“No! No, absolutely no!”
It’s early one morning, at her home in Oslo, she’d just turned 25 and guess the question to which Grete Waitz was responding?
Lured by the offer of a free flight, deftly presenting it as the chance for a second honeymoon, her husband and coach Jack had suggested she should run the New York Marathon. This was the autumn of 1978, when women’s marathon running was still a mostly unknown, often forbidden exercise.
It took another six years before women were allowed run the Olympic marathon, thanks to a late flurry of appeals before Los Angeles in 1984, and there was none of the fame or fortune that surrounded the men.
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Waitz had other reasons behind her resistance. She’d twice broken the 3,000m world record on the track, won the World Cross-Country earlier that year and was already thinking about retiring from running to further her teaching career. She’d also never run farther than 12 miles in one go. Gently pressed by her husband, “just to see how it would go”, Waitz eventually relented, and the rest is women’s running history.
Arriving in New York two days before the start, lining up in a field of 8,937 runners that included just 938 women, Waitz ran clear at around 16 miles and never looked back, winning in a then women’s world record time of 2:32:30
Some of her initial fear was realised because, like most marathons, it certainly hurt. Writing later in her autobiography, she recalled how she immediately took off her bloodied runners and pointed to her husband: “I’ll never do that again,” she said. Don’t we all!
But of course she did. After defending her World Cross-Country title in Limerick in 1979, she returned to New York and won again in 2:27:36, the first woman to break 2:30. That was the second of her four marathon world records. By the time she retired at the end of 1990, she’d won 13 major marathons, including the first World Championships for women in Helsinki in 1983. In all, she was a nine-time winner of New York.
When Waitz died of cancer in 2011, the New York Times obituary said her “humility and athleticism made her a singularly graceful champion and a role model for young runners, especially women”. That’s unquestionably true.
I’ve been thinking and reading about women’s running a lot this week, not just in the context of Sunday’s Dublin Marathon. When you’ve seen and known far more about running from a man’s perspective, it’s easy to forget – or sometimes not appreciate – the additional challenges and obstacles that women runners had to overcome, and in some regards still do.
Not just in the Kathrine Switzer sense either. She was the American woman who faced a very different sort of wall in the 1967 Boston Marathon, when race codirector Jock Semple tried to push her to the ground and rip off her race number. They later became friends, but Semple’s sadly chauvinistic way of thinking – that women shouldn’t be let anywhere near the marathon – was far from unique for some time afterwards.
“When I go to the Boston Marathon now, I have wet shoulders, women fall into my arms crying”, Switzer wrote in 2013. “They’re weeping for joy because running has changed their lives. They feel they can do anything.”
In advance of the 40th running of the Dublin Marathon, in 2019, Carey May recalled in this newspaper some of the challenges she had to overcome in winning the first race, back in 1980, including an incident during the race itself.
May had just turned 21, a novice by any standard, with most of her running done around the foothills of the Dublin mountains where she grew up. Defying that inexperience, she was well in front of the women’s race with two miles to go, when another obstacle appeared.
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“I just remember this old guy running out in front of me, shouting ‘What are doing? Women shouldn’t be doing this!’ But it was nothing I dwelled on. I just kept going.”
Indeed she did – May’s winning time of 2:41:11 was more than 20 minutes ahead of the next-best woman, Mary Walsh.
Three years later, Mary Purcell was the first woman home in Dublin, completing her remarkable range of national triumphs from 800m to the marathon (also finishing sixth, behind Waitz, at that 1979 World Cross-Country in Limerick).
“I never really thought about what I was achieving,” Purcell told this newspaper in 2018. “People might say ‘you’re great to be doing this’, but you still had to go home and cook the dinner, go to work the next day, getting on with the business of making a living.”
Like Waitz and Switzer and plenty others, May and Purcell were true pioneers of women’s distance running, especially the marathon, and they literally went where no women had gone before.
Maybe at times my perspective was in some part blinded by my own experiences, where there was no real differentiating between men’s and women’s running. From first joining a running club at 15, we trained on the same track, travelled to races on the same old bus, ate in the same chipper on the way home.
Or later in college in America, when the only difference between men’s and women’s track and field was competing in our separate events. We got the same amount of gear, stayed in the same hotel before races, ate off the same $20 per diem.
Then later still, when seeing Sonia O’Sullivan and Catherina McKiernan and their achievements recognised and celebrated on a par with the men, there was a sense perhaps that their perspective on running was no different at all.
But there is something else which men rarely experience, and that’s the sense of hesitancy – or in some cases absolute fear – that women runners often still face, even when running out in wide open public spaces.
There have been timely reminders of this, listening to some of the terrifying and horrific evidence from the Ashling Murphy murder trial over the last nine days. The 23-year-old schoolteacher was stabbed to death on that bright evening in January of last year while out running along the Grand Canal in Tullamore.
There is no coming to terms with a senseless murder like that, ever. And perhaps it is impossible for a man to fully relate to the fear that running can instil in women everywhere.
