in her sport. She chisels the monolithic problem of sexism into a series of manageable boulders.

Fleshman excelled at a young age. Her descriptions of cross-country meets at 13 conjured up delightful flashbacks for this aging,