Long Run

by Catriona Menzies-Pike

  If Atalanta was defined first by her virginity and her extraordinary hunting skills, her story culminates in this marriage, the key narrative device for representing women’s experiences. Spinster, old maid, widow, bride, wife: how difficult it is to relinquish these categories. Atalanta may have been a wonderful runner – but she is also the trophy bride offered to the winner of a race. Her wishes about marriage count for little. Ultimately, Atalanta takes her place in a story about the restoration of a gendered order. As mesmerising a runner as she is, I’m not convinced her story inaugurates a narrative tradition of the liberated female body.

  I did once see a marriage proposal delivered from the sidelines of a running race. A man stood waiting patiently for his beloved to run past. He brandished a two-metre high corporate display sign bearing an enormous image of the woman’s face and the question, ‘Will you marry me?’ A bit like an advertisement for a photocopy service. This poor woman must have been puffing her guts out somewhere behind me on the course; the runners around me cheered in encouragement to the guy as they ran by. I kept running and mused on her likely reaction. She was probably thrilled when she reached him – I hope so – but I would have been mortified to see myself reflected like this as I ran. She must have trained to complete the event, as I had, and looked forward to the run as a major occasion in her year.

  I remember that the sun was gleaming like a beacon, that it was surprisingly hot and the crowd in good humour. Instead of drinking it all in, instead of celebrating the ground moving beneath her feet, one woman had to contemplate a marriage proposal, as if one of Aphrodite’s apples had been rolled onto the course. Couldn’t she have been allowed to finish her race, celebrate her run and then consider the future? What if she didn’t want to marry him? I wondered the same thing about Atalanta, even though her story was told long before the tropes of romantic love were set in place.

  I’ve no idea whether the proposal I saw was accepted, although maybe I could dig into an online forum and find out. Maybe the woman took Atalanta as her role model and said, ‘Yes … but only if you can better my time in this race.’ Or maybe she accepted – and then had to squeeze an engagement ring onto her swollen finger before she kept running. I’ve no reason to doubt that this placard proposal was sincere and loving. If the marriage came off, may they still be a happy couple. Still, I can’t help but think that it was all terribly ill-timed. Matrimony! – and just as a girl is caught up in a vivid and intense display of independence and physical activity.

  Is marriage the only happy ending for a woman runner? Have we let those stories about women running from trouble roll away like a sack full of rotten apples? Cautionary tales about the sorry lot of women who run still linger in our shared cultural spaces. What an astonishing breach there is between their agonised depictions and the lived experience of women running in the contemporary Western world. Transformation, escape, recovery – these are all destinations we can reach by running. Most women runners aren’t in danger. Maybe some started out angry, hurt, despairing – I did – but running can be a repudiation of that pain, rather than its prolongation.

  Novelist and marathon runner Joyce Carol Oates writes, ‘If there’s any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can’t think what it might be.’ Expressions by women of the sheer delight that is being in motion are a notably recent phenomenon – and I wish I’d heard more of them when I was forming my ideas about my body and its limits. Enough stressed and vulnerable women in parks, I say. Enough with fleeing maidens and distressed damsels. What my journals and notebooks record is the movement from anxiety to invigorated glee, the discovery that my body can tell stories that haven’t been written. Running hasn’t taken me into or out of matrimony. No, for me, running is a narrative end in itself – and I suppose if you find yourself confronted by a set of stories that don’t fit, you have to tell your own.

  7

  Look at her go

  There is glamour running gear, high-performance running gear, comfort running gear, sexy running gear, yoga goddess running gear. There is running gear that says, I am trouble, shirts that tease, Catch me if you can, ensembles that warn, Don’t even bother, shoes that insist, This woman is fast. I don’t think there’s any running outfit that I could imagine for myself, at least not one that I’d want to run in, that I wouldn’t be able to buy somehow.

  Not so long ago, however, women runners needed to improvise to dress themselves. Women’s running shoes weren’t in production when Kathrine Switzer and Bobbi Gibb tackled the Boston Marathon; then, as I’ve said, runners made do with crepe-soled shoes designed for other purposes. If they could find a good fit, they ran in men’s or boys’ shoes. The photographs in those 1970s running guides show women in moccasins, tennis shoes and espadrilles.

  Male runners didn’t have a whole lot of footwear choices either – but at least they didn’t have to work out what to do with their breasts. When jogging was on the rise in the 1960s, there was no such thing as a sports bra. Women who wanted to avoid the uncomfortable sensation of bouncing bosoms and the leering they attracted were out of luck. A ‘free swing’ tennis bra was on the market in the United States in 1975, and a sports bra was patented in 1979. Women were already competing in tennis, sprinting, horseriding and most other sports at the highest of levels. How did busty women make do? Why do more women run now than in the 70s, and why does the ratio of female to male marathoners and half marathoners continue to rise? A few decades of innovation in corsetry shouldn’t be discounted as a contributing factor.

  If we dart back a few centuries, we find the beginning of a vivid argument in favour of movement-arresting sports bras. Smock races were a common feature of village sports carnivals in the British Isles from the 17th to the 19th century. In these events, women sprinted short distances for the prize of a piece of clothing, usually a smock. It was not frowned upon for runners to compete lightly clad and with their breasts unbound. There’s a dash of ye olde wet t-shirt contest here. Crowds would travel from nearby villages to watch the action – and they weren’t there for displays of female athleticism.

  In England, smock races spawned a subgenre of pervy pastoral poetry, the smock poem, in which B-grade poets praised the delights of watching women’s breasts jiggle as they ran. When I wrote that I struggled to find women runners in literature, I neglected to mention this marginal genre, which illuminates another way audiences watch women run. Where crime TV says that a woman running alone is in danger, the smock poem and its descendants insist that women’s bodies are made for entertainment.

  The best-known smock poem is probably ‘The Smock-Race, at Finglas’, which appeared without attribution in a 1714 volume of Poetical Miscellanies. The ‘panting Rivals’, three village girls named Oonah, Nora and Shevan, compete for a ‘smock enrich’d with Lace’ before an audience of rogues, young squires and Dublin-prentices. You can practically hear the poet panting along with the runners. He attributes to the goddess Venus an intervention that unties the strings of Nora’s petticoat: she loses the race when she stops to knot them. Oonah makes no such concession to modesty: ‘Stript for the Race how bright did she appear!/ No Cov’ring hid her Feet, her Bosom bare, /And to the Wind she gave her flowing Hair.’ Behold the topless runner! And thus Oonah wins the race, the smock, and the hand in marriage of a handsome swain named Felim. The poem closes, ‘The Smock she won a Virgin, wore a Bride.’ As with the story of Atalanta and the three golden apples, the happy ending is a marriage.

  British comedians have done their best to keep the cultural legacy of the smock races alive. In a skit in Monty Python’s 1983 film The Meaning of Life, for example, a man sentenced to death for the crime of telling gratuitous sexist jokes is allowed to choose the manner of his execution. He elects to be chased off a cliff by a group of naked women. A crowd of topless runners, whose helmets and wristbands match their bikini bottoms, administer the sentence. No sports bras here. It’s filmed in slow motion, and close-up shots of bouncing
knockers are cut between footage of the condemned man running for his life. Boobs! Boobs! Boobs! It’s incredibly silly – but also a vexing reminder that even though the rules on women’s participation in sports had been loosened by the 1970s, other social deterrents existed. If you can’t ban women from running, then you can always just laugh at them. Benny Hill’s stable of topless women are there to be snickered at, especially when they chase him around the park. Bounce! Bounce! Bounce! I don’t think I’m the only runner to dread being the object of this kind of schoolboy eroticisation. It may be that women wear sports bras as much to avoid being mistaken for lost competitors in smock races or extras in a Benny Hill skit as for comfort.

  *

  The non-existence of the sports bra has not been a problem for male artists who, on the whole, have preferred to paint women naked and sedentary. To speak in the broadest of terms, in the history of Western painting, as in the history of literature, women rarely run – and when they do, they are in trouble. What this means is that women who run for pleasure are defying a long visual history that equates female flight with disobedience, distress and trouble. It goes at least some way to explain why shock was the response to images of Switzer and Gibb.

  There is a painting by Sandro Botticelli hanging in the Prado in Madrid, the first of the Nastagio degli Onesti series, that shows how tightly knotted ideas about gender and running can be. In this painting, a woman is running for her life. She doesn’t have a half marathon in her sights; she’s clearly not running to keep fit. It’s too late for her to turn and look to see whether she’s got a chance to get away, because a hunting dog has leaped up and taken her thigh between his jaws. Streaming behind her naked body, first a blaze of golden curls, and then a knight on a rearing horse, his grand scarlet cape billowing like a bloodied sail. Unlike Botticelli’s more famous Venus, the serene face of a thousand fridge magnets and wedding invitations, this beauty has taken flight – and the knight’s sword is raised high to strike her down. In a cross-genre mash-up with a crime show, this scene would precede the discovery of her body in the woods.

  There’s an onlooker: a young man in red hose. His name is Nastagio degli Onesti, and his broken heart is the trigger for a frightening cautionary tale to runaway ladies. I was terribly startled by this painting when I first saw it while loafing around Madrid. All I’d wanted to do on that trip was to meander through galleries during the day, and through streets and plazas at night, caught in that pleasant zone between being lost and purposefully adrift. I walked around the stately Retiro gardens each morning before sitting down to coffee and trying to persuade myself that the next day, I would run a few laps. It was an off period in my running, and the drive to get moving had disappeared. Daily I was defeated by the conviction that I would stick out, that I would look strange if I ran. No one else was running and, not being made of the same stuff as those running pioneers, I didn’t have it in me to be the first.

  As I traipsed again through the Prado, I had running on my mind, which might be why this painting of a woman runner in distress stayed with me. Why was she running? Why wasn’t I? It wasn’t until I returned to Sydney that I started to make sense of it. I took a magnifying glass to the library and peered at a plate of the scene in a heavy book on Renaissance painting. Small details: bleeding scratches on the woman’s ankle and arms; the curve of her belly; a white goat grazing placidly in the middle ground; the golden studs on the trappings of the elegantly poised horse. The woman is arranged in the classic pose of the runner, with one foot ground into the earth as if to draw from it energy to propel herself away from the sword.

  Nastagio appears three times on the canvas, each a step forward in time. First, he’s a tiny figure in the background, almost imperceptible. Next, a slightly larger Nastagio decamps to the corner of the frame, where he’s utterly absorbed in contemplation. But the Nastagio who demands our attention is in the clearing, watching the knight and the woman. His expression is that of a startled man who doesn’t quite know what to do. He makes a perfunctory shoo-shoo movement with a stick to fend off the hunting dog.

  It’s not unusual to hear the pursuit of love phrased as a man hunting a woman; here, that metaphor is displayed in graphic terms, the woman unambiguously prey to the knight. And for many authors of running guides, the primal running scene is, in fact, the hunt. Recreational running is re-purposed as a kind of practical activity, at least for men: chasing food, feeding the kids meat, and kicking along the evolutionary can. An origins-of-running scene is a set-piece in most of the 1960s and 70s running manuals that I’ve read. These tableaux depict imaginary Palaeolithic nuclear families – the father goes off to chase antelopes, and the mother stays in the cave to look after the kids and gather some grains. Best-selling contemporary writers such as Bernd Heinrich and Christopher McDougall are still preoccupied with the foot-hunters of early human cultures and their capacity to chase down ruminants. The argument goes that it’s natural for humans to run, we were born to do it, and so we should just get out there and run. Not all Palaeolithic anthropologists agree with this analysis, nor with its framing of the family lives of early humans. For women runners, the immediate problem with this man-as-hunter line is that it provides no satisfactory evolutionary fairytale to fall back on. If men run because they have ancient hunting blood in their veins, why do women run? Must we return again to the answer: because someone is chasing them, because they’re breaking some biologically determined code of gender conduct? Soon, we find ourselves stuck in a briar patch of acculturated ideas about men chasing women in the heat of passion, men chasing women for their own good, men chasing women to restore the natural order. And so it’s hard work to push back against a tradition of representation that insists if a woman is running, she’s fair game.

  *

  Why is the woman in Botticelli’s painting being chased? It’s because she refused a man. If there’s any kind of running that’s worrisome to the patriarchal status quo, it’s doing the bolt on a fiancé, husband or father. Botticelli borrowed the story from Boccaccio’s Decameron, a 14th-century set of bawdy morality tales told by travellers holed up in a castle. This one deals with renegade virtue and romantic opportunism. (It didn’t make the cut for inclusion in Pasolini’s 1971 film version of the Decameron, a romp heavy on the screams, gasps and moans.) Unhappy Nastagio leaves his home in Ravenna for a bit of soul-searching after his advances were spurned by a capricious woman. Walking in the forest, he comes upon the gruesome scene painted by Botticelli: ‘a young Damosell come running towards him, naked from the middle upward, and her faire skinne rent and torne with the briars and brambles …’

  Botticelli tells the tale over four panels. In the second, we see the knight kneeling over the fallen woman, tearing her body open. Renaissance audiences familiar with the Decameron would know that the knight and his prey are both phantoms. The knight, Guido degli Anastagi, bids Nastagio stay and listen to his story. The fallen woman is bound to him by a curse, says Anastagi. In life, she rejected him. Crushed, he committed suicide, and the wicked woman set to ‘rejoycing immeasurably in mine unhappy death’. He was condemned to eternal punishment for his suicide, and she was condemned to join him in the afterlife to suffer the consequences of her flightiness. We never learn her name or why she denied the knight. The curse: every Friday, degli Anastagi must chase the woman through the forest, slash her back open with the dagger he’d used to end his life, then rip out her heart and feed it to his dogs. It’s a hideous, histrionic revenge fantasy; today, a jilted lover might run a marathon instead to get over it.

  Nastagio is shocked – until he realises that he can turn the spectacle to his own ends. He invites the woman who walked out on him, Bianca Traversari, to dine in the forest the following Friday so that they can watch the phantom knight strike down the cruel strumpet. Bianca gets the message: stick with your man. The final panel is a wedding scene. The bride, Bianca the white, her perfect Renaissance features a blank, stays seated. Is she dreaming of running off to anothe
r lover, of a life without the feckless Nastagio and his gaudy red hose? The paintings were commissioned in 1483 – as a wedding present.

  Taken together, Boccaccio’s story and Botticelli’s painting demonstrate the powerful link that we’ve already encountered between the image of a woman running and cultural sanction. If running off is the action of a woman who seeks sexual autonomy, it is also her punishment. The ghost woman didn’t start off by running; she just said ‘no thanks’. Her impropriety was to imagine that she could love whom she pleased – which made the knight start chasing. The painter has captured her running, an eternal signal of her impropriety. She must have broken the rules. Run, ladies, and you will be run to ground.

  Is it too much to claim that paintings over five hundred years old have any bearing on runners today? I don’t think so. What Botticelli’s runner shows us is that the uneasiness about the idea of women running experienced by sports officials in the early 20th century had very deep roots, that the worried depiction of women runners across literary history is consistent with patterns in other art forms. It tells us about the everyday history of women running and how that’s tied to autonomy. Umpteen variations of this story operate around the core of a woman being punished – through violence, mockery, exile – for running in the wrong place, alone and without protection. It’s never neutral for women to run.