No, Mary Cain is not a hero. She's just another frustrated former athlete eager to cast blame for her personal failings and her misjudgments of a high-profile program and myopic coach. In news this week, former Nike distance runner Mary Cain has lambasted her former coach and program by attributing her personal traumas to a “system” abusive toward women. In her scathing exposé of Nike’s Oregon Project, Cain points to coaches who encouraged her to get “thinner, and thinner, and thinner” in order to compete with the world’s best. In her diatribe against Salazar, Cain claims that he “created an arbitrary number of 114 pounds” as a target weight for the 5’ 7” athlete. To get a better idea as to why Salazar might encourage his athletes to cut weight, we might benefit from an assessment of the body mass index (BMI) readings for the top female middle-distance athletes at that time. To simplify the data, we’ll take a look at the BMIs for each female athlete who compete