28
When I first started jogging, in my teens during college, I was self-conscious and kept to the trails on the edge of campus. I was embarrassed by my sweat and my muscly legs and by what I wasn’t: an athlete. I wore my tennis shoes and team shorts, and a repurposed halter-top. I tried to slink back to the dorm in obscurity, to shower and change into my real self.
Ten years later I felt good enough after childbirth to take to the road. I was 28. I wanted my spring back. I was passed by a lot of women running along the road. We women had shoes engineered for the road, as well as gym shorts and t-shirts and jogging bras and sweat bands. We were a purchasing power, a growing market. I was part of a movement of movement.
Ten years after that I saw it happening in France. In France, the land of make-up and fashion and perfume and “le look.” I saw women for the first time who had no “look.” They were doing and thinking of something else, probably de Beauvoir’s words, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
Ten years after that I saw it in the islands, lonely women running along the only road between the beach and the mountain, jogging before sunrise, dodging speeding cars and buses, zipping passed tethered cows, claiming their right to the road.
Ten years after that I saw it in Morocco. Women running in hijabs. Women running in caftans. Women who were middle-aged and overweight from years of children and cheap bread and scrubbing floors. They weren’t embarrassed by the fact that they weren’t runners, that they jogged really slowly, that they were never going to compete in a half-marathon. They weren’t bothered by the fact that women in this country were typically in public spaces for shopping. They weren’t deterred by passing cafes filled only with men drinking coffee. Women were claiming their own mobility as a birthright.
It might not seem like much of an accomplishment in the eyes of girls today, or in the eyes of boys of any age. But let me tell you, on behalf of all women of the last half-century, it is a huge accomplishment. We have claimed strength, health, and vigor. We have claimed public spaces. We have presented appearance not for men’s approval. We have appropriated time in the day. We have done this for ourselves.