Champion distance runner Lauren Fleshman still remembers the first time she lost a race to a boy. She was in middle school, and had developed a reputation as the fastest overall runner, the one who consistently won the mile. Until one day, she wasn't fastest.
"When I first got beat by one of my male peers ... it was because he hit puberty and kind of skyrocketed his performance in the mile in a very short period of time," she says. "It was very disorienting to find out that puberty was going to create two different paths for my male peers and my female peers, and that I was on the one that I wasn't so sure I wanted to be on."
