03/30/2020
We've come a long way! 1.5 miles?! That's not even our warm up!
This is 23-year-old Bobbi Gibb in 1966, right after becoming the first woman to run the Boston marathon.
A few months earlier, Gibb had received a letter in the mail, disqualifying her for the marathon. The letter stated that women are “not physiologically able to run a marathon.” The Amateur Athletics Union even went as far as prohibiting women from running more than 1.5 miles (2.4 km) and the organizers of the Boston Marathon did not want to “take the liability” of having a woman compete.
However, the rejection letter only emboldened her. On the day of the race, Gibb showed up wearing a blue hooded sweatshirt over a black swim-suit and her brother's Bermuda shorts. She hid behind a bush near the starting line and waited. When the starting gun fired, Gibb waited some more until about half the runners had passed. She then jumped in and blended into the pack.
However, it wasn't long before the men saw that she was a woman. To her surprise, she was not met with hostility, but with encouragement and support. She removed her sweatshirt and and finished the race in 3 hours and 21 minutes and 40 seconds, beating two-thirds of the runners.
Diana Chapman Walsh, who later went on to become the President of Wellesley College, recalled that day many years later: "That was my senior year at Wellesley. As I had done every spring since I arrived on campus, I went out to cheer the runners. But there was something different about that Marathon Day—like a spark down a wire, the word spread to all of us lining the route that a woman was running the course. For a while, the 'screech tunnel' fell silent. We scanned face after face in breathless anticipation until just ahead of her, through the excited crowd, a ripple of recognition shot though the lines and we cheered as we never had before. We let out a roar that day, sensing that this woman had done more than just break the gender barrier in a famous race..."
