Women celebrate 50 years running

More than 14,000 will join in race to Boston’s Back Bay.

BOSTON — When Joan Benoit Samuelson was in high school in the 1970s, the longest distance she was allowed to run was a half-mile.

“It was thought that running would do us bodily harm, and we would never bear children,” said the woman who went on to win two Boston Marathons and the inaugural Olympic marathon gold medal.

“Now here I am: 150,000 miles and two children later, I’m still running,” she said. “And I’m cheering on a daughter.”

Fifty years after Bobbi Gibb tucked her long, blonde ponytail under a hooded sweatshirt and sneaked onto the course, the Boston Marathon is celebrating a half-century of women who have broken barriers on their way to ripping the finish-line tape.

More than 14,000 women — including Samuelson’s daughter, Abby — are in the field of 30,747 planning to leave Hopkinton on Monday for the 26.2-mile jaunt to Boston’s Back Bay. The women will start first, and the first among them to reach the Boylston Street finish line will receive $150,000 and an olive wreath — the same prize as the men’s winner.

“It’s an exciting time to be a female athlete, a female runner,” said Shalane Flanagan, a soon-to-be three-time Olympian and the daughter of a former women’s marathon record-holder.

“It’s always been a given to me that I have the same opportunities as men,” she said. “I guess I’ve taken it for granted: ‘Oh, that’s how it should be done.’ I just assumed, ‘Why wouldn’t it be that way?’”

While sports such as soccer and tennis are still fighting over equal pay for women, running adapted quickly. Even the Boston Athletic Association, which was originally formed to encourage the pursuit of “manly sports,” has paid the men’s and women’s winner the same amount since first awarding prize money in 1986.

Guy Morse, who was the race director then, said it was more controversial to pay the winners after almost a century of amateurism than to treat men and women equally. “Once we went that way, it was really an easy decision to make it across the board,” he said.

Current B.A.A. president Joanne Flaminio, the first woman to head the organization, noted that the Boston Marathon has created a separate start for the women’s race, allowing them to run free of the men’s field. “It allowed them to have their own race,” she said.

“Everything we have done is to give everyone an equal opportunity to run,” she said.

Gibb will serve as grand marshal for this year’s race — the 120th — and Flaminio announced that Gibb’s three first-place finishes previously relegated to an “Unofficial Era” section of the event’s history will now be recognized as part of a “Pioneer Era.” (Sara Mae Berman also earned three victories from 1969-71 before women were allowed to enter the race.)

Growing up before the boom that expanded marathoning into the bucket list accomplishment it is for tens of thousands today, Gibb nonetheless enjoyed running and sought out its biggest challenge.

Then, as now, that was the Boston Marathon.