Paula was unfailingly polite. Somehow I neglected to tell her about my recent and dramatic decline in enthusiasm; I pretended that all of my questions were for the novice runner. I asked her the same question—what would she recommend for that would-be runner?
There was a gentle pause before Paula answered softly, “Just go out and run. Just . . . go out and try it. That is the easiest way to get involved, to get hooked, and to experience what it can bring to your life. Do it. Go out and have fun, see if you like it.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” I mumbled politely. We chatted some more, and I thanked her profusely before heading for the tube, somewhat despondent.
Never meet your heroes was ringing in my ears as I boarded the train to Brighton. It had all been a bit of a waste of time. Neither of them had given me that fresh perspective on running that I had been searching for since Edinburgh. I began to wonder if it would ever happen. At home, I listlessly Googled a couple of the names Paula had mentioned in our chat: Ingrid Kristiansen, whom she had watched break the world record in 1985; trailblazing Norwegian runner Grete Waitz; and Joan Benoit Samuelson. I’d heard of Samuelson. She was the first woman to win the Olympic gold for the marathon.
It was only then that I learned that the marathon wasn’t an Olympic event for women until 1984. I decided to find out more. Three hours later, I was still pinned to my laptop, slack-jawed at what I was discovering. There were these women, these incredible women, who had been fighting to run competitively for decades. As recently as the 1960s, they had been told that they couldn’t, that they wouldn’t, and that they mustn’t. Women were forbidden to take part in public races, for fear of harming their femininity and reproductive health; some officials warned that distance running could cause the uterus to fall out. But some women just wouldn’t be told.
There was Dr. Julia Chase-Brand, who in 1960 was denied entry to the Manchester Road Race in Connecticut. A year later, it was decreed by the body governing the race that she could take part, but her time would not be counted, and she could not run with the men. This did not deter her. She turned up on race day wearing a headband, a skirted running outfit, running shoes, and a necklace. The media was intrigued by her and followed her story with an uneasy mixture of support and patronizing headlines and questions, from “She Wants to Chase the Boys” to “Women don’t run. You run. What are you?” They were flummoxed by her unapologetic combination of strength and femininity.
She was asked by an official to leave the race. She did not. And run she did. While the organizers had no intention of supporting her, the crowd—and other male runners—did. “The first guy I passed said, ‘Go get ’em, girl,’ ” she recalled. She completed the race with a faster time than ten men—or that is what the records would show, if her result had been counted.
Five years later, Roberta “Bobbi” Gibb applied to run the Boston Marathon—deemed the ultimate marathon on account of it being the world’s oldest and having very strict entry qualifications—only to receive a letter from Will Cloney, the race director, informing her that women were not physiologically capable of running twenty-six miles, and furthermore, under the rules that governed international sports, they were not allowed to run.
Bobbi’s response? “All the more reason to run.” The way she saw it, “I was running to change the way people think . . . If women could do this that was thought impossible, what else could women do? What else can people do that is thought impossible?” On race day, she was driven to the start line by her mum, wearing a blue sweatshirt with the hood pulled up and her brother’s Bermuda shorts secured by string. She did a couple of warm-up miles, then hid in some bushes near the start line before beginning the race. Instead of jeering, the male runners were supportive, and she finished the race in three hours and twenty-one minutes. As she had been running without a place, the record books did not take note of her achievement, no matter how many newspapers did.
In 1967, Kathrine Switzer scoured the race entry form and rule book for the Boston events, only to discover that they were listed as “Men’s Track and Field Events,” “Women’s Track and Field Events,” and then a third category, “The Marathon,” which specified nothing about gender. Although it was assumed that women were forbidden to run the race, the rule had not been expressly stated. Cloney, on writing to Roberta Gibb those years before, had not done his homework. Kathrine filled out the requisite paperwork and signed her name: K. V. Switzer, a childhood affectation inspired by writers J. D. Salinger and e.e. cummings. “Ever since I was twelve I signed all my papers K. V. Switzer, thinking I was totally cool.” Then she got on with her training and prepared for the big day.
As the race began, Switzer had to lift her sweatshirt to show the race number on her vest, and as she did so, Will Cloney himself herded her through the starting gate without even noticing that she was a dreaded woman. Though she had made no attempt to hide her identity, the bulky clothes and terrible weather conditions had done it for her. As had happened with Bobbi Gibb, when the male runners realized who was in their midst, instead of reprimanding or reporting her, they cheered and congratulated her. “My hair was flying, I didn’t try to disguise my gender at all. Heck, I was so proud of myself that I was wearing lipstick!”
Consequently, journalists took note and started to take pictures. They didn’t stop there; they also started to heckle Cloney’s race codirector, Jock Semple, a man already known for his temper. Seething at the indignity of the race being “infiltrated,” Semple leaped from the race truck and grabbed Switzer, screaming, “Get the hell out of my race and give me that race number.” Classy. Switzer was understandably scared to death and tried to dodge him, but he had her by the shirt and was trying to grab her race number. “He was out of control. It was like being in a bad dream,” she recalled.
Switzer’s boyfriend, Tom—a fellow athlete and hammer thrower—was less afraid, and he body-blocked the race director, who “went flying through the air,” leaving Switzer free to complete the race. Although her time was not officially recorded, she finished in four hours and twenty minutes. In 1972, in no small part due to the images of Switzer and Semple, the Boston Marathon relented, and women were allowed to compete officially.
It was even longer before women were allowed to compete in the marathon at the Olympic level. This barrier was left for Joan Benoit Samuelson to break. Having taken up running as rehabilitation following a ski accident, she found that “girls just didn’t run in public. When I first started running, I was so embarrassed, I’d walk when cars passed me. I’d pretend I was looking at the flowers.” Having run, and won, the Boston Marathon in 1979, she set her sights on the Olympics. By 1984, with considerable help from her sponsor, Nike, the inaugural women’s Olympic marathon was set to take place. Only seventeen days before the Olympic trials, Samuelson suffered a knee injury and had to endure major surgery. To everyone’s surprise, and in a triumph of fortitude, she managed to show up at the trials and win. Three months later, she ran—and won—the race in one of the most moving marathon finales of all time. She ran alone for the last few miles and entered the famous Los Angeles stadium to huge cheers, having not only completed the run of her life but opened doors to generations of female runners.
Her race wasn’t just for the runners of the future. “I cried like a baby,” said Julia Chase-Brand of the historic day. “She gave a tribute to all the women who made distance running possible. I took it as a very personal thank-you. Maybe she was me if I had been born ten years later.”
By the end of my evening of reading and discovering, my mind was awash with images—how hard it is to run a marathon, let alone when you are not wanted, not counted, being spat at or physically assaulted on the course. These women weren’t tedious gym bunnies or brainlessly competitive automatons. They had been rock stars of the road and gone on to become doctors and mathematicians. And there was I, a little cheesed off with the prospect of running a few times a week. A switch had been flicked.
The next morning I
went for a run, chastened. My head was swimming with my discoveries. Those women weren’t running to keep fit, to stay slim, or to impress anyone but themselves. They weren’t chasing approval; they were chasing the effervescent joy of running. They were running to run, just as Paula Radcliffe had suggested. As I turned off the seafront and headed for home, I realized that she had been right. Sometimes, to find out if you are a runner, you have to go out and run. It turned out that I still was.
11
The Finish Line
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go . . .
—T. S. Eliot
London gradually got smaller beneath us. Even though I could see the city from the plane, it seemed very far away. San Francisco seemed even farther. It had existed in my mind for so long as a holy grail. The Golden Gate Bridge had transfixed me since childhood—it was one of those images you see in picture books and cannot believe you might ever witness yourself. When I was a teenager, watching films set there and beginning to understand the city’s unique political and cultural history, San Francisco became the city of my dreams.
Running past the Golden Gate Bridge had been a big part of the reason I wanted to run the Nike Women’s Marathon, and I was finally going to do it. I was so nervous at the thought that I burst into tears and sat in a bit of a daze for the first hour of the flight, scrolling through recent photographs of those most beloved to me. I calmed myself down enough to sleep a while, but when I got to the hotel and realized how alone I was, how far from everyone I knew and loved, I felt rigid with terror and utterly weak.
I closed the hotel room door behind me and burst into tears again. I was terrified. I opened my bag, got out my father’s twenty-five-year-old woolen running top, and threw it on the bed, desperately hoping it might emit a bit of courage. Apparently not. I was going to have to find my own. I unpacked forlornly and looked at the contents of the cupboard. Two pairs of running shoes. A pair of tracksuit bottoms. Two pairs of running tights. Two running tops. And a dress. An unusual selection, when you looked at it laid out like that. But my friends had been telling me all year that it was unusual to spend so much time trying to get to the other side of the world simply to go for a run with a load of women you’ve never met. Nonetheless, I’d gone and done that.
I reached for my running shoes. I had arranged to go for a run with some other British runners I had gotten in touch with in the weeks before. We headed out from Union Square, where the marathon headquarters were, and down to the Embarcadero, the road running alongside the water. It was nine A.M., although my brain was convinced it was something else entirely. Both the water and the October sky were a perfect clear blue. My heart swelled as I caught sight of a bridge ahead of me, only to realize that it was not the right one. We continued along the water, past the farmers’ market opening up, local artists setting up stalls, and boats delivering fish to the restaurants. I had made it! I was in San Francisco, where I had wanted to be for so long, and I had gotten there through running! My stride lengthened, and I felt the cramps and tightness from the flight dissolving away.
Later that morning I was invited to a press breakfast, where we were introduced to the athlete Allyson Felix. A superstar Olympian of 2012, she was one of the many magnificent women who had graced our TV screens over the summer, looking strong, proud, and goddess-like. To sit and chat with one of the women who had helped promote the idea that a useful body, a strong body, might be of more value than a decorative one, was amazing. Once again I was starstruck. I asked her about distance running, and she said she’d never run farther than four miles, and anyone who had was, as far as she was concerned, “someone with a great gift.”
How had the simple act of putting one leg in front of the other made this possible? How was I living out the dreams of the little me on the sofa, legs dangling, unable to touch the carpet, watching the man soaring across the stadium in the jet pack at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics? I felt more complete, more me, than I had in so long. Those weeks of despair during training seemed to melt away. I had a gift, I repeated to myself. I had a gift.
I wasn’t feeling quite as gifted the next morning when my alarm went off at four-thirty A.M. I put on my running clothes, laid out as usual on the floor by the end of the bed. I rubbed Vaseline all over my feet, remembering the first time my father had told me to do so and how I had scoffed at him. I guzzled a cup of coffee and a carton of coconut water, my favorite pre- and post-run drink, full of electrolytes and far superior to those glucose drinks, in my opinion. I headed out through the lobby, where the concierge waved and wished me luck.
Union Square was swathed in darkness, but there was a buzz in the warm air. The huge palm trees were twinkling with fairy lights. The area had been taken over by the marathon, but now it was time for business. There were security fences going up around the closed roads, and several streets were lined with big yellow American school buses, ready to bring the runners home from the finish line.
I crossed the square and headed to an all-night diner where a group had arranged to meet. I had some toast and eggs, my usual marathon breakfast, while we took turns going to the bathroom and fixing our race numbers to our tops. Crowds were gathering, like a running zombie nation in the half-light. As ever, I found myself marveling at the myriad shapes and sizes of the runners. In among the crowd there were a few men, but all of them had marked themselves as either survivors of or those left bereft by the cancer whose charity the marathon was associated with.
Within half an hour, I had joined the throng lined up and ready to begin. I could just about see the stage, where my new heroine Joan Benoit Samuelson took the microphone and declared the start. I was going to be running in the same race as Samuelson. I was thrilled as the crowds inched forward slowly while daylight started to appear. Moments later, we set off.
We headed to the edge of the bay and ran toward the Golden Gate Bridge. The crowd fell largely silent, the thump of runners’ feet the loudest sound around us. I could smell the fish and wondered how far they had all swum. I tried to remember the route map that I had studied so long back at home in Brighton and then on the plane. I had a pang of longing for home. Then I remembered the bridge. We were going to be there soon, weren’t we?
Well, yes, we were, but so was something else. A fog the likes of which I’d never seen before. It was thick and claggy and coming straight off the water. I could feel the humidity settling in my lungs every time I breathed in. I looked around and saw how much visibility had been reduced. It looked as if there were only a few runners around me, not the hundreds I had set off with. Had it not been for the neon splashes on the odd running vest, I scarcely would have believed I was doing what I was. Fear crept back in. Would the whole run be like this? How would I know where I was going? The marks on the map that I had memorized were obsolete now that I could see no distance at all.
Then I noticed that we were running past the bridge—the Golden Gate of my dreams! All I could see of it were two concrete stumps looming above the water. It was early on in the race, and crushing dispiritedness was starting to consume me. How would I cope if the whole race were like this, so different from everything I had anticipated?
The delicate fabric holding my confidence together began to unravel. I wasn’t sure if I’d make it without the visual and emotional treats I had bribed myself with. But then the landscape changed, distracting me altogether. A hill appeared, a huge hill. Five months of my breezy tweets in reply to anyone who had asked about the hills of San Francisco seemed rather facetious. I thought of my passion for hill running that summer, and I imagined that enthusiasm pushing me up the hill. And what a reward was waiting when I got there! There was a spectacular view across what of the bay was visible through the fog. No bridge, but as our heads bobbed up above the mist and clouds, I felt something approaching invincibility.
I gasped, not just breathlessness but excitement. The route was proving to be as astonishing as I had hoped. The views grew more and
more spectacular as the mist cleared. I felt like an explorer venturing through the unknown and pushing myself to the limit.
As the halfway point approached, those running the half marathon started to peel away, turning toward their finish line, leaving the rest of us to do the final thirteen-mile loop. Though I wasn’t even halfway done, a certain loneliness was creeping over me at seeing so many runners turn away. The distance I’d covered from Union Square felt endless, and the remaining distance seemed unfathomable. I longed for a running partner, a teammate, a companion of some sort.
Then came the texts. I had entirely forgotten, but Nike had created an app, which meant that my Facebook page could chart my progress with messages I had prepared in advance. When I crossed the mats at certain milestones, the chip on my shoe was activated, and Facebook loaded a message updating where I was. My heart surged as the messages started to appear.
“You are not alone, we are here with you.”
“Hemmo! Run home soon!”
“KEEP GOING, DARLING!”
A photograph of Louis appeared, wagging his hands excitedly at the camera, wearing a snazzy pair of tracksuit bottoms. I wanted to hug my phone.
Next a simple row of kisses arrived. I was not alone. I never was and I never would be.
I waved goodbye to the half marathoners and looked around at the women who were left. It was unusual for me not to be surrounded by characters in costume or slower runners at this point in a marathon. This time the other women were just like me. They weren’t freaks or hard-bodied obsessives or slaves to the track. They were women trying their hardest. Wearing photos of their family who inspired them. They were inspiring one another. We would run together.
Running Like a Girl Page 13