Long Road to Boston. Mr Mark Sutcliffe

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СКАЧАТЬ there is evidence that women not only thrive in long- distance events, but might even be better-suited to them than men. In 2002, Pam Reed became the first woman to be the overall winner at the Badwater Ultramarathon. Billed as the world’s toughest footrace, Badwater is a scorching test of one-hundred and thirty-five miles through Death Valley. In 2003, Paula Radcliffe set the women’s world record at the London Marathon in a time that was less than ten minutes off the men’s standard. In 1970, the gap between the men’s and women’s bests was more than fifty-three minutes.

      Less than six months before Reed was born, the 800 meters was restored to the Olympics at the 1960 games in Rome. But that was it; women were not allowed to run more than half-a-mile. The limit remained in place for the 1964 and 1968 Olympics. Perhaps organizers needed to make sure that it wasn’t just a fluke that the entire field hadn’t collapsed at the finish line.

      In 1972, a women’s 1,500-meter race, just slightly less than a mile, was added. That was the limit for the next three Olympics, until finally, in 1984, women were allowed to run in a 3,000-meter race and the marathon.

      That was twelve years after women were officially allowed to run the Boston Marathon, and eighteen years after they started doing so. The trail was blazed primarily by two women.

      Bobbi Gibb says she fell in love with the Boston Marathon in 1964. “I was running through the woods with the neighborhood dogs when I first saw it,” she once wrote. “I didn’t know the marathon was closed to women.”

      Gibb started training seriously. Her boyfriend would drive her somewhere on his motorcycle and she would run home. She gradually increased her distance from one mile to ten. Eventually she was running back and forth to school, where she studied sculpture. She didn’t follow a specific training program or book, and she ran in nurse’s shoes because there was no footwear designed for female runners.

      “For me, running was a form of communion with nature and a way to rejoin my mind and body,” Gibb wrote.

      Gibb and her dog Moot traveled across the United States in a Volkswagen bus in 1965. Every day, she says, she ran for hours in a new place – “the hills of Massachusetts, the grassy fields of the Midwest, the open prairies of Nebraska, the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevadas, the coast of California. I’d never seen this earth before, and to me it was wondrous.”

      Some of her runs extended to forty miles, more than one-and- a-half marathons. “I’d see the top of a distant mountain, small and pale blue in the distance, and I’d spend all day running there, just to stand on the top. Then I’d turn around and run back. I made camp and slept outside every night, feeling infinitely close to nature. I was on a spiritual journey discovering something basic about existence.”

      After she moved to California, she kept running long distances. According to ESPN, one day, while running on a beach from San Diego, she accidentally ran into Mexico and was detained by border security officials when she returned to the U.S.

      Gibb wrote a letter to the Boston Athletic Association, asking for an application to the 1966 marathon. The race director wrote back sayingwomenwerenotphysiologicallycapableof runningamarathon distance. All the more reason to run, she thought. “At that moment, I knew that I was running for much more than my own personal challenge. I was running to change the way people think. There existed a false belief that was keeping half the world’s population from experiencing all of life. And I believed that if everyone, man and woman, could find the peace and wholeness I found in running, the world would be a better, happier, healthier place.”

      Gibb’s journey to the marathon, on a bus from San Diego to Boston, took three nights and four days. She arrived the day before the race. The following morning, Gibb’s mother drove her to Hopkinton. Gibb hid in the bushes near the start and jumped into the pack after the gun went off.

      Gibb has said that she was afraid she would be thrown out of the race, that the police might arrest her, that spectators might boo. She tried to disguise her appearance by wearing a hooded sweatshirt and her brother’s shorts, but it wasn’t long before other runners realized she was a woman. She says they were supportive and friendly. And after she took off her sweatshirt, so were the crowds.

      By the time she reached Wellesley College, the women’s university at roughly the halfway point of the course, the word had gotten out that a woman was running the Boston Marathon. Spectators were screaming and crying. “I felt as though I was setting them free,” she wrote.

      When she finished the race, the governor of Massachusetts shook her hand. The story was reported internationally. “It changed the way men thought about women, and it changed the way women thought about themselves,” Gibb wrote. “It replaced an old false belief with a new reality.”

      Gibb ran again in 1967. This time, there was a woman registered for the race. But it wasn’t her.

      Like Bobbi Gibb, Kathrine Switzer had been told by someone that a woman couldn’t complete a marathon. In 1967, when she was a journalism student at Syracuse University, she registered for Boston using her initials, K.V. Switzer, and received bib number 261.

      On race day, Switzer says, she didn’t try to disguise her appearance. Because of the weather, she was wearing a sweatshirt and sweatpants. But her hair wasn’t hidden and she says she was wearing makeup. What followed has been documented many times. A couple of miles into the marathon, a race official named Jock Semple discovered Switzer and tried to physically remove her from the course. Switzer says he screamed, “Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers.”

      Jock Semple was born in the slums of Glasgow in 1903. According to the Scottish newspaper the Daily Record and Sunday Mail, he lived “in a crumbling, cold one-bedroom apartment” with his parents and two brothers and learned from a young age to “punch first and talk later.” Semple moved to the U.S. in 1921 and worked as a cabinetmaker in Philadelphia. After running the Boston Marathon, he moved to Massachusetts and began working in sports, as a trainer for Olympic athletes and a physical therapist for the Bruins and Celtics.

      Eventually, he became the co-director of the Boston Marathon, a role he carried out very earnestly. An article in Sports Illustrated describes how Semple would physically and verbally attack anyone who didn’t seem to be taking the race seriously. He called them weirdos and screwballs. One year he tackled a runner wearing swimming fins and a snorkeling mask.

      To Semple, Kathrine Switzer was not welcome in the Boston Marathon because she was breaking the rules. Women were not just discouraged from running Boston, they were banned from the marathon and other long-distance races by the Amateur Athletics Union.

      Switzer was running alongside her boyfriend, an athlete named Tom Miller. After Semple grabbed Switzer’s sweatshirt, Miller knocked him out of the way. The incident was captured in photographs that were soon shared around the world and, eventually, in a Time-Life book called 100 Photos that Changed the World.

      Switzer finished the race, crossing about an hour after Gibb, who had once again participated as a non-registered runner. But she wasn’t welcomed or congratulated at the finish line. She was disqualified from the event and expelled from the Amateur Athletics Union.

      Switzer became an advocate for women’s running, won the New York City Marathon in 1974, launched a global running series for women, and wrote a book.

      Semple is known for his attempt to physically remove Switzer from the course. But he was also a pioneer who was instrumental in changing the rules he once enforced. In 1972, he and other race officials opened the race to women. At the start line of the 1973 Boston Marathon, Semple and Switzer reconciled. A photo of them embracing appeared СКАЧАТЬ