What Bobbi Did: Capital Region women reflect on running, racing, and the significance of the Boston

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Karen Dolge serves as the president of the Kinderhook Running Club and can often be found running the dirt roads

around Old Chatham. When she took up distance running over a decade ago, she wasn’t thinking about going to the Boston Marathon. But, she ran a strong debut marathon raising money for Team in Training, qualified, and, with the encouragement of some friends that were also going, registered to run. “I had no idea what to expect or how amazing it is to run alongside fellow runners, on the same course as elite athletes, who have all trained so hard to be there,” she told me. “It's the love of running and the camaraderie of those runners, the spectators, the volunteers, and all the communities along the course, that make running Boston so special. I get goosebumps just thinking about it.” Since then, running and the Boston Marathon have been an inextricable part of her life.

Boston Marathon memories seem to be like Karen Dolge’s, where the experience of running the race is made more vivid by the things, big and small, that make the Boston Marathon a special running event. Some of those things stem from Boston’s date and location--on the east coast at a time of year when winter can hang around or summer can come early. What Jessica Hageman Northan remembers about her first Boston Marathon is the wicked storm that whipped through the city that morning in 2007. Huddled in a nearby gym with other runners, she forgot to account for the time it would take to walk to the starting line and missed her start time by almost 20 minutes. But, ask her about her 2010 Boston and she’ll recall the feeling of being pulled along by the pack of fast runners around her, flying past the crowds and, at the end of the day, setting a marathon person best by nine minutes.

In 2013, Kim MacGregor Law was running her first Boston Marathon and loving it. Less than a year before she was a casual runner and, little by little, built up her mileage to the point where, in October she ran a local marathon in a time of 3:46, which was well below the Boston qualifying standard that the 54 year old needed to meet. She was running well, passing the bands playing music and cheering, costumed spectators lining the side of the road when she heard a loud boom, and was soon stopped by a police officer. The Tsarnaev brothers had set off bombs near the finish line.

Karen Bertasso remembers her 2009 Boston Marathon as a day of suffering. She had grown up in Scotia and got into competitive athletics at a young age, spending some time on the U.S. Olympic Development Team for soccer, but now she was in graduate school, and new to distance running. The morning of the race, she followed her normal race routine, eating a light breakfast after she woke up, but the scale of a major world marathon like Boston means that the race start unfolds slowly. By 10 a.m., when her wave started, her breakfast had worn off and the standing around waiting amidst the odors of hot dogs and pretzels hadn’t done her stomach any favors. Out on course, she barely ate anything. “I didn't take gels back then and tried to do the whole sport beans things. Little did I know an entire pack was equivalent to a single serving. I probably didn't finish a full pack during the entire marathon.” Still, she has vivid, positive memories of that day. “I remember some elderly women outside of their nursing home in their wheelchairs cheering, that was cute. Also, I threw my gloves to some young girls along the course that squealed with excitement because they got my gloves.”

The experience of running the Boston Marathon is, for many runners, the highlight of their year, if not their entire running lives. And yet, for most of its 120 runnings, those experiences were inaccessible to women. That began to change in 1966 when Roberta “Bobbi” Gibb snuck her way into the race, ran strong the entire 26.2 miles and, met a cheering crowd at the finish line. At the end of the day, 414 men had finished, and, for the first time, so too had one woman. In that moment, knocked a big brick out of the wall that excluded women from the challenge and triumph of long-distance road racing.

With this year’s Boston Marathon marking the 50th anniversary of Bobbi Gibb’s historic run, her story, still unknown to many even in the running community, is finally getting the full attention that it deserves. When I realized the significance of this year’s race, it made me wonder about the meaning and significance that Boston holds for female runners today. I was fortunate that eight women from in and around the Capital Region were willing to share their stories and experiences with me and help me reflect on how the world of running has changed since that afternoon in April of 1966.

What Bobbi did.

I teach an introductory sociology course to university students, and when we get to the discussion of gender and society, I start by telling them the story of Bobbi Gibb’s first Boston Marathon. I explain to them that, at the time, the American Athletic Union, the body governing road racing, limited women’s racing to events of one and a half miles or less. The longest track event that women could compete in at the Olympics was the 800 meters. These rules were based, in part, on the belief that women’s bodies could not handle the rigors of longer distance events. Women who were serious about running would train for the events that they were allowed to compete in but, because they couldn’t participate in the burgeoning road racing scene, never prepared for those events. The result was a sort of self-reinforcing feedback loop. Prevailing ideas about the physical capabilities of women relative to those of men were enshrined in the formal rules of sport, which produced a running culture that reinforced those prevailing ideas.

The power of Gibb’s run wasn’t that she was the first to show that women could complete the marathon distance--the British runner Violet Percy had done that in 1926, being the first woman to get an official time for a marathon race--it was that she showed it could be done at Boston, at the time arguably the most famous marathon race in the country, if not the world. Gibb continued to lean against the door to Boston, returning in 1967 and 1968, but now she was not alone. As more women finished the race, the ridiculousness of the premise barring them from official competition became impossible to ignore. The rules were officially changed in 1971, and the following April seven women completed the first, AAU scantion Boston Marathon, with Nina Kusckik, who had for that last few years, been battling it out with Sara Mae Berman in the unofficial race, becoming the first official female winner.

As the barriers segregating women’s running from a men’s running broke down, the women’s marathon quickly

transformed from a media curiosity to a world-class, competitive event. Once women were officially allowed to race the Boston Marathon, it took only eleven years for the women’s side of the race to reach a world-class level. Nina Kuscsik’s winning time in 1972 was 3:10:26; Just eleven years later, Joan Benoit took more than 45 minutes off that time, winning the 1983 Boston Marathon in 2:22:43. That incredible performance, now 33 years old, would still have beat all but four of every female successive winner since then. Women’s talent at the marathon distance had quietly been developing in shadows of the running community, and with the doors to Boston thrown open, it could now be expressed.

The quieter power of moments like Gibb’s run is that they continue to churn and ripple long after the race is over. Each push against the forces keeping women out of sport can create new opportunities to bring women into sport. Wendy Duffy Mastripolito qualified for her first Boston Marathon last March in Virginia Beach at the age of 49 after having come back to running later in her adult life. She had started running for Henderson High School in Westchester, Pennsylvania in 1981, but there really weren’t any programs in place to encourage and develop female runners, or support them if they found their way onto the school’s team. “The only reason I ended up running was because I got cut from our field hockey team,” she recently told me. “Our high school had just started a women's cross country team and I think maybe there were five of us. I didn't even know what to wear or eat or even how to run, I just went out and ran as hard as I could. I remember trying to keep in shape during indoor track season and there was no women races and so I couldn't race.” After high school, she left running behind, and didn’t pick it back up again for twenty years.

Jump ahead a generation and the opportunities available to women to run and race competitively have expanded considerably. After her disappointing, 2009 attempt at Boston, Karen Bertasso’s motivation to take on the marathon only increased, and she found a supportive community of runners to support that ambition. She put in more and more miles, and joined a local racing team, and has chased her dream to qualify for the U.S. Olympic Trials around country and the world. Hillary Johnson is in her late 20s, works as a running coach for Fleet Feet Sports in Albany, and is looking forward to her first Boston Marathon. She grew up in a running family (both her mom and dad ran for Truman State University) and has been running for as long as she can remember. When she was very young, it was club track in the summers, then for her middle school team, and, by high school, was running competitively on the club team, and school cross country and track teams. There were so many opportunities to train and compete that, by the time she left high school, she was burnt out on running and took a break from the sport. At 25, she picked it back up, and ran her first marathon on her 26th birthday. Since then she has completed multiple marathons and ultramarathons and this past May, ran strong at the Vermont City Marathon, setting a new personal marathon best by fourteen minutes and earning her entry to Boston.

Finding a place in the wide open world of running.

As important as these changes have been, there’s another, though less obvious, way that Gibb’s run changed the sport of running. By working to push the door to the Boston Marathon open for women, Gibb helped to make the sport more expansive which, I think is fair to say, was key to the massive growth of the sport in the 1980s and 1990s that we now call the “running boom.” Before the boom, road running was a niche sport populated by niche characters and viewed with mild curiosity, if it was seen at all. A recent story published by ESPN.com paints Gibb as just the sort of out-of-place, ouside-the-box personality that fit this mold and, more critically, was needed to pull off a stunt as crazy as taking a bus cross country for three days from San Diego to Boston just so that she could hide in some bushes in Hopkinton in her brother’s street close and jump into a 26 mile footrace. But the attention that was given to Gibb did not focus on the things that made her a unique personality, it focused on the fact that she was a woman, a de facto representative of half of the population seen as completely incapable of running such distances. As a result, Gibb’s run has not only changed our perception of what women can do, it has also changed the character of running itself by showing that the marathon was in anyone’s reach.

One clear way to see this is in shifting landscape of road running and marathon racing over the last 50 years. In 1978, the National Center for Health Statistics published a nationally- representative survey of American men and women about the sports and exercise that they regularly engaged in. Seven out of every one hundred men surveyed listed “jogging” as a regular exercise, but less than three out of every one hundred women did. The number of people who regularly run has since increased dramatically and the demographics of the running community have flipped. Statistics gathered by Running USA show that, in 1990, 25% of the nearly five million finishers of running races were women; by 2013 the number of finishers had jumped to 19 million and 57% of them were women.

As the sport has grown, its character has changed. In 1976, ten years after Gibb’s run, twenty seven of the twenty eight women who entered the Boston Marathon finished in under three hours and twenty minutes. In 2013, the median finish time for a woman completing any marathon in the U.S. was just over four hours and forty minutes. In other words, at the same time that opportunities have expanded for women at the competitive, even elite, level of the sport, the running tent has expanded greatly, so to speak, and has become more things to more people. No longer the exclusive playground of former high school and collegiate track stars, running is the sport of everyman, and everywoman.

Thinking about the culture of running around her, Kim MacGregor Law told me “I think more and more people, especially the women I know, are getting into running for their health, fitness, and for the camaraderie that comes with joining running groups.” Kathleen Dougherty embodies this approach to the sport that Kim MacGregor Law sees around her. Dougherty has lived in the Capital Region for all of her 51 years, has completed 12 marathons since taking up running in 1987, and is looking forward to her first Boston Marathon. Running has long been a key part of her life. “I think it's the challenge and the comradery that attract me, and running is just more of a way of life instead of an activity or exercise. Just getting out there and being with friends is the best part.”

That many women approach running with a different set of goals and motivations than men typically should not be surprising. For most of us, running is not our life, it is something that we try to fit into our lives, which means, in addition to finding the motivation, finding the time. And when it comes to finding time, women’s and men’s lives continue to be different, especially at that stage when the demands of work and family are most pressing. In 1965 women reported spending on average about two hours a day doing paid work, four hours a day doing housework, about an hour a day on childcare and got in six minutes a day of sports or exercise. Men, on the other hand, were working about six and a half hours a day, but just doing a little more than 30 minutes a day of housework. They also got in about 14 minutes a day for sports and recreation--a little more than twice as much time as women did, and about a minute more than they spent on childcare.

Fast-forward to 2012 and those numbers have changed considerably. Women now report that, on average, they spend about four and a half hours a day at paid work and two and a half hours a day on housework. The time that they take for sports and recreation has more than doubled, to fifteen minutes a day. Time use has changed for men as well. On average, they do less paid work (five and a half hours now), and more housework. But men’s average time of just under 90 minutes of housework per day is still about an hour less than that of the average woman, and men’s average of 22 minutes a day for sports and exercise is still about 50% higher than what women claim. Men are now spending about half an hour a day on childcare, but this is still half the amount of time as the hour a day that women give to their children.

The gulf separating the male “breadwinner” from the female “homemaker” has narrowed in the last fifty years, but it is still the case that, for most women, the expectation is that they will take care of the home and, if they have children, their needs as well. The most obvious effect of this is that many women will find they can give less time to their sport, and may even take a break from running entirely the demands for caring for young children are at their most intense. As Karen Dolge observed: “I see a lot of women starting to run later in life, or picking it up again after they've had children, in an effort to keep fit, and be a role model for their children.” Hillary Johnson saw this first hand. “I watched my mom get back into running when she was in her 40's, when my sister and I were old enough to be on our own, and go from her first marathon to her first 100 miler in only a couple years.”

This distinct set of challenges can be the foundation for some uniquely beautiful moments. One of Karen Dolge’s clearest, and fondest, Boston Marathon memories is running the race five months after giving birth and seeing her babies at the top of “Heartbreak Hill.” For Johnson, seeing her mother come back to, and excel at, running has been a powerful, motivating force behind her own running. ”It is so inspiring watching my own mom finish so many races and win her age group month after month,” she told me. “If she can do that, I know I can as well.”

The measure of a runner.

Gibb’s run helped open the doors of road racing to women, and the many achievements of the women runners that followed her, have changed our ideas about what women can, and should, be doing, but that does not mean that many women do not continue to struggle to find their place in the sport. If runners share a personality trait, it is a tendency towards self doubt. Beneath that veneer of self-assurance and confidence that we try to project is a mind in turmoil, prone to self-doubt. While all runners, men and women, grapple with this the additional challenges that women face incorporating sport into their lives means that they often can not give their running the attention that they want to, which, in turn, can make it harder for women to see themselves as runners.

Lynn Allin is 47, has lived and worked in the Schenectady area for the last three years, approaches the sport with the confidence that comes from having been a competitive runner since her her 30s, but sees many of the female runners that she knows second-guessing their running identities. “They put qualifiers and conditions on participation that limit their identification based on arbitrary conceptions of what runners do and what running is. Women may simply not feel like a runner unless they attend races, or finish a marathon. Women may be slower to identify themselves as runners simply because they don't participate in the sport in a way that they recognize as substantial enough.”

Women who are new to sports, who are coming back to running after a break, or who have limited time to train after juggling jobs and families, have access to a world of running that has evolved and expanded, from one where Gibb could not even find a woman’s road running shoe to wear, to one that welcomes runners who approach the sport from diverse backgrounds and motivations. It’s probably fair to say that now, more than ever, women who want to take up running can find resources and supportive communities to help them do that. Female coaches provide expert advice in a positive, nurturing environment. The Capital Region, like the rest of the country, abounds with women-only training groups and boasts a prestigious women-only race: the Freihofer’s 5k.

At the same time, the sport retains at its core a singular and rather inflexible metric defining success: time over distance. The more that our running takes us out of ourselves, the more we start to run with friends instead of alone, to jump into small local races, and then larger regional races, and then set our sights on something as big as the Boston Marathon, the more we become exposed to these measures and rankings, which come to shape how we see our place in the larger community of runners. This is something that Hillary Johnson confronts as part of her work as a running coach with Fleet Feet sports. She finds that many of her female clients are very talented, but struggle with self-confidence. “They are much better than they think they are.” Have I trained long enough, hard enough? Do I deserve to be here? Am I even a runner?

This reality gets at why it was so important that Gibb chose Boston. The Boston Marathon looms large in almost all runners’ imaginations. Even those who are new to the sport, or who, at least for now, can not imagine finishing a full marathon, understand what it means to run Boston versus another marathon. Lynn Allin, who is looking forward to her first Boston, explained what makes Boston so special: “It's the holy land. It's like a golfer playing at St. Andrews against Tiger Woods. I'm not going to win, but I'll be on the same course with the best, where the best have been tested for decades.” Karen Bertasso agrees. “For the majority of runners,” she said, “obtaining the Boston Marathon qualifier is their Olympics.”

Wendy Duffy Mastripolito is 50 now, running her first Boston Marathon, and so it is perhaps not surprising that the 50 year anniversary of Bobbi Gibb’s first Boston run, and the impact of that day, holds real significance for her. “I knew of her and to be honest I always thought she was amazing, but it didn't really get to my core until I was struggling while training for Boston. My training has been flat this winter and spring, I struggled with motivation, with being mentally and physically tired, and Boston was soo elite in my mind that I kinda felt like maybe I didn't really belong. Well I just re-read her story and I hope one day I can meet her and shake her hand because not only did she inspire me and put back the belief in myself, she paved the way for people such as myself to be able to run this magnificent race, I will never doubt myself again!!”

It’s that “not just any other race” feeling that makes runners strive for Boston, and keeps them coming back for more. Jessica Hageman Northan is running Boston for the fifth time, and Karen Dolge for the thirteenth. After her race came to a sudden, terrifying end in 2013, Kim MacGregor Law went back the next year, the year after that, and will be there again this year. Despite struggling to recover from torn hamstrings, Lynn Allin will still make the trek to Boston to run this year. “Not fast,” she says, “but I'll be there, and I'll finish.”

By pushing hard against the door keeping women from the Boston Marathon, and road racing more broadly, Gibb helped to give women access to what is perhaps the strongest source of validation of one’s identity as a runner. This is what making it to Boston means to Kathleen Dougherty. “For me qualifying for Boston has been the ultimate dream, not specifically as a woman but as a runner in general.” If you get to the starting line in Hopkinton, you don’t need to explain to anyone why running is important to you, what you get out of the sport, or how you measure your achievements. You’re running Boston. You’re a runner.

A big thank you to Lynn Allin, Karen Bertasso, Kathleen Dougherty, Karen Dolge, Hillary Johnson, Kim MacGregor Law, Wendy Duffy Mastripolito, and Jessica Hageman Northan. They were kind enough to share their time and stories and trust me not to waste it, or screw them up. And to Rebekah Tolley. If this piece is readable, it's because she took the time to look it over. Responsibility for remaining errors and ill-crafted turns of phrase lie with me.

In case you were wondering: (1) The B.A.A. is, for some reason, reticent, to share the results history of the Boston Marathon. Fortunately, I had downloaded a list of all the previous winners several years ago when it was up on their website and the fine volunteers at the Association of Road Racing Statisticians (www.arrs.net) have posted results going back to 1907. All of the references to Boston Marathon finishers and finishing times come from those sources. (2) Running USA gathers lots of data on runners through its surveys, but you have to pay for most of it. They are nice enough to post the figures that I referenced on their website, http://www.runningusa.org/statistics. (3) The data on how men and women spend their time comes from a 2013 analysis of time diary studies going back to 1965 conducted by Dr. Liana C. Sayer at the University at Maryland. If you want to look at data on time use over the last decade, the Census Bureau has conducted its American Time Use Survey since 2003, which is publicly available. (4) If you want more on Gibb the person and her 1966 run, Runner’s World has a great piece in their latest issue, and there is the ESPN.com piece that I reference above: http://espn.go.com/espnw/culture/feature/article/15190954/50-years-later-paying-tribute-bobbi-gibb-first-woman-run-boston-marathon (5) That last image is one of Bobbi Gibb's own sculptures. There's a project underway to get one of her sculptures erected along the marathon course. For details and to support the project, go to http://www.bobbigibbart.net/50-anniversary/