"Can girls get six-packs?"

At home for a week between races, my sister asked my to come to track practice with her at the high school.

"We train hard," she said, in an effort to pique my interest, "Monday and Wednesday are really hard, Tuesday and Thursday are pretty hard, Friday's our easy day-- but even Friday's hard."

Unable to resist the opportunity to run with my sister and visit with my old running coaches, 3:20 on Monday saw me driving too fast over Skyline Drive and pulling up to the back side of the Wenatchee High School track. I spotted my sister's ponytail and joined her along with the rest of the distance runner clan. I was on a break from focused training to get a little mental rejuvenation after the World Cup season and before Canadian and US Long Distance Nationals in the following, consecutive weeks. Along with extracting my promise to do a level 4 interval session on Tuesday my coach, Erik, had given me the following instructions, "don't do anything too unusual, like going for a two hour run." I'm sure if Erik had even been able to imagine that I'd be tempted to run 600m intervals on a track he would have explicitly banned those too but seeing as how he hadn't...

After intervals and a cool-down jog we regrouped for stretching and abs. It had been my first time running fast since intermittently sprinting around a golf course to cheer for my sister in a cross country running race last fall and that had been on nice soft grass. By the end of our cool-down I could already feel my calves starting to think about cramping. They would have been fine if I hadn't tacked on those last 4x200m sprints, but how could I say no to a seemingly innocuous 200m? During our last set of ab exercises I was informally fielding some questions from the rest of the girls' team and willing my calves to unclench when one of the girls asked, "Can girls get six-packs?"

I was momentarily speechless and she followed up her question by commenting, "because my dad says they can't." I laughed because of how absurd I found that theory and quickly reassured her, supported by several other girls on the team, that anyone could get a six-pack with enough determination. Then I sobered up because after two months of brushing elbows with the women racing on the World Cup I had forgotten that the "women are weak and fragile" myth was still out there. There are a lot of girls, even girls who are already participating in sports, that still have yet to discover that women can be as tough and as strong as they want to be.

And dads... don't tell your girls that they can't have six-pack abs.

Kikkan Randall