Eilish McColgan is no stranger to body-shaming on social media, but one incident stands out. A woman sent an unsolicited photo of American athletes, including Mary Cain, to the British runner, along with a barbed comment that McColgan should be trying to model her physique after those in the image.
In 2019, Cain, who was a former Nike Oregon Project athlete, opened up about how her period stopped for three years and how she broke five bones because of osteoporosis while under pressure to lose weight to perform. Considered a once-in-a-generation talent as a teenager, Cain has not competed on the world stage since 2020.
“This woman said I should try and be like them because they looked far healthier than me and I looked far too unhealthy,” McColgan tells Telegraph Sport from her sunny altitude training base in Colorado.
“It’s been well publicised that Mary has been suffering from a severe eating disorder at the point this image was taken and she was self-harming. I mean she was really, really struggling and in a bad abusive coaching-athlete relationship and ultimately left the sport. So I messaged this woman back saying, ‘You just proved my point’.”
As McColgan says “you can’t assess someone’s health by just looking at them”, yet almost every time she posts a video or photo on social media, she is told to “go and eat” or faces armchair diagnoses of a non-existent eating disorder.
The dangers of under-fuelling are real. Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport is a syndrome that has affected many sportswomen, particularly when it comes to fertility, loss of periods and bone density (as discussed in the below Telegraph Women’s Sport podcast). But while it is a danger for athletes, it is not McColgan’s reality.
“I’m still in the sport over a decade later – normal menstrual cycle, normal bone density, normal blood tests,” she says. “But this person you sent me saying I should try and aspire to be her body shape was not healthy, so it’s trying to get that across to people too.”
A distance runner will not have the same body shape as a sprinter, or as a shot-putter, yet all are professional athletes.
While McColgan is told on social media that she is under-fuelling, she says that fellow British long-distance runner Charlotte Purdue is often told the opposite, despite having ran the second-fastest national marathon time, behind only Paula Radcliffe.
“When I stand on the start line at the Olympic Games I don’t feel out of place in that way, I don’t feel like I look unhealthy or anything else, I just look like most of the other people who are there,” McColgan says.
“It’s another thing that’s misconstrued a lot. There’s a lot of eating disorders within Olympic sports now but I can’t speak about other sports, I can only speak about distance running. I can assure you, to compete at this level, fuelling is a huge priority. You might get away with it for a year, maybe two years at a push but that’s really it.”
Earlier this month, McColgan’s mother Liz, who was also a middle- and long-distance runner and competed at the 1988, 1992 and 1996 Olympics, called out the comments aimed at her daughter’s body as “demeaning and abuse”.
Confronting trolls is not what motivates McColgan, however. Instead it is a desire to protect her younger followers, and to try to dispel the misinformation that circulates on social media.
“I don’t call it out every day, I don’t have the energy to call out every person who says something to me,” says the 34-year-old. “But I do think it’s important every so often that I do call it out because I’m aware that younger women – and younger boys as well because I have boys that follow me… I want to make sure that they know that these comments aren’t my reality.
“I don’t want them to get this warped idea in their mind that they believe that I am starving myself, and that I have to do this in order to run fast or that being lighter equals faster – and that’s just not the case.
“It’s such a scary concept for young people – not even young people, even adults get drawn into that too. So I want them to know the reality is completely different to these comments.
“I’ve had a couple of young guys message me and say they are being targeted for being a beanpole – and I just say stand up for yourself, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to be yourself. That’s your own body shape, that’s your natural body shape and there’s nothing you can do about it. We all come in different shapes and sizes.”
McColgan qualified for her first Olympic Games in 2012, making her debut in the 3,000 metres steeplechase, although since then her focus has increasingly shifted to longer distances. She is currently stepping up training for her first marathon, in London at the end of April, having had to pull out of the 2023 edition because of injury.
Having been a professional athlete for more than a decade, McColgan has a sense of perspective as well as the knowledge of what it takes to secure long-term success in a sport.
“Ultimately you’ll learn very quickly, if you’re not fuelling for a marathon – you’ll know about it,” she says. “I understand when people say, ‘Oh but there’s people who are unhealthy but manage to perform’, but it’s really short-lived. You might get one year of good performances and then the sad reality is they vanish very quickly.
“I mean anorexic runners or runners who have eating disorders, it’s really brutal to see but their careers are very short-lived. It’s a really short time frame where their body allows them to operate to a normal level and then it just vanishes so quickly.
“The only way to be consistent over however long really in this sport, whether you’re an amateur or a professional is to do it properly and fuel your body correctly. Ultimately what you’re putting in – it’s no different to a car and you’re fuelling your running.
“My body is my job, so looking after my body is the most important thing for me because if I’m not, I’m going to get injured, I’m going to get sick and I won’t perform to the level that I need to to do my job at the end of the day.
“So it’s trying to get across that looking after your body should be, as an athlete, the absolute top priority.”
‘I’d like to be faster than my mum and get a Scottish record’
As the conversation turns to London, McColgan cannot avoid showing her competitive streak when asked if she has any goals or aims for the race.
“The first thing is to get around, and enjoy it,” she says, before adding: “I suppose I’d quite like to be faster than my mum’s best and get a new Scottish record. I think she ran a 2:26.”
Liz ran the London Marathon six times, finishing in 2hr 29min 37sec on her debut, and clocking her personal-best 2-26-52 in 1997 – that is the one her daughter is now targeting.
For a first-time marathon runner, though, McColgan remains realistic. “It’s a completely new challenge for me, so I’ve never ever run that far in training, in a race. The longest race I’ve ever done is a half-marathon, so it’s a very, very different game.
“But really there’s no goal on the overall thing. This for me is a huge stepping stone, just getting one and actually getting round it, the whole experience of it will be a huge, huge learning curve for me that I can build on and that I can take into future marathons.”
Eilish McColgan is an ambassador for leading electronics brand, Shokz.
