Woman runs marathon without a tampon to encourage others to be proud of their period

26-year old Kiran Gandhi chose to let her period flow during the London Marathon to raise awareness about people who have no access to feminine products and to encourage period pride.

Initially Kiran and her two best friends were only running to raise £3,800 ($6,000) for Breast Cancer Care but as fate would have it, the day before the marathon, nature called.

The brave young drummer and Harvard graduate made the decision to do without a tampon for 26 miles and to rather run comfortably and freely.

“To me, period-shaming is when you – as someone who is experiencing the bleeding – have to make somebody else comfortable before yourself,” said Kiran

While many understand her reasoning, others think she is “disgusting” for doing it.



Kiran has a message for any critics who may hate on her choice to free-bleed: “I don’t care if people want to make fun of me. I felt good doing it, it’s my life, and it’s my story.”

 

Picture Credit: kirangandhi.com
Extract taken from Kiran's blog:

FEMINISM: I RAN THE WHOLE MARATHON WITH MY PERIOD BLOOD RUNNING DOWN MY LEGS. I got my flow the night before and it was a total disaster but I didn’t want to clean it up. It would have been way too uncomfortable to worry about a tampon for 26.2 miles. I thought, if there’s one person society won’t f@#k with, it’s a marathon runner. If there’s one way to transcend oppression, it’s to run a marathon in whatever way you want.

 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. 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. The marathon was radical and absurd and bloody in ways I couldn’t have imagined until the day of the race.

SOURCES: www.buzzfeed.com, kirangandhi.com, www.independent.co.uk