Mary Cain on REDs, Period Health, and Why Sports Should Be Healthcare - This Is Not About Running

Okay, so going back to that feeling of hope, I reread parts of your book before recording this.

I read it when it first came out, and then I was like, "I'm gonna have to read it again.

We're gonna have to do this a second time." So I'm reading the introduction, and I love that you wrote it from the present tense.

I maybe have read memoirs before that are written in present tense, I just didn't really notice it.

But I love that you also say that you're doing that and why you're doing it.

And I'm just gonna read a little point of the introduction.

It says, "Years of therapy, reading through my old journals, and taking the uncomfortable but necessary time to reflect has helped me remember not just what happened and when, but how it felt.

How it felt to be young, to be hopeful, and to be hurt, to be let down, and to lose myself." And I got stuck on the word hopeful, and I was wondering as I was reading that, what is something, if anything, that you feel hopeful about in sport right now? And maybe it is just, like, women's sports having a huge moment, even though, like, they've been here, you know.

Um, or maybe specific to running.

Yeah, that's a really great question.

I think I am hopeful based on the response to my memoir.

What I have a lot of discomfort with, and I always have with things, is that I just like being really honest.

Honesty is the best policy.

And I feel right now in our culture we feel that hope needs to be positive, right? Like hope needs to be like, "Oh my gosh, look, there's more money," or, "There's more fans," or, "There's more views," or, "There's more likes." Insert these very, like, kind of outcome-oriented things that I always look at and I'm like, but what's the foundation? What's the basis here? Are we building this new, like, kind of investment into women's sport? Is it being invested well, or are we just throwing money into things because we want money? Because that's so often the foundation of sports.

I actually feel much more hopeful when people start kind of almost with the negative news, when they're like, "We know there is a problem.

We hear you.

We see this.

We agree.

Let's address it." That's actually what makes me very hopeful.

And so I think it's, if anything, been more like when people respond in that sort of way to my memoir of like, "I am comfortable addressing this uncomfortable truth.

Let's make it better," that's to me where we can actually see hope because everything else is just branding.

Everything else, it's like, yeah, if you throw a million dollars at something but it's a m- a million dollars by someone who's then gonna exploit someone or abuse someone, I don't think that [laughs] million dollars is good.

But I think if we're able to be like, okay, like, how do we actually, like, spend things well? How do we create a culture of support and positivity and health? That's when I get excited.

But the only way to do that is to actually, like, address the elephants in the room.

Yeah.