Thanks to Race Roster for sponsoring this month of the podcast. Race Roster and its Runkeeper app, now a part of the ASICS family, form a great team that drastically enhances the digital services Race Directors require to host premier events. Next time you're looking at registration or virtual race platforms, take a look at Race Roster.
This Pride Month banter episode features special guest Michael Clemons, founder and owner of the Louisville Running Company. Michael, already having completed his run before our early morning recording session, gives us a little bit of his history with running before sharing his coming out story. Thankfully, his coming out story is a supportive one, and among the first people who he came out to were his college cross country teammates.
After one of the eponymous "two clueless straight dudes" asks Michael to, he defines two key terms ("LGBTQ+" and "cisgender") for our hosts and listeners before educating us on how our run crews, clubs, and teams can be more LGBTQ+ friendly (use your words thoughtfully and display those rainbows proudly, allies, and back that up with your actions!). Tony then asks Michael to give races a grade on how they're doing on LGBTQ+ inclusion, and Michael gives us a grade that shows there's room for improvement. And the hosts and Michael all agree that while portalets are egalitarian in their terribleness, registration with only binary gender options should rapidly become a relic of the past.
Coming at it from the viewpoint of someone whose workplace is the endurance sports events industry, Michael encourages us all to embrace sharing our pronouns even if we conform to traditional gender norms, to normalize and make it easier for those who may not. And as a sometimes road warrior, he encourages us to think about how we house folks when we bring in folks from away to work our events.
We then transition to talking about track and field's (or as Eli pretentiously calls it, "athletics") spotty history (and present) of policing sexuality and gender, especially as relates to transgender athletes. And Michael wonders whether, in the vast majority of cases, there may not need to be any policing of gender for purposes of awards, and holds up Western States's Transgender Entrants Policy and the BAA's qualification policy as examples of good, gender-inclusive ones.
We then ask Michael, as a Louisville resident who has been attending protests and speaking out since the killings of Breonna Taylor and then David McAtee and also someone who has to work closely with police, how he has navigated that, and also about his sense of ethics in the industry overall.
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