Bobbi Gibb Came to Race
4 On the morning of her first Boston Marathon in 1966, Bobbi Gibb got into a fight with her parents.
She’d traveled for three days by bus from California to her childhood home in Winchester to run the race. She’d trained for two years, 40 miles at a time in the Sierra and Rocky Mountains. But in 1966, women weren’t allowed in the race. Gibb, then 23, had tried and been rebuffed. And now her parents were apoplectic.
“It was not thought proper for a grown woman to run, God forbid, in public,” Gibb recalls now. After she shared her plan to sneak in at the starting line, her father stormed out of the house. “He thought I would injure or possibly kill myself,” she says. Meanwhile, her mother looked on in exasperation: Once again, her daughter was flouting social norms.
Gibb’s mom was a homemaker who had once hoped to be a journalist. She self-medicated to offset her disillusionment with her life. The two had been at odds for years. “Don’t you see?” Gibb implored. “A woman doing this could help set women free.”
Her mother’s lip quivered. “Get the keys,” she said.
The drive to Hopkinton was the first time the two talked about their dreams. “I’ve always envied your freedom,” her mother said. “I thought I needed you to conform. Thank God I failed.”
They hugged in Hopkinton, then Gibb found a spot near the starting line. Crouched in a forsythia bush, she wore her brother’s long shorts over a bathing suit (it was before sports bras) and covered her head in a hooded sweatshirt. The moment, she realized, was bigger than her. If I can prove this misconception and prejudice and false belief about women is so wrong, she thought, it’s going to throw into question all the other false beliefs that have kept women so limited so long.
The gun went off.
Gibb jumped into the pack. It was minutes before the men realized she was among them. They adopted her quickly as their own. They pushed each other, all running a sub-three hour pace. “They were all like brothers, you know?” Gibb recalls.
As they approached the halfway mark, Gibb heard screaming and laughing in the distance. “What’s going on?” she asked the men.
“Just you wait,” one told her. “It’s the tunnel of love.”
As she approached Wellesley College, young women lined either side of the road. They made an archway with their arms in the middle of the street.
“Like a spark down a wire, the word spread to all of us lining the route that a woman was running the course,” recalled Diana Chapman Walsh, a senior that year who would go on to become Wellesley’s president. She remembered the scream tunnel falling silent as the young women scanned the faces passing by. Spotting Gibb, a “ripple of recognition shot through the lines” and a cheer erupted.
“The women were jumping up and down, and some of them were crying, and they were laughing,” Gibb says. “And over to one side, there’s a woman with three kids. And she’s [singing] ‘Ave Maria,’ with this passion. So I found it incredibly moving.”
Gibb would later be recognized as the first women’s winner of the era when women were barred. Kathrine Switzer would officially run the next year, with a bib mistakenly given to her. Nina Kuscsik won the women’s division in 1972, the first year women were allowed to race.
In Wellesley, most men ducked to run through the tunnel, but Gibb didn’t have to. The dappled sun filtered through their arms and fingers and she felt the wind in her hair as the cheering enveloped her.
“In that moment,” she says, “I realized that things were never going to be the same.”