Who Gets to Play in Women’s Leagues?
Boulder, Colorado, where I was born and raised, is sometimes called the fittest city in America. Septuagenarians go skiing before work, high-school delinquents hang out at the climbing gym, and people do not so much hike as trail run. Every year, the town hosts the BOLDERBoulder, one of the largest road races in the country and a sort of festival day in honor of the local god of exercise. I first ran the ten-kilometre course when I was six, not an unusual age of initiation for locals, and discovered that I was a bizarrely good runner. Three years in a row, I finished first out of some four hundred girls my age, and fifth or sixth out of a similar number of boys. At twelve, the last year I raced, I ran what was then the sixth-fastest time ever recorded by a twelve-year-old girl in the race...
