Women runners have - and continue to - overcome obstacles not encountered by men
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?
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 I’ve been thinking and reading about women’s running a lot this week, not just in the context of Sunday’s. 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.
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. 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.