On May 6, 1967, twenty-eight men, Kathrine Switzer, and a thirteen-year-old girl started a marathon. Only one of them was trying to break a world record.
Maureen looked small standing in the grass on the side of the cracked asphalt road, like a loitering kid who’d snuck into an event for adults. Newspapers regularly commented on her size when they reported on her races around Canada and the United States.
As she shuffled closer to them, Maureen felt like she’d entered a restricted room during an important meeting. Like when you accidentally open the wrong door and everyone turns their head toward you and the whole space falls dead silent. She walked right next to the men, the top of her brown hair barely reaching their torsos. They parted ways to let her through. Some of them looked confused.The other girls were off to the side.
It was a strange feeling for her. In typical races, the tension doesn’t cease after the starting gun goes off. Your legs fire off the line. You can’t relax, your muscles burn. You begin to breathe hard. You can’t speak or smile or wave. Maureen was doing all three in the first miles. She’d never felt so wistful and at ease during a competition before. She was just happy to be away from the starting line, away from the tension. She was doing what she loved to do. She was running.
At the end of each of the 5-mile laps, she stopped and crouched behind a canvas tent staked into the ground. It served as a little bathroom for runners. Maureen thought this was funny, that in the middle of a race, when nature came knocking, she had time to pee and was still hitting her goal pace each mile.The distance floated by with cheers from friends and parents. This felt so easy, Maureen began to wonder what the big deal was.
Sure, he knew the basics of it—the stuff anyone can find out if they read the papers or running magazines that Sy devotedly subscribed to. He knew that because it is so long and so tremendously difficult, there is honor in simply finishing, no matter how fast. In 1967, not many people in the world had done it.
When Maureen came through the starting area for the fourth lap, her teammates hopped onto the street and ran with her to keep her company. They passed four more men over the next five miles. Coming into the final lap, Maureen had moved up to eighth place. Somewhere behind her, the men who were allowed to run this race because of their strong bodies and masculine minds hobbled forward. The girl who wasn’t supposed to be able to do this smiled to her friends and waved.
Five men passed Margaret in different states of despair. The leader, Jim Beisty, looked pained yet determined. Minutes behind him, a college-aged kid named Jim Rea streaked by, looking stronger than anyone should after twenty-five miles of running. The others looked like zombies. You couldn’t say they were running a marathon as much as shuffling through it.The race had started at noon. Maureen needed to cross the finish line by 3:19 p.m. She needed to reach Margaret by 3:11 p.m.
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