Maggie Mertens is a Seattle-based journalist whose essays and reporting have appeared in The Atlantic, NPR, Sports Illustrated and more. She was nominated for the 2021 Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting.
In her new book, “Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women” (on sale June 18), Mertens delves into how, over the past century, women have defied limitations and broken down gender barriers through competitive running.
The Seattle Times spoke with Mertens about her debut book, and why now, as gender discrimination in sports is a topic of discussion across the country, might be the right time for a book about women in running.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What inspired you to write a book about women in sports through a journalistic lens at a time when women’s sports are rising in popularity?
I wanted to write a book that connected why women’s sports and women athletes really do matter on a broader scale. Those of us that have been writing these stories for a long time are kind of like, what happened? What changed this moment?
I think specifically the thing that I charted as a journalist and just as a fan was the women’s soccer shift. The first piece I wrote about the U.S. women’s national soccer team was in 2015, just before the Women’s World Cup. Looking back at that is like night and day. The amount that people paid attention — the names that people knew. I wrote a piece for the Atlantic right before that tournament started about how these women had a lawsuit then about playing on turf instead of grass. I pointed out some of these inequities because I’d been to the men’s World Cup the year before in Brazil, and seeing this global phenomenon of soccer, and then to see how people talked about the Women’s World Cup, even at that point, it was just so diminished in comparison.
After writing that story, I got so much pushback … The men on the internet just really didn’t like the idea that anyone would consider treating women in soccer similar to the way we treat men in soccer. And then by the next World Cup, these women are household names, they’re suing FIFA, they’re getting in fights with the president. They’re actually making the case for equal pay and things like that. Seeing that progress happen so quickly, I think did help me realize why these things matter so much: yes to the growth of women’s sports, but also to gender inequality in general.
Did your Seattle upbringing help shape how you see the world regarding gender and sports?
I grew up in Bothell, Washington. My childhood was really 90s suburban Seattle, very outdoorsy and sporty. Growing up with four brothers made me very aware of how boys were conditioned to be and what those differences were between them and myself.
I went to a women’s college, and so I had this experience of what it’s like to be surrounded by boys and then surrounded entirely by women and that’s really what set me off on this journey: What is gender?
One of my first jobs out of college, I was working at a women’s magazine, which was almost [an] entirely female working experience. Talking and writing about women athletes got me thinking about why we’re at this moment where we can celebrate every female CEO but not every female soccer player in the same way of feminist excitement. I was curious about why we live like this, why we’re all in these buckets.
The chapters in “Better Faster Farther” are titled after myths about women’s limitations in running that have been debunked. If you had to write another chapter of the book or debunk another limitation, what would it be?
The myth that women aren’t worth as much as athletes. That idea of value. I think this is the one that’s going to take a lot longer to move along.
We’ve seen some movement on that front, but when you look at the way that women athletes are valued, on a very baseline level, the comparisons are so out of proportion. That still says so much about the way that we value women’s abilities and especially in these physical sports and physical types of jobs.
In running specifically, there’s a little less of that, but we’ve only just seen women runners get contracts that allow them to have maternity leave. There’s still a lot of precarity for women runners and I would say that’s also to do with the way that we value women athletes a bit less than we value men.
What do you want readers to take away most from the book?
The big picture thing that I really hope people come away with is the idea that human beings are amazing and we exist on a spectrum and we don’t have to try to sort everyone into two distinct buckets of existence. When we do that, which we do for a lot of the reasons that I explain in the book, we end up trying to find these differences and make these differences so stark. In reality, they’re really not. What we do is make it seem as though anyone who doesn’t fit the stereotypical description of a woman versus a man doesn’t belong or is an outsider.
I think that is really where a lot of the antagonism and political attacks on transgender athletes and intersex athletes is coming from. It’s like, you don’t fit into this box that society said you should fit in. Rather than seeing sports is really for everyone.
What if we expanded our definitions of what gender is, what sports can be, and the ways that we can compete, and the categories we have for competing? It just becomes a very exclusionary practice and that’s kind of a bummer for everyone. It’s not great for us to constantly be doing that. Why can’t we think a little bit more broadly about humanity?
