Women running in Marathons

Jane Galt mentions that she's not running marathons for a variety of reasons. The blog that Jane was mentioning is Art De Vany's Top Ten Reasons not to Run Marathons (where I've added my two cents).

I haven't run a marathon. Not yet, because it's too hard. I will be running my first one next year.

I want to run a marathon. And the granddaddy of all marathons is Boston. I was reading about the Boston Marathon the other night (not that I'm ever going to be able to qualify for Boston) and read something about the history of women running in the Boston Marathon.

After reading it, I was shocked. So I asked Little Michigander 1 when he thought women were allowed to run there, given that the event started in 1897 and it didn't allow women then. He guessed they opened it up with women's sufferage. Reasonable guess, but the answer is 1972.

A woman, Roberta Gibb, ran in 1966 through 68 as a "bandit" runner. She didn't enter, so she didn't have a bib number, just hid near the start and jumped in. Another woman, Katherine Switzer, entered as "K.V. Switzer" and had a bib number in 1967. She trained at Syracuse with the men's cross country team and entered the race with her coach and also her boy friend, a hammer thrower for the Syracuse track team. A race official saw that a woman (gasp!) was running and tried to physically remove her from the race at the 4-mile mark, even though there was nothing in the written rules prohibiting women from running in the event.

(A helpful hint: don't try to physically remove a woman when her hammer-throwing boyfriend is present.)

The boyfriend body-slammed the race official.

You can read Katherine Switzer's story here.

It's an amazing story. For one, she ran the mile for Lynchburg and got hate mail, telling her that God would strike her dead. I was reminded of the Austin Lounge Lizards singing "Jesus loves me, but he can't stand you."

From Katherine's story, here's a couple of nice pictures of the hammer-thrower and the race director in the Boston Marathon.

http://www.katherineswitzer.com/ks_bos_1.html
http://www.katherineswitzer.com/ks_bos_2.html