Maggie Mertens is a Seattle-based journalist whose essays and reporting have appeared in The Atlantic, NPR, Sports Illustrated and more. She was nominated for the 2021 Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting. In her new book, “Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women” (on sale June 18), Mertens delves into how, over the past century, women have defied limitations and broken down gender barriers through competitive running.
The Seattle Times spoke with Mertens about her debut book, and why now, as gender discrimination in sports is a topic of discussion across the country, might be the right time for a book about women in running. More This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What inspired you to write a book about women in sports through a journalistic lens at a time when women’s sports are rising in popularity? I wanted to write a book that connected why women’s sports and women athletes really do matter on a broader scale.
Those of us that have been writing these stories for a long time are kind of like, what happened? What changed this moment? I think specifically the thing that I charted as a journalist and just as a fan was the women’s soccer shift. The first piece I wrote about the U.S.
women’s national soccer team was in 2015, just before the Women’s World Cup. Looking back at that is like night and day. The amount that people paid attention — the names that people knew.
I wrote a piece for the At.