Woman Runs Marathon Without a Tampon to Fight the "Stigma of Periods"

Photo Source: kirangandhi.com

Staining your pants with period blood in public is just plain embarrassing. True or false? Society tells women that it’s definitely something to be ashamed of, but is it time to rethink the stigma surrounding menstruation?

Kiran Gandhi thinks so. Gandhi ran a 26-mile marathon in London on the second day of her period without a pad or a tampon to catch the flow. “I ran the whole marathon with period blood running down my legs,” she wrote of the race on her blog. “It would have been way too uncomfortable to worry about a tampon for 26.2 miles.”

Photo Source: kirangandhi.com

The 26-year-old is a Harvard Business School graduate, has played the drums for singer M.I.A, has given a TEDx talk and she now has finished a marathon with period-stained-pants.

More importantly, comfort isn’t the sole reason she decided to forego a tampon. It’s an effort to blatantly combat the “stigma of a woman’s period.”

“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,” she wrote.

“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.”

Photo Source: kirangandhi.com

Gandhi trained for a year to prepare for the race and, on the big day, was able to finish it in four hours, 49 minutes and 11 seconds, she told Cosmopolitan. Aside from the blood, she also had to run with the cramps that came with it.

She was also running for a breast cancer charity, Breast Cancer Care, for which she and her two friends collectively raised $6,000 dollars for.


Sources:
Aug. 6, 2015. "26-Year-Old Woman Free Bleeds Proudly Through Her First Marathon". cosmopolitan.com
April 26, 2015. "Sisterhood, blood and boobs at the London Marathon 2015". kirangandhi.com