For female marathoners, it’s been a long road to Boston
Next Monday, the Boston Marathon could well become the latest front in a second American Revolution.
Leading the fight will be the 16,560 women who make up 46 per cent of the entire field of runners in this 118th Boston Marathon.
It will be a record number of women at the start line and it suggests that next year, for the first time, the majority of participants in the world’s most prestigious endurance race might not be men.
This tipping point isn’t just being neared in Boston. In fact, in running generally, the numbers have already tipped in women’s favour. Last year well over half (56 per cent) of all runners in all races in America — 5K, 10K, half- marathons and marathons — were women.
It’s easy to forget how far women have come, and how fast. Before 1967, no woman was even allowed to run in a marathon, not since the first one took place in the 1896 Olympics in Athens. It was just assumed that women could never endure the gruelling 42.2 kilometres from start to finish. Besides, it was said, they’d damage their internal organs and compromise their fertility.
Then, in 1967, a Syracuse University journalism student, Kathrine Switzer, entered the Boston Marathon despite the ban on women runners. Just past mile four the race director leapt from the media truck, rushed on to the course and tried to push Switzer off, yelling “Get the hell out of my race!” But Switzer carried on and that collision became one of the most iconic images of the women’s rights movement.
True, it took Boston five more years before officially allowing women into its marathon. In 1972, there were 1,210 men at the start line — and just 9 women. But Switzer paved the first part of a long road to this year’s remarkably genderequal Boston Marathon.
And of course Boston is just one front in a larger revolution. Elsewhere, women are flooding the finish lines. The Rock ‘n Roll Running Series organizes races in 28 cities in Europe and America. In 2013, 75 per cent of their hundreds of thousands of entrants were women. Last October, the Nike Women’s Marathon in San Francisco drew an astounding 30,000 runners, up considerably from the 2,500 women who ran it in the race’s first year in 2004.
For Kathrine Switzer, the deluge of women hitting the streets is more than a demographic fact; it’s a social revolution. “Running transforms everyone who does it,” she said, “and the longer the race and harder the training, the more it changes you. When you cross that finish line, you feel an incredible sense of empowerment that spills over into all parts of your life.”
Switzer said to me, “For centuries, women have been defined by their resilience and determination. So what better test of that resilience than the ultimate endurance race?”
It took until 1997 for the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra to accept its first woman members. It took until this February in Sochi for the Olympics to allow women to compete in the ski jumping event. And it took until last year for the U.S. army even to allow women to train for combat roles.
It’s taken too long, but in Boston next Monday, a very different world will be watching thousands upon thousands of women, arms raised in triumph, cross the finish line on Boylston Street.