There's No Such Thing as a Runner's Body
Nobody has ever met an orca trainer at a party and said, "Really? You train orcas? Huh. You just don't have the typical orca-trainer body."
What is the typical orca-trainer body? Powerful herring-delivery shoulders? A long wingspan for reaching across a splash zone? The rare combination of a strong whistle and the quiet confidence required to tell a wet, six-ton apex predator, "No, that was good, but let's try it one more time"?
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Join the YDS community on PatreonPerhaps, at the elite level, there are biomechanical advantages. Longer arms may allow a trainer to distribute fish with greater efficiency. Strong quads could be useful when crouching beside a pool. A sleek ponytail certainly reduces drag. But it would be strange to look at someone's body and decide whether they spend their working hours asking an orca to please return the traffic cone to the stage.
But we do this to runners (and athletes of every kind) all the time. I understand that I move through the running world with a certain amount of body privilege, but even I've been told I don't "look like a runner" enough times to have extremely strong feelings about this. I've also had a stranger follow me around a grocery store before finally accosting me in the produce section to announce, "You look like a softball player."
I have never played a sport involving a ball. This is not a criticism of softball players, who presumably have the ideal physique for softball by virtue of playing softball. It is a criticism of the absolutely deranged confidence required to study a stranger's body between the avocados and the bagged spinach, assign it a sport, and then share your findings publicly.
What "You Look Like a Runner" Really Means
"You look like a runner."
"I never would have guessed you run marathons."
"You don't look like someone who runs that far."
Usually, "you look like a runner" is intended as a compliment. It is rarely a comment about the visible strength of your soleus or the unmistakable confidence with which you approach a Denny's Grand Slam. It generally means: You are thin. Possibly also tan, or wearing a giant watch. You look like someone we have been taught to associate with discipline, restraint, speed, health, and owning several small pairs of shorts. That's a lot of baggage to place on a worn-out pair of split shorts.
It would sound deranged if we applied the same logic anywhere else.
"You have the ideal build for historical research."
"I can tell from your waist-to-hip ratio that you play the bassoon."
"I'm surprised you're a very accomplished accountant. You have more of a recreational falconer's body."
"You'd probably be better at pottery if you lost five pounds."
We understand that accountants, bassoonists, potters, falconers, and orca trainers can have all kinds of bodies. Their bodies may change throughout their lives without ejecting them from the profession. A falconer who gains weight remains, critically, still a falconer!
But running occupies a strange place in our culture. It is something you do, but we also treat it as something your body must continually prove.
Is There a "Runner's Body"?
There are, of course, physical traits that can affect performance. Running is a physical sport, and bodies are not irrelevant to it. At the sharpest end of elite competition, tiny physiological and biomechanical differences matter. But most people are not attempting to win the Olympic marathon. They are attempting to run around their neighborhood, finish a trail race, improve their time, spend a few hours with friends, or just get away from the house for a little bit to finish their sixth true crime podcast of the day.
Looking at someone cannot tell you whether they do those things. It cannot tell you their aerobic capacity, durability, training history, pain tolerance, tactical intelligence, or ability to eat mashed potatoes out of a plastic bag at mile 70. It cannot tell you whether they are fast. It cannot even really tell you if they're healthy.
When You Don't Feel Like You Look Like a Runner
Still, knowing that doesn't automatically dissolve the feeling that you don't look like a runner.
Maybe you see race photos and immediately search for the angle that makes you appear smallest. Special shoutout here to my quads, which seem engaged in a cosmic struggle with every camera that's ever wandered onto a race course.
Maybe you stand beside other athletes and feel as though they showed up in the correct bodies while you brought yours by mistake. Maybe you have increased your food intake, recovered from RED-S, gotten stronger, or gained weight during a hard training block, and some part of you remains convinced that doing everything "right" should eventually make you thinner.
That is a story a lot of us have carried onto starting lines, ball courts, into gyms, and wherever the hell orca trainers report for duty. We have been taught that athleticism has a look, and that the body produced by training should be visible proof of our discipline. (We dug into where that idea comes from in our episode on the reality of racing weight.)
The athletes most commonly shown to us are lean. Sports brands use lean bodies to sell movement as both an activity and a body-transformation project. Race coverage spends most of its time at the front of the field. Social media supplies a steady stream of visible abs and tiny shorts.
Even body-positive messages often arrive attached to the same narrow range of bodies. You may hear "fuel your body" from someone whose body looks exactly like the one diet culture promised you if you behaved perfectly. The message can be good, and the surrounding imagery can still make you want to scream.
You are allowed to feel complicated about your body. I know I do. After nearly a decade in recovery, I've received unsolicited reviews from every direction: You look great. You look tired. You look so fit. Have you gained weight? As someone who talks publicly about recovery, I can become especially self-conscious about whatever story people think my body is telling—or, worse, whatever story they think it proves about me.
But I've also learned that people are idiots. They do not know what is happening inside my body, what I eat, how I train, how I feel, or whether I have ever played softball. Mostly, they are projecting an entire narrative onto the shape of a stranger and then presenting it to her as useful information.
How to Respond When Someone Comments on Your Body
It is enough to make a person walk fully clothed into the orca tank at SeaWorld and ask to be left alone. But you do not have to disclose your medical history, explain your recovery, or deliver a TED Talk every time someone attempts a compliment that makes them sound like they've been in a coma since the 1970s. You can redirect, make a joke, say that you don't discuss bodies, or simply allow the comment to hang in the air like a fish nobody has agreed to throw.
There Is No Runner's Body. There Are Running Bodies.
There is no runner's body. There are bodies at the front, middle, and back of races. Bodies returning from injury. Bodies getting faster, slowing down, aging, menstruating, recovering, adapting, and occasionally crouching behind a shrub for reasons we need not discuss. They are not all equally represented, celebrated, or believed. But they are all running bodies.
The same rule applies to orca trainers. If you train an orca, you have an orca-trainer body. Although you should probably also have excellent health insurance and access to an enormous bucket of fish.
And if you run, hell yeah. You look exactly like a person who runs.
We talk about bodies, sport, and the stories we're sold about both on the Your Diet Sucks podcast, including our episode on body image and eating disorders in male athletes. If you want more essays like this one, plus a community of people who also don't think your quads owe anyone an explanation, come join us on Patreon.
If you're struggling with eating or body image, you don't have to figure it out alone. The National Alliance for Eating Disorders helpline is a good place to start.
