A WOMAN WHO ran the London marathon without a tampon while on her period said she did it to show the “stigma of a woman’s period is irrelevant”.
Kiran Gandhi, a Harvard Business School Graduate and professional drummer for M.I.A., wrote about the experience and shared photos of the marathon on her site KiranGandhi.com.
I ran the whole marathon with my period blood running down my legs.
I got my flow the night before and it was a total disaster but I didn’t want to clean it up. It would have been way too uncomfortable to worry about a tampon for 26.2 miles.
“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. The marathon was radical and absurd and bloody in ways I couldn’t have imagined until the day of the race.”
Gandhi ran the marathon for Breast Cancer Care and finished with a time of 4:49:11.
The 26-year-old told Cosmopolitan magazine about what the experience was like and described how an older lady ran up to her and said, “You have your period!”
She looked very disgusted when she was informing me about that. And I just say with a thumbs up, “No way! Didn’t realize that. Thank you.”
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