On a cold night in early May, a Saturday, I stood in a park with six thousand women. We were all wearing the same dark pink singlet. As we shivered under the bright lights, two clowns in heavy jackets and winter beanies bopped around on a stage and barked commendations into microphones. Ladies, you all look so hot. You girls are amazing. You got yourselves here tonight and that’s a huge achievement. Give yourselves a massive cheer! The party music didn’t stop for a beat. That particular shade of pink, a late-night raspberry with a hint of blood, is one of my favorite colors, and I resented having to share it with so many people.
I was waiting to start the 2014 Nike-sponsored She Runs event in Sydney’s Centennial Park, a 10-kilometer, women-only night run. The words She Runs SYD were printed at nipple-height on our six thousand pink singlets: no one could possibly forget where we were and why we were here. No event singlet, no run. Sorry ladies, those are the rules. I had everything that it took to fit in: a singlet, a gender identity and a willingness to run 10 kilometers in the dark.
If you’ve never mustered with thousands of people at the start of a running race, you won’t be familiar with the encouragements that are bellowed into these crowds. At She Runs the Night, the script had been tweaked to suit women runners. All of you at the back of the pack, give yourselves a huge cheer. Let’s hear it for the first-timers! Anyone here from out of town? Come on, give them a cheer! And let’s hear it for the mums! You’ve all made it to the starting line, so you’re all winners to me. I’d run in scores of races, and should have been used to this relentless bonhomie.
The beginning of any big run is intimate and slightly awkward. Nervous strangers are squashed into a small space to wait for the starting gun, sometimes for hours. It’s more common to gather in the early morning, close enough to other runners to inspect their tan lines, tattoos, scars, and scabs in the half-light. That May night was unexpectedly cold, and the floodlights picked out goose bumps on the women around me. Some hugged themselves and jumped on the spot, others danced in front of a friend’s camera or turned cartwheels under a disco ball.
At this bright, noisy threshold, I had no hope of accessing the steady roaming headspace that I reach when running alone. That’s what I love most about running—but without races like She Runs on my calendar, I’d probably slack off on the training, even though I know how exhilarating it can be. And so, despite my ambivalence about the crowds and the fuss and the motivational claptrap, my running career has been almost entirely structured by events like these.
“You know, I’m not really into sports,” I recently reminded a friend who’d invited me to a cricket match. “Yes, you are,” he said. “You’ve got your running.” If this claim that I don’t really fit in with the running scene keeps me going, over the years I’ve had to accept that it’s not completely true. I’ve grown used to the carnival of the starting line. I wish I had a story to tell about running that didn’t involve goons with megaphones and party crowds. I wish I didn’t need a race looming to convince me to get up early and go for a run—but I do. And so I keep finding myself in places like this, fighting the instinct to elbow a path to the perimeter, beyond the range of the strobe lights and the amp, and then to hop over the railings and bolt home.
I’d never run in a women-only event before and I hoped that night to encounter something new at She Runs. One aspect of the event was distinctive: it was pink. Shockingly pink. Magenta, fluorescent pink, cutie-pie baby pink, stripper pink, and every shade of princess pink that’s ever tinted a plastic hairclip. Pink neon lights stretched over the stage. A floodlight swept through the crowd, picking out shining, happy faces and pink, slippery shirts. Glowing tubes were bent around scaffolds as if to convince us that the lights were held up by musk sticks. Stalls selling shoes and sports drinks were festooned with pink fairy lights. A tour de force of monochrome branding. The starting line hadn’t been sluiced with pink only to dazzle and seduce us—it effectively conscripted every raspberry-singleted woman as an extra in the show. Above us floated drones fitted with cameras, as if we were performers in a song-and-dance spectacular.
Only runners were permitted in this pink arena, designated the “event village.” Supporters had been banished to the other side of the barriers. An event village might sound cozy, but really it was just a set of stalls, stages, and scaffolds standing in what the day before had been an open patch of parkland. Security guards held the barricades, their nightclub schtick ludicrous: “Pink singlet? In you go.” In spite of the party trappings, the village wasn’t a space of gleeful exclusion, one freed from the inhibitions and restrictions of everyday life. No, it was much more like a tiny Swiss municipality, complete with service infrastructure and many rules: first-aid officers and ambulances stood at the ready, and so did Nike sales reps. Event officials in safety vests and ask-me-anything smiles fielded questions about public toilets and water bottles.
Flashes and cheers ricocheted around the event village. A huge screen loomed over the stage, and several more hung high from a pink scaffold. The most impressive was the selfie tower, its four faces representing the northern, southern, eastern, and western suburbs of Sydney. Four queues of excited women and girls spiraled around this tower, new communities created by running bodies. If their pics were marked with the right hashtag, they were projected onto one of the screens. Photos of women in pink singlets scrolled by: Pymble girls, Shire girls, #northsidecrew, Bondi legends, Bankstown legends, Penrith runners, Katoomba runners, on it went. We want to hear you girls make some noise when you see your selfie, said the hucksters with the microphones. Let everyone know you’re having the time of your life!
This was the third year that a She Runs event had been held in Sydney; similar women-only night runs stamped with Nike swooshes are held all over the world. The emphasis is firmly on inclusion and participation, rather than aggressive competition. You should totally do it, friends told me. You love running. They were right—a night like She Runs should have been just my thing. And yet, why did it have to be a reiteration of the thesis that ladies love pink? What happened in the marketing meeting that turned a running event into a glorified shoe sale? Maybe I’d forgotten how to have fun. But who’d made the decision to give a pair of sexist dirtbags the microphone at a women-only event? I was irked by their assurances that we were all beautiful and amazing and really, really hot. I just wanted to get on with it.
The day hadn’t begun auspiciously. It was raining when I woke up. Big races require participants to pick up a “race pack” in the week before the event: essentially showbags that are packed with advertising guff, samples of new products for amateur athletes—maybe a sachet of sunscreen or a can of electrolytes—as well as vital items such as timing chips and, in this instance, the pink singlet. Carrying a race pack around is a quick way to signal that you’re a runner. In six years of running, I’d amassed a pretty good collection of them. This time, however, I’d neglected to pick up my race pack and now, to retrieve it, not only would I get a scolding from irritated officials, I’d also get drenched.
Home and dry, I ate a late lunch and flicked through the running magazine that had been shoved into the pack, seeking some last-minute training advice. Be thin. Be strong. Be sexy. Be in control. Do it your way. Let yourself lose control. Live a little. Have it all. Eat more carbs, more protein. Fill up on good fats. Love yourself, but don’t slack off. Watch out for avocados. Treat yourself sometimes. Wonderfoods, superfoods. Five-minute ab revolutions. New shoes might put the spring back in your step. Romance at the gym. Free workouts. There were so many rules, so many exceptions to the rules. I lacked the dexterity to dodge the cuts and thrusts. And so, rolling my eyes, I chucked the magazine into my recycling pile.
The rain finally stopped, and I marched through the twilight to Centennial Park. I’d been warned that the event village gates would shut early—if I didn’t appear on time, wearing my uniform, I wouldn’t be allowed to run. These are the injunctions delivered to schoolgirls, not to grown women. I’d layered up: running shorts over leggings, a slippery long-sleeved shirt under my pink singlet. Neither flattering nor comfortable, but I knew that I’d stay warm.
I felt extremely foolish, but I kept going because I was drawn to the idea of a women-only event. I wondered how it might be different to run in this crowd. The magazine hadn’t given me much cause for optimism, but I hoped that some shared experiences might not, for once, be left unspoken. I can’t remember exactly what I was anticipating. Breasts, bras, bleeding, and babies? Hardly. Would a feminist trailblazer be called up to lead us on our way and inspire us to pick up the pace? Maybe the organizers would be bold enough to acknowledge the lived experiences of trans women. I hoped, I suppose, that the event would at least be free of catcalling and pervy bystanders.
I also hoped that the sense of uneasiness that so many women feel when running in public spaces—especially alone, especially after dark—would somehow be suspended. Running in the dark piqued my interest. I would never run in Centennial Park on my own at night. Years ago, I sometimes cut through the park on my bike after midnight, taking a route home from the pub that mostly wasn’t illumined by streetlights. I was more reckless then, and still it frightened me. I’d grip the handlebars tightly and stare into the short wan beam of my headlight, hoping its batteries would hold out. I told myself that possums were responsible for the shuffling and grumbling in the bushes, and chastised myself for not having taken the longer, well-lit path, even if there were more cars and hills to deal with. Every time I left the park at the Oxford Street gates, I exhaled the tension, shrugged my shoulders, and resolved never to take that path again.
On morning runs, I have occasionally followed a dirt and sand track that hugs the perimeter of Centennial Park, encountering only a few dog walkers and other runners. Usually it’s spookily quiet, a surprising contrast to the packed main paths of the park. I’d be overstating it if I said that I’ve felt in peril on that sandy track in the early morning, but I am acutely aware of my surroundings there. I get a jittery sense of confinement in sections with a high fence on one side and high shrubs on the other, and mild alarm strikes when the path is too twisty and overgrown to give me a strong sense of who might be approaching. Do I expect belligerent strangers to leap out of the bushes? Perhaps. I grasp at the hope that I’m fit enough and fast enough to run away from anyone now—and that the park is full of friendly people. Whenever another lone runner crosses my path, we exchange greetings, maybe a wave, and carry on. I still often find myself uncomfortable when alone in poorly lit, depthless places like these. And that’s why, in spite of all the pink neon, I was excited to see the park full of people, to see the space cordoned off for a safe communal activity.
Centennial Park is the largest urban park in Sydney. When it opened in 1888, no one would have dreamed that six thousand women might gather to run its circuit, let alone in the dark. Women running for any reason other than to get out of trouble is an extraordinarily recent phenomenon—not that you’d know it under the pink lights. It’s a shock to discover that only a few decades ago, a women-only distance run would have been highly controversial. In fact, the history of running is shaped by ancient anxieties about women on the move and stern prohibitions on where they could go. The road for today’s women runners was first trodden by brave, rebellious athletes a few generations older than me. They broke rules and bothered race officials, sports commentators, their fathers, moralizing tut-tutters, and many other women. Now the objections that were, not so long ago, raised to women running even 10 kilometers—it’s unladylike, it might affect fertility, it might stimulate weight loss, it’s altogether silly—sound preposterous. She Runs is a very well-groomed and well-behaved culmination of this history. That I heard no one mention the past was at least, I told myself, a sign that it had been left behind.
The title “She Runs the Night” makes the event sound a lot like another gathering of women, Reclaim the Night, and its American sister, Take Back the Night. These explicitly feminist events also involve women and girls taking to public spaces after dark—but marching down streets, not running around parks, in the name of safety for women. When I joined these marches in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, they were lit with candles rather than neon tubes.
It’s thrilling to venture into public places that are normally decreed out of bounds. Protesters and runners both get the chance to take over the roads on foot, sending vehicles into exile. When I first ran in road races, I was vividly reminded of the wonderful city views I’d enjoyed when protests took me off the sidewalk and onto the pavement. Familiar sights are transformed when viewed from the center of the road. Anyone who’s been scared walking home alone at night can understand how powerful it is to fill dark streets with light and exuberant human bodies.
I’ve still got a calico bag from a late-1990s Reclaim the Night march, which now stores obsolete computer cables and plugs. (If the She Runs carry bag lasts as long, I’ll be impressed.) The image on the speckled cream fabric is printed in purple ink, of course. When I tip out the junk and smooth the bag on the carpet, I see a woman with Medusa dreads wearing a kaftan and playing a drum, blissed out on the beats, her eyes closed. Next to her is a woman with Gloria Steinem glasses, striped pants, and a guitar. The Harbour Bridge grins in the background. There’s also a ballerina, a woman in a wheelchair with spiky hair and a choker, a woman in a daisy-printed waistcoat with her hair cropped short. Everyone is smiling and holding candles, and someone has brought a confused-looking cat and dog to the party. You can almost smell the nag champa in the air.
I have to be honest: the bag is an incredibly dorky artifact from feminist history, all right-on hairy armpits, bongos, and menstrual dirges. The kind of clichés that I think make young women who are invested in equal pay, safety from violence, and reproductive rights tell journalists that they don’t actually see themselves as feminists. Markers of identity are rendered in thick, earnest strokes. It’s hard to detect any cultural diversity. I think the short-haired women are supposed to be lesbians. In these days of intersectional, trans-positive feminism, the bag strikes me as a friendly but very unsophisticated map of feminist community.
In the battle over visual identity, Nike clearly has the upper hand. Everywhere I looked at She Runs, I saw slick branding. Pink cranes held bright Nike swooshes aloft. Cheerful PR assistants wore backpacks to which floating, logo-printed balloons were tethered. There were long lines for the enormous inflated trampoline, another unmissable selfie opportunity. The night was a virtuoso demonstration of the marketing sleight of hand that turns participation into consumption. Every image was designed to reassure participants that we were sexy, modern, and cool. I drafted lines for the twerps onstage: We’re not here for politics, we’re here to pa-a-arty.
As unstylish as they might have been, it was in earnest and optimistic environments such as Reclaim the Night that I formed my ideas about gender and politics. They made me a feminist long before I was a runner. And so, to me, efforts to separate one section of the community—women, say—from the rest, whether for profit or protest, are inherently political.
It bothered me that I didn’t hear one word from that pink stage about street safety, about how frightening big parks can feel to women alone at night, how crowds can share not just fun, but also solidarity. No one asked questions about the category of woman or made gestures of inclusion to trans women. If there was a welcome that acknowledged Indigenous women, I missed it. Not a word about sexual harassment, or income disparity, or domestic violence. What a downer that would have been. It was just a group of women running in a brightly lit park on a Saturday night, their menfolk relegated to the sidelines. Everyone around me was having a great time. What’s political about that? Grumbling away in the crowd on my own, I didn’t feel like an edgy feminist critic; I felt like the odd one out.
When I tell people that women didn’t run the Olympic marathon before 1984, that women weren’t allowed to run more than 800 meters at the Olympic level until 1960, they’re incredulous. It’s such a tangible exhibit of sexism. But you run, they cry, even you! How could it be that women weren’t even allowed to enter 10-kilometer events? The “natural” order changes fast.
Women runners now enjoy a visible culture of participation and inclusion, and sponsors like Nike have played an important role in promoting this. They’ve sold a lot of shoes and shorts in whatever shade of tough pink or assertive gray the season favors—and, on the way, they’ve helped to normalize women’s recreational running. When events like She Runs were first organized in the early 1970s, most sports officials were digging in to defend the idea that even elite female athletes shouldn’t run long distances.
The first official women’s marathon took place in 1973, in West Germany, and the first international women’s marathon was held there the following year. These events utterly confounded the conventional wisdom about women runners. As the ’70s got underway, so did women-only distance events—such as the Crazylegs Mini Marathon in New York in 1972, a 10-kilometer run hosted by the New York City Marathon founder and race director Fred Lebow. The event was named after the sponsor’s product, a brand of shaving gel for women. The Bonne Bell Mini Marathon series started in the United States in 1977, another 10-kilometer event. By 1978, the Avon International Women’s Marathon Series was underway too. Over the next eight years, two hundred women-only marathons were raced under the Avon banner in twenty-seven countries.
That cosmetics companies—the purveyors of shiny lips and glossy pins—were among the key enablers of women’s running seems a little less incongruous in the girlie party zone at the starting line of She Runs. Corporate-sponsored, women-only events are now a fixture of the running circuit and have fostered several generations of women runners with the promise of safe, hassle-free spaces to run.
Equal running rights for all isn’t the catchphrase of a politically radical movement. When women weren’t allowed to run long distances in the late 1960s and the early ’70s, campaigners made a straightforward liberal case for equal treatment. They weren’t trying to change the world; they just wanted to run in it. That said, the campaign to allow women access to the Olympic marathon played out in parallel to broader feminist battles over the body. Women wanted sexual freedom, reproductive freedom, access to the workplace—as well as the right to run long distances. In providing a set of new stories about strength, speed, and resilience, the women’s running movement was a powerful repudiation of patriarchal claims about women’s bodies: one of the reasons why those guys onstage, going on about how hot we were, got on my nerves.
There’s a big difference between access to safe, legal abortion and being able to wear a pink singlet that identifies you as a paid-up entrant in a running race, but they both involve women having a say about what our bodies can do. Being able to run in parks without fear of molestation, whether that’s to train for a marathon or to get a bit fitter, is part of a bigger freedom to be safe in both public and private places. The decision to run 5 or 10 or 20 miles is a recognition that our bodies are our own, and that we can choose how far we run, whom we sleep with, what we eat, whether or not to take a pregnancy to term, and how we might swing our arms and legs to take us through our days.
All this might have seemed a bit heavy in that pink arena, were it not that “She Runs the Night” sounds like a feminist slogan, and the organizers were making us wait out in the cold for what seemed an unnecessarily long time.
We didn’t all start to run at once. No, the women of She Runs were to cross the starting line in orderly waves. We’d been invited to seed ourselves according to how long we thought it would take us to complete the course. There was no need to rush or to push when our wave was called, we were assured. We were all chipped, we’d all be individually timed, and anyway, this wasn’t a race, it was an event, and we were all participants, running with and not against each other. As we waited, the runners in the green wave were called to cheer for their group, and then the red wave, then the purple, and so on. In this state of perpetual encouragement, you might even let yourself believe that a level playing field could yield equal outcomes. God forbid we see each other as competitors.
I’d predicted a sedate time for myself but, even so, I spent much more time waiting to start than I did actually running. Training runs are nothing like this—it’s off and away, immediately. I watched the crowd as I waited, and I wondered at its identities. What stories might the people around me tell about their lives and their running if I got them at the right moment? That trio of twenty-three-year-olds with matching pearl earrings—were they schoolmates or had they grown into versions of each other working together? I was too shy to interrupt their giggling and ask, “Why are you here?” like some two-bit workshop leader. Maybe they played on a sports team together and decided this would be a fun way to cap off the season. Maybe a friend had died and they were raising money in her memory. And the woman in her mid-forties with huge burnished muscles wrapped round her arms and a full face of makeup, what drew her to this race? One of the few loners I spotted, she looked like she could run 50 miles and wrestle a python. What did I know—maybe she managed a women’s health center.
In that crowd, there must have been mothers, lesbians, rich women, poor women, trans women, single women, women who ran five miles five times a week, and women who hoped to run the distance for the first time. Some must have been dragged there by friends or sisters. There were probably a few who, like me, had turned up out of an intermingled sense of curiosity and gender solidarity, a sense that if you’re going to join any running crowd, it might as well be a crowd of women. I was so engrossed in these reflections that I jumped like a bird when a young woman asked me to help her attach a timing strip to her shoe.
Looking back, what’s really amazing is that I had the emotional energy to grumble about the usurpation of a particular shade of pink by a corporation—that I hadn’t blown it all on worrying about whether I could run 10 kilometers. I’d become so used to running that I was wondering how many in the crowd were single, instead of flipping out about the distance. In my first races, a more immediate self-absorption prevailed, and it still does over longer distances. I worry about collapsing in knots of muscle pain and dehydration, about tripping on my shoelaces and being too tired to stop myself from falling; I used to worry about being able to finish the race.
I learned to calm myself down with the clichés about individual endeavor that are the natural language of amateur athletes. Just run your own race, I made my inner coach say. Relax, enjoy the atmosphere and take your time. Somehow I found a kind of confidence. I stopped seeing myself as a hopeless case, an injury risk, a likely dropout, and started seeing myself as a runner. Running transformed me from someone who was terrified of long distances into a woman possessed of the happy certainty that she could run 10 kilometers and then walk home to complain about the pinkification of feminist politics.
How far is 10 kilometers? A lap of a typical track is 400 meters. Four laps (plus 9 meters) is a mile. To run 10 kilometers you need to make it around that oval twenty-five times. At school, I hated running around the track more than any other activity; then, I could have imagined no greater abjection than long-distance running. To a super-fit endurance athlete, 10 kilometers is nothing. It isn’t much of a training run. To a natural athlete, possessed of good coordination and enviable confidence, 10 kilometers is a manageable distance, one that doesn’t require any particularly rigorous training. To someone who doesn’t run, it’s a hell of a long way.
That night, I knew my legs could take me 10 kilometers, farther if I wanted them to. I had planned a longer solo run a day or two after the race, and could have run 10 kilometers anywhere in the city on that rainy Saturday. I stayed because I wanted to find out what it was like to run in a crowd of women. I stayed because these experiences of being in a mass of runners, even as they irritate me, remind me of all the ways that my life has changed, that even the most unlikely scenes can yield possibility.
Running has a way of dragging you into the present moment of exertion. In those early races, when I was worrying about my calves seizing up, the attention I devoted to the sensations between my knees and my ankles made me forget about any other concerns I had to lug around. At She Runs, the present moment was pink and loud and bright, and as the shuffle toward the starting line finally gave way to running, I relaxed into the fizz of the crowd.
The first stretch was a narrow chute tightly packed with sharp elbows, along which I hopped and skittered, looking for clear space to move. The course widened, and we left the lights behind. In the darkness I found a rhythm. I wriggled my toes to feel the bounce as my feet left the ground. My heart rate picked up, and the real warmth of movement flowed through my limbs. As my shoulders loosened, I pulled my head up higher to better take in the crowd.
Other women were realigning their bodies to fit into the space, as pleased as I was finally to be moving. Was it the reliable endorphin hit that made me smile at this scene? If we had nothing else to share, we had the same finish line in sight. I waved at the kids who were huddled on the sidelines waiting for their mothers to pass by. I got dizzy running through a stretch of the park lit by a spinning disco ball, then was surprised by darkness—at one point, when I looked down, I couldn’t quite make out my feet. I slowed down and placed each foot carefully, worried that I might trip over my shoes or skid on a loose rock.
I ended where I’d started, in the candy-cane event village. This is how most running stories end, back at the beginning. And yet, I carry with me—and so does everyone, I think, who crosses a finish line—the sense that something momentous has taken place. Running through the final colonnade decked with Nike flags, I heard someone blurt out a triumphant, “Yes!” It could have been anyone. To finish a race, even slowly, even under pink lights, even when you harbor no doubts about being able to complete the distance, is a fine feeling. The run had lifted my mood—but not enough for me to join the awesome pink party. I cut a path across a section of the park that hadn’t been lit up, and when I reached the gate, I turned back to watch the lights of that one-night-only running utopia flicker, knowing that next time I visited the park, all traces of the event would have disappeared.