Tag: Bobbi Gibb

RUNNING HISTORY LESSONS WITH RAMON

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We had a guy come over to the house yesterday to install a backup device on our computer by the name of Ramon, a fast fingered tech guy.

As he worked we got to talking about all the audio tapes on the desk from my old Runners Digest radio show in Boston and I went and showed him an interview I did with Bobbi Gibb in 1980 explaining how she was the first woman to run the Boston Marathon in 1966 but how she had to sneak into the race cause women weren’t allowed to run back then and how all these years later a statue is going to be erected in her honor at the start line next April and, yea, she is actually the sculptor of her own younger likeness.

Old tapes waiting to be digitized from Runners Digest days

And then I told the story about how the following year another woman named Kathrine Switzer got entered by her coach from Syracuse University, not out of any devious plan, just that he had a bunch of people to enter and used their initials rather than first names. So the BAA didn’t know she was a woman when the entries arrived, so they just sent back the bib numbers for everybody when if they knew she was a woman they wouldn’t have sent one to her.

But then when they saw a real live woman actually running in their race with a bib number on her chest, well this one official had a cow and came charging out to try to grab the number from her. but he found out real quick that Kathrine’s boyfriend was a hammer-thrower who blocked this older Scotsman into the bushes and the whole thing was photographed by the media and instantly went viral worldwide and how that became a real marker in the early stages of the women’s movement.

And Ramon was a bit taken aback by it all, being as he was still in his late 20s or so, and hadn’t ever heard the whole saga.  

But then he wanted to know “is that the one that cheated?”

“Kathrine? Oh, God, no. That was Rosie Ruiz.”

And off I went telling him how Rosie had died recently, and how sad her whole story was and how she really didn’t mean to cheat to win back in 1980, she just wanted to cheat for a decent time, but jumped in too soon and then wouldn’t admit it after they gave her the olive wreath and medal, you know, a screwup, like Mulvaney.“

Ramon consolidated more files and said, “I think I read something about that.”

“Which one?” I asked  “Mulvaney or Rosie?”

Before he could answer I told him “you know the women’s world record in the marathon was just broken last weekend in Chicago by a Kenyan lady Brigid Kosgei.”

“She beat Usain Bolt’s time, right?”

“No, Bolt ran the 100 and 200 and besides women can’t run with the best men, testosterone and all that.”

Which brought up the subject of the recent IAAF ruling on testosterone levels for Caster Semenya and the other inter-sex women athletes. And you try to explain that phenomenon to a computer technician. Anyway, on it went, one thing touching upon another.

Ramon’s head was beginning to spin by this time like the internal mechanism of that USB drive he was all but finished installing. 

Our two cats came over to check him out and  musta thought he was a good human cause they sidled right up. Ramon said he had seven cats of his own. I guess they could tell.

Ramon fixed us up real good on the computer, reset some folders, cleaned up the home screen. He was the kind of guy that knew his trade very well even knew some snippets of running here and there, but just enough to be completely confused. Like me with computers.

And so it goes.

Bobbi’s statue in her studio

END

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NEW STATUE COMING TO BOSTON MARATHON STARTING TOWN

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Each Patriots Day tens of thousands of runners descend on the bucolic bedroom community of Hopkinton, Massachusetts, historic starting point of the Boston Marathon. But once the racers have been sent on their way, only four quiet stationary representatives remain behind.

These are the four statues that have already been erected over the years to commemorate special contributions to the world’s oldest continuously run marathon. Now a fifth member to the memorial family is being welcomed, and notably it will be the first woman. (more…)

BERLIN 2018 PREVIEW – DANGEROUS DISTANCE

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Even in modern times, there are those of us who remember when people used to think running the marathon wasn’t just a challenge, but a risk.

Bobbi Gibb, Boston Marathon 1966

Bobbi Gibb, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon in 1966, had a father who thought the event was downright dangerous, and was angry at his daughter for even thinking about running it – “he thought I was mentally ill, but he didn’t know I had been training.”

Who could blame Bobbi’s dad in 1966?  After all, the entire mythology of the event was based on the Greek messenger Pheidippides running himself into his grave bringing word of victory in a battle against Persians 2500 years ago.

With a debut like that, it’s no wonder it took 2400 years before somebody attempted the distance again. But once it got going and they stripped away that ‘maybe you’re going to die doing it’ element, the marathon boomed because it came to represent the ultimate test of athletic endurance in an increasingly sedentary world. 

That’s the thing about consensus beliefs, tasks readily accepted today were once deemed unattainable. Such is the  scientific method and the manner of progress.  Observation and experimentation lead to the formulation and the testing of hypotheses, and thus does evidence accumulate and knowledge expand. 

Of course, there are always science deniers, the proudly lunkheadish, but people generally accept what the data indicates.

It wasn’t that long ago that there was a school of thought that believed trying to run the mile in under four minutes was as physically dangerous as trying to break the sound barrier in flight, another thought-to-be-impossible human endeavor. In fact, the frisson of danger was a big part of why people were intrigued by such monumental undertakings. 

Tragedy, after all, could happen, and you could be witness to it. There was a perverse car-crash appeal to such danger. “Playing at the edge” was the mindset for what a long, hard running effort might bring about.  (more…)

DANGEROUS DISTANCE

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As we enter Boston Marathon week 2018, let us remember that people once used to believe that running a marathon wasn’t just a challenge, but a risk.

Bobbi Gibb, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon in 1966, had a father who thought the event was downright dangerous and was angry at his daughter for even thinking about running it – “he thought I was mentally ill, but he didn’t know I had been training.”

Bobbi Gibb, Boston Marathon 1966

When Gibb hid in the bushes near the start line in Hopkinton, Massachusetts in April 1966 (because women weren’t allowed to run the marathon back then), her sole aim was to run the distance because that is what she had trained to do. And since she had already run as far as 30 miles on training, it never dawned on her that the marathon was beyond her capability. Only male officials were of that opinion. 52 years later women’s competitions in major Marathons stand on par, and at times higher, than the men’s race. That is certainly the case in these next two weeks in Boston and London.

But let’s also recall that it wasn’t all that long ago when there was a school of thought that believed that trying to run the mile in under four minutes was as physically dangerous as trying to break the sound barrier in flight, another thought-to-be-impossible endeavor. That frisson of danger was a big part of why people were intrigued by long distance racing. Tragedy, after all, could happen, and you could be witness to it. (more…)

ON ANY GIVEN SUNDAY

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Community of Spirit

The trilling of birds fills the Sunday morning air, a gentle reminder that we once lived in a society scaled more for pause and reflection, rather than one constantly driven by the passing billow and grind of work-a-day commerce.

On any such Sunday morning across the country we seekers and sufferers alike gather by the tens of thousands, congregants all, and embark on a journey of spiritual awakening, discovery and self-fulfillment. We represent every race and religious denomination, every creed and every faith, and by our simple garb make it impossible to distinguish between the wealthy and the poor among us.  We, then, are America’s runners, observers who enter no church as such, rather attend what amount to services at speed at marathons and road races nationwide.

Ours is a movement now firmly within the American mainstream, though we only began in earnest in the 1970s. Then, a combination of age and cynicism began to erode once dewy ideals which were bent toward altering a society of convention waging an immoral war in a foreign land.  Back then, a few iconoclasts sought refuge from the collective entanglement, and began to run on a path of self-discovery and personal well-being.

Today, our discipline transcends all boundaries and conventions, and has swollen into the millions across the globe. But even as our new collective has clogged city streets  – and in doing so filled charity coffers – we have met resistance.  Resistance not for what we believe, i.e. the restorative and redemptive power of a distance run, for that is a universal set tied to men like Thoreau and Emerson.  Instead, the resistance has come due to that which we require to fulfill our quests.  For in our need for open roads on which to celebrate fitness and health, we have called upon the graces of other, more traditional congregants whose path to their own places of worship have been blocked in the process.

The scheduling of marathons on Sunday mornings has thus become a thorny issue throughout the country. It cropped up a few years ago in Los Angeles, California after the city’s 21st annual marathon in 2006.  The old L.A. course, like so many major marathons, wound through the city’s neighborhoods blocking streets, and at times disrupting church services, in L.A.’s case as many as 500 churches.   But in thinking about the churches / marathon dilemma it struck me how narrowly us-versus-them that argument had become.  (more…)