Haley Shapley

Welcome back, friend! You know my favorite thing to do after gushing about a book? Host the author. 🙂 Yesterday, I shared about Strong Like Her: A Celebration of Rule Breakers, History Makers, and Unstoppable Athletes by Haley Shapley, a non-fiction book about women athleticism. Let’s chat with Haley about the book! In case you missed what the book is about, here’s a quick recap with my weights:

---

---

Get to know the author: Haley Shapley

Hi Haley! It is a pleasure to have you on Armed with A Book. I have been excited for our conversation ever since we connected some months back. Please tell me and my readers a bit about yourself.

Thanks for having me! I’m a writer and fitness enthusiast, and with Strong Like Her, I got to combine my personal and professional lives into one project.

Everytime I look at my copy of Strong Her Life or even think about it, I feel a rush of joy and strength. It symbolizes my personal fitness journey and reminds me of how proud I am of it. I want to learn about your fitness journey and how that led you to writing this book.

I grew up playing a lot of sports and always enjoyed being active and athletic, but I never really focused on being stronger when I was younger. I wanted to be faster, more agile, more flexible, more coordinated, and to be honest, I wanted to be smaller. I did a little bit of weight training as a teenager, but it wasn’t until my 30s that I started lifting weights in any serious kind of way.

Once I did, my understanding of my body’s capabilities changed, and I became less concerned about what I should look like. Instead, I was lot more motivated by what I could accomplish in the gym.

It was after I started training for a bodybuilding show that I got the idea for the book. I found people’s reactions to my goal to be interesting, and so I wanted to learn more about the women who’d come before me. But when I tried to read about the history of fitness, I found most books were focused on men. That’s when I knew I had an opportunity to tell the story of the female fitness trailblazers.

In the introduction of your book, you shared how bodybuilding is not just about strength but also mindfulness. Can you elaborate more on this connection and all the less spoken of benefits of exercising and working with our bodies?

Physical strength isn’t just about how much you can lift or how fast you can run — it’s one aspect of overall well-being, including mental, emotional, and spiritual strength. Sometimes people think of working out as this frivolous pursuit, but when you’re in tune with your body, it does feed into other parts of your life, improving your connection to yourself and boosting your resilience. 

Strong Like Her is a tribute to all the women who pursued their interests throughout time, no matter how illogical the restrictions posed on them were. You explored societal perceptions, gender biases, body type, clothing, media coverage amongst many important details. It all came together holistically and I loved every chapter. What was your process of researching for this book? Were there any challenges you had to overcome?

The biggest challenge was feeling like I’d done enough research to be ready to write. There was always another article I could read, another library I could visit, another interview I could conduct. At some point, though, I just had to trust that I’d done a whole lot of research and was ready to synthesize that into a work of my own.

I think the other big challenge was organization. Like you mention, there are a lot of themes in the book, so I had to decide which stories fit best where and how I could tell a coherent narrative with so many different threads. I’m so glad it came together holistically for you!

How was the first draft different from the final one?

It’s 15,000 words shorter, for one! It was tough cutting that many words, but it ultimately led to a more streamlined read. The organization of the chapters is a bit different, as well — my editor really helped me sharpen the flow of the book. I’m grateful for her work on it! But the general messages and main characters did remain throughout the entire process.

I was awestruck when I read about Muscle Beach and how it inspired so many people to just work out together as a community. Was there something new that you learned that you didn’t know about before writing this book?

Yes, so much! One example is that I had never heard of the sport of pedestrianism before I wrote the book. It was America’s first spectator sport, and it involved walking a long distance, either against a competitor or with a time goal. One of the women I write about in the book, Ada Anderson, would do these super-long walking matches, like 2,700 quarter miles in 2,700 quarter hours. That’s almost 675 miles in about a month. And she barely got to sleep during that entire time, because she’d only have a few minutes after she finished her quarter mile before the bell rung again for the next lap. These pedestrians ended up being celebrities and made quite a bit of money. It’s such an interesting part of sports history, and yet something I don’t think a lot of people know about.

The events of the Women’s World Cup and the US soccer team’s efforts to get equal pay are fairly recent. You summarized their critiques really well in “boys will be boys, but girls will be humble.” What kind of arguments are organizations like the United States Soccer Federation making to withhold equal pay? I have heard comparatively fewer audiences watching women’s soccer vs men’s soccer as one of them but I am not sure how audience size and funding for such national organizations relates to what the players get. What are your thoughts on this issue?

A lot of people believe that women’s sports are inherently inferior and not deserving of the same pay as men’s sports. Many argue that it’s all about revenue generated by men vs. women, but we have this example of the U.S. women’s soccer team, where the women in recent years have generated more than the men, and still had to fight for pay that they felt was equitable. If we invested in women’s sports at the same level as men’s sports and we normalized the watching of women’s sports and equally admired the talent women display, we wouldn’t think of this idea that they could possibly earn the same as so foreign.

Strong Like Her includes photographs by Sophy Holland of prominent athletes. Did you meet or know any of them already? 

I hadn’t met any of them prior to the photo shoots, but I knew of many of them. Sophy knew a few as well. I did a lot of research to come up with a wonderful, diverse collection of 23 women who represent all kinds of different sports, backgrounds, body types, etc.

Of everyone you mentioned in this book, if you could meet one in person, who would it be and why?

Great question! I’d love to meet Pudgy Stockton. She was known as the Queen of Muscle Beach in the 1930s and ‘40s, and she seems like she was a very sweet, genuine person. She inspired a lot of people, men and women, to get into lifting weights, and I love how encouraging she was of athletes of all levels.

Though my adoption and love of exercise into my everyday life has been fairly recent, I didn’t grow up with the challenges and perceptions that women as late as the 1970s faced and many still continue to in professional settings today. How has your perception of womanhood changed from your childhood to now?

I grew up in a time when girls had a lot of opportunities to play sports compared to previous generations, but there were still quite a few ideas about what we should and shouldn’t do. I had these beauty standards encoded in me that did not include women with a lot of visible muscularity. Now, I think we’re more accepting of a wider variety of body types, and there’s more understanding that strength is important for all athletes.

What are some things that parents and teachers can do to encourage young girls to pursue fitness and embrace their strength from an early age?

Parents and teachers should provide encouragement and opportunities for girls (and everyone, for that matter!) to pursue fitness. Research shows that 96% of women at the C-suite level in major companies played sports growing up. Studies have also shown that girls who play sports are more likely to attend college, find a well-paying job, and work in male-dominated industries.

One thing adults can do is make sure girls have access to a sports bra. This is a big reason why girls leave sports as they enter adolescence, and it’s easy to fix. There’s an organization called Bras for Girls that helps out with this.

Do you have any favorite women characters in fiction?

So many! I’ll always love Jo March from Little Women — I once toured Louisa May Alcott’s home in Concord, Massachusetts, and it was very exciting for a book nerd like myself. Nancy Drew is another good one. I love how smart she was — she was always on top of it! I also think it’s important to have complicated women’s characters in fiction. Lily Bart from Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth comes to mind. She’s not always the most likeable character, but she is real.

Are there any books you would recommend around fitness? 

For the story of one woman who gets involved in strongman competitions, read Alyssa Ages’ Secrets of Giants — she goes into the history of the sport and talks a lot about the benefits outside of the physical. Lauren Fleshman’s Good for a Girl is a great memoir about an elite runner and her experience in a sports system that was built for men. And if you really like the historical aspects of Strong Like Her, Let’s Get Physical by Danielle Friedman looks at women’s exercise culture, covering the origins of barre, Jazzercise, and more.

Are you currently working on another book or would like to share about a personal project? 

My next book proposal is complete and is actually out with editors now, so I’m hoping I’ll have news to share soon! 

Is there anything else you would like to add?

I think we’ve covered it all!

Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me and share with my readers. Strong Like Her is on my forever shelf and I am grateful for the opportunity you gave me to read it and learn from you.

I appreciate you reading the book and sharing it with your audience!

---

Thanks for joining us! Learn more about Haley on her website. Connect with her on X and Instagram.

I hope you will check out Strong Like Her on Goodreads. Read my review here.