Running Like a Girl (18 page)

The two of them were interviewed onstage, then Paula waded through crowds of fans asking her to sign things, to speak to them, to meet their babies. I was taken to the press area. As a result of my enthusiasm, I was granted interviews with both of the stars. I was warned that they would be brief, so I quickly prepared myself. I sat down to speak to Carl, a genuine icon.
He was glowing and I basked in his beam. His running shoes were box-fresh, and his running jacket was made of a silver reflective fabric. He shone in a way that only the very healthy or very rich do. He was immaculately polite and listened carefully to my questions. I asked how he would advise the woman who thought she might like to become a runner but had no idea how—the woman who believed there was a secret that needed unlocking. Who felt that she needed permission.

Mr. Lewis gave me a long, involved answer about how that woman should pick a route or a distance she wanted to run and then walk it every day for a month. He was convinced that this woman would then feel her “natural competitiveness” surge within and break into a run, desperate to move at speed. I nodded, smiling. I could kind of see his point, but inside me was a clear voice, one not wearing a silver jacket, that said:
I'm not sure any woman would see that through. She would have told herself she was wasting everyone's time halfway through week two. She would never make it to running.

I thanked Mr. Lewis, choking back emotion as I explained how much it would mean to my dad that I'd spoken to him. Deep down I knew I wouldn't be passing on his advice. I held out for Paula. She would have the answer. Surely the most iconic long-distance runner of our time would provide me with the solid-gold nugget of advice that I could pass on to generations of would-be runners. I would be enthused anew. A nation of runners would be born! Inspire a generation!

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.

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go . . .

—T. S. Eliot

L
ondon 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.