In one variation of the story, the race officials forgot her name and instead called her Melpomene, because, in historian Ana Miragaya’s words, ‘they could see only tragedy, not her extraordinary feat’. What did they view as tragic – the spectacle of a woman running such a long way, or the likelihood that her achievement would be forgotten?
One of the few published accounts of her run appeared in a French-language newspaper in Greece, Le Messager d’Athènes. That brief report contains one vivid detail: Melpomene stopped only once, halfway through, and only for ten minutes, to eat oranges. ‘Sucer quelques oranges’, is how the journalist puts it: ‘to suck down a few oranges’. We know so little about Melpomene, but this detail helps us fathom her thirst and, as we picture the juice running down her neck, we may suppose that she was a woman who didn’t squander time on unnecessarily long breaks. I often crave sugary citrus when I run for a long time: my thoughts turn to lemon gelato, sticky orange cordial, margaritas, salty-sweet energy drinks, and fat, juicy oranges like Melpomene’s.
There’s another story in circulation about a woman and that first marathon: this one involves a thirty-year-old single mother named Stamata Revithi, who was travelling from her home in Piraeus to Athens to look for work. One of her children had just died, and she needed money to feed the child who had survived. She met a man who advised her to seek renown by running in the Olympic marathon – so she changed direction and walked to Marathon.
Why not? She must have thought it over as she walked, because when the international journalists at Marathon asked her why she was running, she had an answer ready: ‘So that the King might give my child a position in the future.’ She reckoned it would take her three and a half hours, adding, ‘It may be even less. I saw in a dream that I had an apron full of gold and gilded sugared almonds! Who knows! My heart is in it, I suppose my feet will hold.’ Children and money are rarely plot points in the big stories that get told about running, though for many women who run, they’re important considerations. Who can afford the time to run? And who will look after the kids?
Stamata Revithi’s readiness to undertake a tremendous physical feat to help her kid sounds as if it’s made for daytime television. In fact, See How She Runs, a 1978 telemovie starring Joanne Woodward, follows a pretty similar storyline: a newly single mother gets her life together and regains the respect of her kids as she trains for the Boston Marathon. The calm rhythms of running help her resolve the chaos in her personal life. It’s one of the few books or films I’ve encountered that depicts a woman runner in an unambiguously positive light. The difference is in the ending. Woodward’s character aces her race; Revithi wasn’t allowed to enter the 1896 Olympic marathon – instead, she completed the course the day after the official event in five and a half long hours.
I wonder what this runner who tried to get a start looked like. No one took a photo of her. Did she have a classic runner’s physique: not too tall, long limbs, slim shoulders and hips? Did the journalists talk among themselves about whether she was too thin, or too tall, or a little heavy in the thighs? How much of her body would she have been expected to cover?
Historians have sparred over whether Melpomene and Revithi were the same woman. Most of the official male entrants who started the 1896 marathon dropped out en route, but in both these half-told tales, the women make the distance – even though neither was allowed to enter the new Panathinaiko Stadium for a final lap and had to run around it to finish. On the day, 29 March 1896, a young Greek man of humble birth named Spyridon Louis won the first marathon ever run in just under three hours. He became a national hero. There’s no record of what happened to Revithi – or to Melpomene. Neither woman is generally granted more than an apologetic footnote in commentary on that first marathon.
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It’s plausible that neither of my grandmothers would ever have run more than a kilometre at a stretch in her life. Their mothers, who would have been girls when Victoria sat on the throne of England, were even less likely to have done so. Some runners might be able to trace an athletic lineage and say to themselves, This love of running came from my grandmother; I was born to run long distances. There are no Melpomenes in my family tree. In fact, I don’t recall even once seeing my father’s mother, Nana, wearing trousers or shorts. She wore skirts and uncreased shirts with silver brooches; her white hair was always precisely tucked behind her ears. A brilliant, impatient woman, she left the workforce when the first of her seven children was born and never went back. Her children and grandchildren were expected to plough tirelessly the opportunities she hadn’t been given. ‘Once you’ve made up your mind,’ she advised me, ‘never, ever change it.’ I didn’t inherit her adamantine demeanour; had I, I would have become a tougher runner, less inclined to slow down and walk, more determined to keep going. I doubt Nana ever considered running a marathon, but had she decided to do so when she was in her thirties, even she would have been turned back at the starting line.
My mother’s mother, Grandma, thought of herself as more modern, and she did wear trousers, though she called them slacks and matched them with strappy sandals and painted toenails. I know that she played tennis with my grandfather when my mother was growing up, but it is impossible for me to imagine her wearing either sneakers or shorts. Jeans were sloppy, she thought, and she often cautioned me against wearing trainers when I was a student. My feet would become too accustomed to comfortable shoes, she said, and I’d never be able to wear heels. For Grandma, the only thing worse than a visible bra strap was no bra at all. Girls should never gobble their meals lest they be thought greedy. Horses sweat, men perspire, women glow: the messiness of running, the grotty physicality of it all, would have bothered her, I think. She died before I started running, and by then she’d stopped worrying so much about my unbrushed hair and my pierced nose. Had she lived to hear me get excited about running, I might have found that she had changed her views.
Both my grandmothers were born in 1914 and were city teenagers in the hungry 1930s. Did they run around playgrounds and parks when they were young, and if so, when did they stop? In the 30s, women were encouraged to foster their health and beauty through physical culture. Swimming, callisthenics, cycling and dancing were sanctioned activities, but strenuous exertion was discouraged as it was thought to imperil fertility. Any undertaking can be dangerous at extremes – however, the risks of vigorous exercise for women, including running long distances, were by today’s reckonings wildly overstated.
By the 40s, the world was at war and my grandmothers’ husbands had enlisted. Grandma worked in advertising and sang in a radio trio with her sisters; Nana looked after her eldest children. I can no more picture them running than I can see them rollerskating or hitchhiking or chewing gum, though it’s not impossible, I suppose, that they did all these things.
When my parents were kids, the photo albums tell stories of suburban Australian home life: beaches, gardens, carefully posed group portraits. Times would have changed enough for my mother and aunts to have been herded into school cross-country events. My aunt Anne is a fine runner, and I’ve completed many races with her and her children. I don’t think my mother was an enthusiastic school athlete, and she certainly wasn’t a runner. She liked to kayak on the Murray River in summer and to cross-country ski in winter. If I ever saw her playing a team sport as an adult, that memory has gone. If she’d lived, maybe we would have spoken about the remarkable generational shifts in thinking about women’s bodies that we’d both witnessed.
Strict grandmothers who believe in dress codes and good manners don’t usually feature in stories about long-distance running – but they should. For the greater part of the 20th century, women who ran anything like what we now think of as long distances were chided as if they were naughty girls. A modest women would not sanction visibly moving breasts. Sweat was grotesque, unfeminine, unattractive. Renegade women who did want to run were warned of dire physical consequences. It was thought that running might generate abnormal hunger
s and thirsts. And what other freedoms would wayward women athletes demand? If women couldn’t control their own bodies, rigid social norms would.
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I first stumbled across a reference to Melpomene on a website devoted to women’s running. It was an appealingly improbable story, one that also signalled to me how little I knew about the history of women’s distance running. I thought that to remedy this I’d just need to visit a library and borrow a book about women’s athletics. It turns out that very few such books have been written. Before the 1960s, only a handful of female long-distance runners are on record – and their stories have been as patchily recorded as Melpomene’s. These women intrigued me; running wasn’t an activity I’d ever associated with insubordination. As is the case with disruptive women today, crowds of mockers belittled their achievements, while persons of influence called for their outrageous conduct to cease.
Where to begin? I was looking for predecessors. I wanted to grasp who I was following when I lined up to start a race. I soon learned that tough-as-nails women competed in the brutal pedestrian races of the 19th century in England, the United States and Australia. Peter Radford – one of the few historians who has fossicked extensively in the archives of women’s sport – has gathered accounts of an extraordinary variety of women who ran for money on the pedestrian circuit, including a seventy-year-old Scottish woman who attempted to run 96 miles in twenty-four hours in 1833 (and was arrested for causing a public disturbance), and an eight-year-old who raced in several 30- and 40-mile events in 1823. Radford adds, as if making an aside to one of my grandmothers over drinks, ‘there were not, however, as far as we know any ladies’.
In the United States, women pedestrian runners issued audacious challenges to male champions, while spectators were invited to bet on the outcomes. It sounds like a rough scene, and all the runners were professionals, not amateurs. I’m tempted to draw a line between the brutal pedestrian races and go-hard-or-go-home boot-camp regimes, but the match is hardly exact. Women pedestrians were catcalled, harassed, ogled and pelted with stones as they ran. What they had in common was that they ran for money: a blithe love of movement had nothing to do with it, nor did a desire to harden up or prove a point.
Not all cultures have bristled at the idea of women running. There’s evidence, for example, that running long distances was part of girls’ initiation rituals in some Native American nations. The Tarahumara people ran between their villages in the hills of northern Mexico as a matter of course. Nina Kuscsik, who argued the case for a women’s Olympic marathon in the 1970s, borrows a story from a Sports Illustrated article by Edwin Shrake that shows that the women who ran in those villages were not viewed as first-class runners: ‘in the 1920s an emissary went to a Tarahumare chief to invite him to send runners to a marathon race in Kansas. When told that a marathon was a mere 26 miles, the chief ordered three girls to run it.’ The chief might have viewed women as second-grade runners – but he knew they wouldn’t have trouble with a marathon.
Native American women and men both participated in the pedestrian events of the late 19th century and, when they did, much was made of their racial identities. Australian Indigenous men, including the legendary Charlie Samuels, were also prominent figures on the international pedestrian circuit, but I’ve encountered no records of Australian Indigenous women who gained renown through running. What did the figure of the woman runner mean in Australian Indigenous cultures – and how, I wonder, did settlement shift that meaning? If Indigenous women once ran for pleasure or to hunt, I fear that many would later have had cause to run in terror. Gaps in the record and inattentive historians have thwarted my efforts to piece together any kind of narrative of women’s bodies in motion; information about those women whose lives have until recently stayed on the margins of history, especially working-class women and Indigenous women, has been even more sparse.
In Europe, very occasionally, the cause of public entertainment was served by women runners. One such event, La Marche des Midinettes, run on a 12-kilometre course from Paris to Nanterre, first took place in 1903. The midinettes were women who worked in fashion: shop assistants, seamstresses, models. Two and a half thousand of them reportedly competed in the first Marche; tens of thousands of spectators cheered as they set off from the Place de la Concorde. This event is much more recognisable to me than the pedestrian races. Although it lacked corporate sponsorship, it sounds like an early predecessor to She Runs the Night, a fun day out rather than a serious competition – at least, that’s the impression I formed from photographs and illustrations. Unfortunately, the attending journalists didn’t vox pop the midinettes about why they were running or how they’d trained. Instead, drooling commentary on the pleasures of watching young women run went to press the following week.
There’s always been an audience keen to gawp at women athletes with their corsets loosened. This goes some way to explain the cautious approach taken to organised women’s athletics. For example, the first-ever women’s collegiate field day, held at Vassar College in the United States in 1895, was conducted under extremely modest conditions: participants were shielded by trees, with no men present save the referee, a presumably chaste-minded professor of classics. The athletics program included 100-yard and 220-yard dashes.
In 1922, the US Amateur Athletic Union decided that 220 yards (200 metres) would be the longest distance women athletes could contest in that country. Over the next decade, a few trouble-making dissenters organised women’s athletics events that included longer runs. One of these rebels, a Frenchwoman named Alice Milliat, helped to convince the International Olympic Committee to add athletics events for women to its program. She later recalled, ‘those first sportswomen who dared to brave public opinion and to bring shame on their families were viewed as wild, emotionally disturbed, fanatic women using sport only as an occasion for a brawl’. After much disputation and public concern, an agreement was reached to conduct five women’s athletics events at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam – including an 800-metre race.
That historic race was, alas, a disaster for women’s long-distance running. Three of the runners bettered the previous world record, but three others collapsed at the finish line. These swooning women seemed to confirm what many observers had suspected – long-distance runs were bad for women. The International Athletics Federation was lobbied by sports organisations and sundry guardians of public good to cancel women’s distance events. Women didn’t race the 800 metres at Olympic level again until 1960.
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A few rare birds in the first half of the 20th century set themselves to running extremely long distances. Take the first woman to finish South Africa’s Comrades Marathon, a race that’s actually much longer than a marathon – it’s a hardarse 89 kilometres between Pietermaritzburg and Durban. Neither women nor non-white athletes were allowed to compete as official entrants until 1975. The event is still being run today, and when two of my cousins entered a few years ago, I followed their progress online in real time, horrified both by the hills they scaled and by the distance they covered.
Somehow, Frances Hayward, a white typist from a Durban bank, was allowed to run the race in 1923. She finished 28th, but couldn’t be awarded a Comrades medal as she wasn’t an official entrant, so spectators and other runners chipped in and collected money to buy her a tea service and rose bowl. I would love to have interviewed her. What did she do with the tea service – smash it? How did she get fit enough to run 89 kilometres, and did she train alone? I’d also ask her the same question I ask everyone I meet who has entered one of these ultramarathons: What the hell made you want to do this? In the absence of answers to these questions, the striking aspects of Hayward’s story are that she had a will to enter the race, was strong enough to finish it, and wasn’t bodily prevented by officials from starting.
The woman with the strongest claim to be celebrated as the first dedicated amateur distance runner was Violet Piercy. In 1926, when she was about thirty-seven, she ran th
e Polytechnic marathon course from Windsor Castle to Stamford Bridge in three hours and forty minutes. A timed run, not a race. There’s no way a woman would have been allowed to enter a marathon as an official competitor in 1926.
Journalists were incredulous that a woman could run the marathon distance – and do so in less than four hours. Tired of the questions, Piercy made her point by running long distances again and again. In 1927, she broke what she claimed was her own record for a 10-mile run (not that there were other women lining up to contest 10-milers). In 1928, she had another go at a timed marathon, but retired 10 kilometres from the finish due to hot weather. In 1933, she ran the marathon distance twice – both times in heavy rain. Because she’d never run a marathon under race conditions, doubts persisted. Finally, in 1936, with what the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography calls the ‘connivance’ of the organisers of the Polytechnic Harriers race, Piercy ran alongside the men and finished in four and a half hours.
She must have had immense confidence in her capacities to set off on any of her runs. What was the source of her self-assurance? No one just leaps out of bed in the morning and runs a marathon – it takes reserves of physical fitness and months of training. Piercy was a member of the Mitcham Athletic Club, but there was absolutely no culture of women’s distance running to support her. Did she train by making hundreds of laps of an oval?
In 1927 Piercy agreed to be filmed for a wonderfully rich silent Pathé newsreel titled The Runner. The opening slide reads, ‘Anyone here like to run 26 ½ miles non-stop …? This lady did … from London to Windsor, in record time (for a lady) …’ We see her running with male chaperones on bicycles. They’re all trailed by another man driving a car. Was this kind of supervisory entourage de rigueur for all women athletes? How irksome that must have been. How could Piercy possibly have organised regular runs under such conditions? The newsreel is staged, but it makes me all the more curious about what it was like to run as a woman when no others were doing so. It’s possible that some annoying schoolboy told Piercy she’d never be much of a runner – because she was a woman – and then she set herself to proving him wrong.
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