Book Review: The Longest Race
Book Review: The Longest Race: Inside the Secret World of Abuse, Doping, and Deception on Nike's Elite Running Team by Kara Goucher.
During the mid-2010s, under the direction of Alberto Salazar and the Nike Oregon Project, Kara Goucher became one of the most successful U.S. distance runners in history. She has been a two-time U.S. Olympian and a world championship medalist, and these days she is the resident distance running expert whenever NBC Sports broadcasts international track&field.
She has experienced the unique challenges of competing as a female athlete on the international stage (with apologies to ABC) up close and personal.
In her memoir, The Longest Race: Inside the Secret World of Abuse, Doping, and Deception on Nike's Elite Running Team, written along with journalist Mary Pilon and recently published by Gallery Books, she exposes in stark detail the physical, emotional, and even sexual abuses she suffered as the first female participant in the Nike Oregon Project, even as she acknowledges that the role Nike’s support and coach Alberto Salazar’s expertise played in her rise to the pinnacle of both U.S. and international distance running.
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Here’s a bit of context for my reaction to Kara Goucher’s book.
My own coaching career began shortly after Title IX, the federal statute that required high school and most college and universities to provide equal educational opportunities to both men and women went into effect in 1972.
At the time there was a good deal of resistance to Title IX’s demand that women’s high school and collegiate athletic programs be upgraded to the same level as the men. Some male coaches were convinced that if support for female athletes was to be increase, then support for men’s programs would obviously have to diminish.
Of course, as time passed and challenges to the Title IX mandates worked their way through the court system, it became apparent that the addition of women’s programs would turn out to be a massive boon to the job prospects for male coaches.
There were few women in the coaching profession at the time, so most of the brand-new coaching positions created by the inclusion of female athletes as full participants in interscholastic and intercollegiate sports were initially filled by men. This remains the case to this day. Even though many of the top collegiate track&field coaches in the country are women, they continue to be in the minority.
There were plenty of male coaches eager to step into the coaching void created by Title IX. In fact, I was one of them. The downside is that most male coaches at the time had no experience with or understanding of the unique needs of the thousands of young women who were flocking to high school and collegiate teams eager to advance their athletic ambitions and personal development.
From my first part-time coaching experiences at the community college and high school levels and from my position as a local sportswriter covering the new phenomenon of girls’ and women’s sports, it was clear that some male coaches, though usually well-meaning, were missing something when it came to coaching young women. The initial results were mixed, and from the female athlete’s point of view, not always beneficial.
For example, I remember a revealing conversation with an older colleague dismayed that a promising young distance runner would be hard-pressed to match the very good times she ran in the ninth grade because as a sophomore “she got hips”.
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Fast forward to the first decade of the 21st Century.
Kara Goucher was one of the first of a growing number of elite female athletes willing to speak up about the culture of financial exploitation, performance-enhancing drugs, and sexual misconduct at the elite level of the sport.
While The Longest Race is a story told from Goucher’s unique and very personal point of view, readers will have to decide for themselves what her story means for the future of the sport. But her direct, forthright, and unvarnished storytelling makes this a must-read for anyone involved in any way with female athletes in any sport at any level.
The book begins with a nostalgic chronicle of Goucher’s three-decade career in the sport, from the day her grandfather took her to her first race, through stellar high school and collegiate careers, to her rise under Salazar’s direction to unprecedented Olympic and World Championship success, and finally to her decision to walk away from what she describes as an Oregon Distance Project environment that had become toxic and abusive.
I won’t go into detail here about how her coach/athlete relationship with Salazar blossomed, flourished, and then collapsed into a haze of recrimination, frustration, anger, and fear. Suffice it to say that everything Kara Goucher claims happened to her and to other women has never been successfully refuted.
She is brutally honest about her own struggles with body image and self-doubt during her adolescence and young adulthood. For example, she describes an incident early in her relationship with her future husband, Adam Goucher, that would be humorous if it were not so utterly typical of the dilemma faced by a veritable army of ambitious female endurance athletes.
One evening in the early spring of 2000, Adam, at the time the preeminent collegiate distance runner in the country for the University of Colorado, offered Kara a Dorito, but by her own admission, she did not take it well.
“A Dorito?” she wrote. “He must be crazy. I could feel the anxious thoughts building up, quick and harsh. If I ate the Dorito, I would be losing control of my diet.”
To anyone unfamiliar with an elite athlete’s mindset, getting angry because someone who cares about you offers you a Dorito probably seems silly. But the incident is revealing, and the fact she takes pains to recount the incident in her book foreshadows much of what is to follow.
An obsession with food and body image has been a psychological, emotional, and maybe even spiritual epidemic among young female athletes going back to pre-Title IX days. And sadly, it is an issue that seems to be reemerging among college and high school girls even today, sometimes with the misguided and misinformed encouragement of their coaches.
Goucher goes on to offer a succinct and, I think, dead-on accurate explanation for this. “The truth is,” she explains, “running often attracts a personality type that gets high off extreme discipline.”
An “extreme discipline”, she adds, which can be a two-edged sword. “On the upside, this kind of discipline can help us stick with rigorous training.” And rigorous training of the sort she and others are willing, even eager, to undertake is necessary to reach the competitive heights to which athletes like Kara Goucher aspire.
“But,” she continues. “it can also go hand in hand with the numerology of an eating disorder.”
I appreciate her use of the term numerology. Distance running training has always been about answering questions with numerological answers: How many miles per week. How many repetitions on the track? What are your personal best times? All questions with numerological answers. And all questions that even an athlete with the elite aspirations of someone like a young Kara Goucher would have been unable to answer for herself.
This is where Alberto Salazar and the Oregon project enter the picture.
Adam Goucher was a Nike sponsored athlete who had made the U.S. Olympic team in 2000. And when Nike invited Adam to move to Eugene and become part of a new training initiative, Kara was invited to (more or less) come along. The plan was to use the vast resources of Nike and the expertise of Salazar to elevate American distance running, which it did.
“They were being nice to make it sound like the opportunity was for both of us both,” Kara Goucher writes, “but Adam’s times were far more intriguing and promising than mine, and no one had to tell me that ‘Adam and Kara’ they more likely meant ‘Adam… Maybe Kara too.’”
In any case it wasn’t long before Adam, who had already been an Olympian, and Kara found themselves going in opposite directions competitively. And soon it was Kara Goucher, who was the first and for a time the only female member of the Nike Oregon Project, who became the focus of Salazar’s attention.
This is where the story gets at first difficult and eventually impossible for Kara Goucher. In the introduction, Mary Pilon explains the situation as she understood it.
“I also knew that in recent years, she’d become a pariah,” Pilon writes. “In 2015, she and her fellow Olympian husband Adam Goucher, had publicly accused their former coach, running icon Alberto Salazar, of pushing the limits of anti-doping rules.”
Remember, at the time Salazar was a veritable icon in American distance running: the winner of the New York (three times) and Boston marathons, the genius behind the one-two finish of Great Britain’s Mo Farah and American Galen Rupp in the 10,000-meter race at the 2012 London Olympics. Rupp was the first American to win 10,000-meter medal at the Olympics in 48 years.
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For Kara and Adam Goucher (and there were others) to even suggest there might be something untoward about the performance of Salazar’s athletes bordered on sacrilege.
However, Pilon is careful to acknowledge that “Kara, who had provided evidence in the case (against Salazar to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency), was not implicated and neither were her teammates Galen Rupp and Mo Farah.”
The doping charges were messy and convoluted as these matters always are, and for Salazar the consequences meted out by USADA were severe. But for Kara Goucher worse was to come.
“Kara’s story is one that only a very small handful of people have ever heard before,” Pilon explains in the introduction. “It contains details about sexual abuse and doping, exploitation of power and corporate corruption, alcoholism, and disordered eating.
Both Kara Goucher and Pilon acknowledge that The Longest Race contains details that have remained private for most of the last decade, but at some point, Kara Goucher decided that the best way to enhance the experience and guarantee the safety of female athletes at all levels would be to tell her story as bluntly as possible.
Pilon continues, “Kara’s book is similar in that it’s the story of someone coming to terms with inconvenient truths that she has struggled for years to compartmentalize and put away.”
Kara Goucher concludes her own story by briefly recounting the experience of teenage phenom Mary Caine, I think in order to demonstrate that her experience was not unique.
She closes her story with a statement of her purpose in writing The Longest Race.
“There’s still a lot of change we need to make in sports, and in our culture more broadly, when it comes to supporting those who want to tell the truth, to ending doping and sexual abuse, and to weeding out subtler forms of manipulation by the powerful of the less powerful. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that change starts when good people refuse to stay quiet.”
Goucher, Kara (with Mary Pilon). The Longest Race: Inside the Secret World of Abuse, Doping, and Deception on Nike's Elite Running Team. Gallery Books.
Click on the image below to go to the Amazon page for The Longest Race.
