45-year-old Bryony Gordon ran her fourth London Marathon in her underwear.
She did it to prove something simple: a body doesn’t need to be perfect to achieve extraordinary things. But when someone tagged her in a photo from the race, something broke inside her. She saw the cellulite pronounced on her thighs and felt, in her own words, a visceral shame. “Was this what everyone saw while I was running 42 kilometers?”, she thought.
Then she stopped to look again. And where she had previously seen something to hide, she began to see ripples like those in the sand, like the waves of the sea. They were the legs of a woman capable of running an entire marathon. Gordon transformed her moment of shame into a message for all women: the diet and cream industry thrives on making you feel inadequate, but your real body, cellulite and all, is already amazing just as it is.
