It's safe to say getting your period isn't really ever the best feeling in the world. And it's especially sucky when the very next day you're running a 26.2 mile marathon that you've been training for for a year. This is exactly how things went for Kiran Gandhi - a 26-year-old drummer for M.I.A. with an MBA from Harvard Business School - who suddenly had to face a pretty tough decision: take the marathon off to deal with her flow or throw caution/tampons to the wind and run the marathon with no period protection. In the end, Kiran decided to kick stigma's ass and go tampon-free, bleeding freely as she ran. Since she'd never trained with a tampon she felt it might be too uncomfortable, and - according to this very in-depth interview from Comspolitan - she had also heard from a friend that a tampon she'd kept in her bra during a marathon once had caused permanent scarring. Kiran documented the experience of the April race in London firsthand on her blog, where she discusses how what started as a way to be comfortable during a lenghty run turned into a pretty powerful statement that's being met with a lot of mixed feelings.
"I thought, if there’s one person society won’t fuck with, it’s a marathon runner. If there’s one way to transcend oppression, it’s to run a marathon in whatever way you want. On the marathon course, sexism can be beaten. Where the stigma of a woman’s period is irrelevant, and we can re-write the rules as we choose. Where a woman’s comfort supersedes that of the observer. I ran with blood dripping down my legs for sisters who don’t have access to tampons and sisters who, despite cramping and pain, hide it away and pretend like it doesn’t exist. I ran to say, it does exist, and we overcome it every day."
We definitely think this is pretty rad of Kiran, and even moreso because she and her team raised $6,000 for Breast Cancer Care. Here's to lots more Period Pride in the future!
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