Marathon running won’t stop the world’s atrocities against women, but it can inspire ordinary people to extraordinary things.
I have long been a great believer that there is nothing quite like the power that comes with reminding yourself of your own insignificance. Time and time again we watch runners overcome by emotion as they cross a marathon finish line;
to take marathon running only at its face value of covering 26.2 miles is to be robbed of the real magic - it’s all about perspective.
Putting things in perspective keeps us from getting too caught up in our own insularity. Sometimes that perspective is found through choice, and other times it just slaps you in the face when you least expect it.
My mum was born in 1967, the same year that Katherine Switzer became the first woman to run the Boston Marathon with an official bib number. She entered under the name K.V. Switzer and got a friend to collect the number for her. The infamous photograph of the race directors trying to physically drag Switzer off the course will be forever iconic. The previous year, Bobby Gibb had applied to run and was told in response that women were not physiologically capable of running a marathon.
So, after travelling for four days on a bus from San Diego, she hid in a bush and jumped into the race after around half of the men had crossed the start line (there is indeed a statue in this woman’s honour - don’t worry). I was born a few months after Paula Radcliffe ran her second world record in the marathon, and my mum was born a few months after Switzer was assaulted for daring to set foot on a marathon course. For me, that’s a stark representation of how much had to change in the 36 years between those two events.
There is a remarkable story of the six women who were permitted to run the 1972 New York Marathon. It was considered “progress” by the American Athletics Union that they permitted “certain women” (with no strict definition of what that meant) to run marathons provided they start 10 minutes before or after the men, or at a different start line altogether. When the gun went off, these six women sat down in protest at this rule. This was only months after Title IX was passed into US law, prohibiting sex-based discrimination in any federally funded school or education program. Yet, it would be outrageous to practise anything but sex-based discrimination in marathon running.
This particular story reminded me of how my mum, in early secondary school, sat outside on school grounds with her peers in the middle of winter until the school agreed to let the girls wear trousers if they so wished. Around the same time, she would go to support her dad at marathons and there wouldn’t be many - if any - women for her to cheer on.
Similar to the New York Marathon story, there was reluctant progress being made in one place, but staggeringly glacial progress in another; marathons were simply not for women. That’s just the way it was.
The progress made in women’s marathon running that took my mum from being a young spectator with no women to cheer for, to a proud mum with a daughter to cheer for is so fascinating - I’d be simply rude to try condensing it into a few hundred words. I’ve read many books and articles and listened to many podcasts; everything I’ve learned has given me an immense level of gratitude for the women that have gone before me.
However, an hour or so that I spent outside a Frankfurt pub in October of last year, the day before my first marathon, proved to be the most impactful lesson I’ve been taught about women’s marathon running. What precisely that lesson taught me, I’m not entirely sure - I’m still struggling with it. But I can tell you that this is when any pre-race nerves disappeared, and I chose to see my worries for the phenomenally tiny things they really always had been.
“Frau, Leben, Freiheit” - German for “Woman, Life, Freedom”- was being passionately chanted across the Romerberg square by a mass of protestors, waving Iranian flags and holding signs in an entirely peaceful demonstration. I distinctly remember the tears that formed in my mum’s eyes when I told her why these protesters were here.
22-year-old Mahsa Jina Amini died in Iranian police custody after being arrested for failing to properly cover her hair, triggering nationwide protests in which hundreds were killed. Was I concerned about a trivial thing like race day weather anymore? Not so much, no.
This is where I get stuck.
When it comes to sentimental, delusionally optimistic runners who think there’s nothing you can’t fix by running through a beautiful sunrise, I’m up there with the best of them. I think there’s no better way to drown my sorrows than a run in torrential rain, and there are times when peace is found only in the kind of endorphin rush I get from lying flat out on a track because I’m totally spent. Call that what you like, but I know I’m not alone in it. These enlightening experiences are not dimmed by the fact that we have the liberty to enjoy them every day; the purity of it makes it all the more mesmerising. And therein lies the problem. The sunrises, the downpours and the extreme exertions - pure though they may be - are all experienced within each of our own wee worlds. In reality there are horrors so far removed from our norm that we cannot even begin to grasp their enormity.
I have a nice picture in my head of me running up The Mall in a few days’ time to finish my third marathon. I think of the heroes who took care of the sit-down protests decades ago so that my biggest worry on the start line can just be about whether I’ve gone for a pee too early. The marathon picture I get to paint is framed by the efforts of a great number of women who have gone before me, and I like to remind myself of that.
But then there are the women and girls of Iran whose courage I was so bluntly reminded of in Frankfurt. They are brave on a level incomprehensible to me. All this is to say that the pain we feel in a marathon is real, but we are not suffering. That pain is a privilege we choose to experience.
To run 26.2 miles is a unique expression of strength, resilience and perseverance. That’s an expression of things women were not - and in some places still are not - given the right to express.
Conquering the marathon in whichever way you choose is symbolic of conquering whatever struggles you may face in your life; we choose the marathon to put things in perspective. But above all else, we must never forget that marathon running is in fact a stunning expression of freedom - the most basic levels of which are still denied to so many around the world today. Audre Lorde said, “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”.
With whatever strength of character you start a marathon, it will only be bolstered by what you endure over the hours that follow. And if you think there aren’t droves of women who went on to use their marathon-empowered mentalities to do incredible things and drive change elsewhere, you’re out of your mind.
The act of marathon running itself won’t stop the world’s atrocities against women, but it certainly can inspire ordinary people to extraordinary things.
To quote the fictional President Jed Bartlett, we must “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful and committed citizens can change the world.” Why? Because it’s the only thing that ever has.
