Yesterday, runners competed in the Boston Marathon, a race that has been run since 1897. Race organizers were inspired by the Olympic marathon of 1896, when the Games were reintroduced into modern times.
But, of course, at its inception, women were excluded from the Boston Marathon. It wasn’t until decades later, in 1972, that a women’s race was finally introduced.
But two women didn’t wait around for that to happen.
Bobbi, not Bobbie
In 1966, Roberta “Bobbi” Gibb ran the Boston Marathon, but she had to do it undercover. The Boston Athletic Association’s rule book didn’t say anything about runners’ gender, so she didn’t hesitate to train for the event.
“I didn’t know the marathon was closed to women,” she said. “I set about training in nurses’ shoes with no instructions, no coach and no books.”*
In February 1966, she mailed a request for an application form. Her answer came back from the race director — under international athletic rules, Will Cloney said, women can’t compete in the marathon, and besides, women aren’t physically capable of running that far.
“I could run 40 miles at stretch,” she scoffed. “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 at the top.”
That April, Gibb took a bus from her home in California to her parents’ house just a few miles outside Boston. On the day of the race, she donned a swimsuit and a pair of men’s shorts, and her mother dropped her off at the starting line. There, she hid in the bushes until the starting gun went off. At that, she jumped out and started running.
She ran a conservative race, determined to finish, no matter what. To her delight, fellow runners and spectators cheered her on. Despite her restraint, she finished the race in 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds, ahead of two-thirds of the male runners. The governor of Massachusetts was at the finish line to shake her hand.
Dame K.V. registers
The next year, a second woman ran the marathon. Kathrine Switzer managed to register for the race using her initials, K.V. Switzer. A student at Syracuse University, she had been training with Arnold Briggs, a 50-year-old former marathon runner who had entered the Boston Marathon 15 times. But even he was angry about Switzer’s intent.
“No dame ever ran the Boston Marathon!” he shouted at her.**
But Switzer reminded him about Gibb and insisted she could go the distance. Finally, Briggs relented and agreed to help her train.
“Hot damn, I thought, I have a coach, a training partner, a plan, and a goal: the biggest race in the world—Boston!” Switzer told herself.
She did indeed prove her endurance, and off she went to Boston with Briggs, her boyfriend and another runner. The day was cold and raw, so she was covered up in sweats, her gender obscured at the starting line.
Even so, word quickly got around that a girl was running. At Mile 4, Switzer heard a truck coming up and the sound of leather shoes slamming on the pavement behind her. It was race organizer Jock Semple, enraged that a woman was running. He grabbed her shoulder and tried to yank off her bib.
“Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers!” he shouted.
Switzer squeezed out of his grasp, and her fellow runners shoved Semple out of the way.
“There was a thud—whoomph!—and Jock was airborne,” she recalled. “He landed on the roadside like a pile of wrinkled clothes.”
Switzer was scared, humiliated and angry all at once. But she kept running.
“If I quit, Jock Semple and all those like him would win,” she said.
Switzer finished the race in 4 hours and 20 minutes. And, by the way, Bobbi Gibb ran the race (again without registering), finishing an hour ahead of Switzer. Over the next few years, women ran the marathon unofficially until finally, in 1972, the race was opened to women.
Both Gibb and Switzer were aware they weren’t just running a simple race. Their feat meant so much more than that.***
“It was a pivotal point in the evolution of social consciousness. It changed the way men thought about women, and it changed the way women thought about themselves,” Gibb said. “It replaced an old false belief with a new reality.”
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* Gibb’s quotes are from her article, “A Run of One’s Own,” Women’s Sports Foundation. She also wrote about her life in To Boston With Love (CreateSpace, 2016). http://runningpast.com/gibb_story.htm
** The quotes from Switzer’s story are from “The Girl Who Started It All,” Runner’s World (Emmaus, PA: Rodale, April 2007). She later expanded on the article in her book, Marathon Woman: Running the Race to Revolutionize Women’s Sports (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007). https://kathrineswitzer.com/1967-boston-marathon-the-real-story/
*** Switzer went on to help organize more than 400 international women’s races, using data from the competitions to lobby the International Olympic Committee to add a woman’s marathon to the Games — which they did in 1984. In 2017, Boston Marathon officials retired Bib #261.