Memories of school PE classes, for me, are a haze of cold changing rooms, crumpled notes from my mum excusing me from taking part and sitting on a bench watching other girls play netball.
I tried to skive PE for most of my teenage years, embarrassed about my body and the changes that were taking place. My breasts developed early on, taking me by surprise, and the eyes in the changing room, including mine, were quick to notice who had started wearing a bra and who hadn’t. Then there was the issue of periods when the summer came round and we were ushered towards the swimming pool. The choice was to hold your hand up and admit to having your period, use tampons (a choice not all teens are comfortable with) or complain, as I did, of verrucas.
So, I was reluctant to get changed in front of my classmates halfway through the school day to then stand out on the school field getting cold or, even worse, sweaty. I remember the changing rooms after PE being thick with the smell of antiperspirant, so much so that the school tried to ban them for fear of inducing asthma attacks. The favourite perfumes in my era, Charlie Red and the Body Shop’s White Musk, were passed round with more enthusiasm than a joint at a party as we were all fearful of any sort of body odour being detected. I also remember my own despair after my supposed “best friends” gossiped behind my back about a smell they decided was coming from my armpits. It was one of the worst accusations that could be made – that you smelled. It seems time hasn’t changed our schools’ sports halls as a study for the Women’s Sports and Fitness Foundation finds that more than half of girls are put off physical activity by PE classes and that 48% view sweating as not feminine.
But it’s not just school-aged girls who find sweat unfeminine – we “grownups” are guilty of this, too. Walk into any gym across the country and you’ll find lots of women working out. But you’ll also see a number of them practising a careful routine of exercising without perspiring, makeup still intact. Part of the problem is that exercise and sport are sold to women (and therefore girls, too) as something that will help make them look better, to slim down and attract men. The cover of Women’s Fitness magazine invites us to “Get slim and sexy now”. Exercise and sport is sold, not as something enjoyable in its own right, but as something that must be endured in order to burn fat or slim down your thighs.
It seems absurd that we’re promoting the appearance-enhancing properties of sport to women and then are shocked when young girls don’t want to get sweaty and red-faced because they see it as unfeminine. Photographer Sacha Goldberger’s pictures of runners taken after their workout, and later looking their most glamorous, captured a more realistic image of the face of exercise than the cover of most fitness magazines or advertising campaigns. The subjects unashamedly show their sweat simply as the result of hard effort.
And it’s no wonder that 43% of girls agree that “there aren’t many sporting role models for girls” when not a single woman, sweaty or otherwise, made it on to the BBC’s 2011 Sports Personality of the Year shortlist of 10.
Even the successful female sports people that do rise to the top and get noticed regularly have their femininity called into question: Serena Williams often being described as “masculine” and Paula Radcliffe being referenced as much for her mid-marathon toilet break than for her athletic achievements.
Engagement with sport doesn’t start and end in the school sports hall or on the pages of a magazine. The Women’s Sports and Fitness Foundation findings also show that mothers are a particularly powerful source of encouragement for participation in sport and physical activity for younger girls: 37% of girls say “I am motivated to be active because my mother/step-mother is active”.
I remember cheering on my own mother as she completed the Seabank Marathon from Skegness to Boston. Twenty years later the tables have turned and this month she’ll watch me cross the finish line of my fourth marathon.
I hated sport at school but in my late 20s I came to love running. After the sudden death of an uncle from a heart condition I finally started going to the gym, but found all the machines ridiculous apart from the treadmill. Here was something that might have a use in the real world – I might need to run towards something or away from someone at some point in my life. So once I could run for three miles indoors I quit the gym and took to the streets.
Now on the mantelpiece in my parents’ house, alongside the pictures of my siblings on their wedding days, there’s a photo of me completing my first marathon – sweat, tears, snot and pride on my face. And while you might not think it looks feminine, I think it looks pretty awesome!
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