Run, Switzer, Run: The Women who Broke the Marathon Taboo (Classic)

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And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-iHeart. Pushkin. Today you're about to hear a rerun of one of our classic episodes about some truly heroic figures in women's distance running.

A love writing this episode. It's a quirky one and a favorite, but lately it's taken on a new meaning for me.

“That's because in a few days on the 26th of April, I'm about to take on by far the biggest running challenge of my life, the London marathon.”

Training for it has been hard, really hard, and this story has made me think differently about endurance, courage, and what it means to keep going. I'm also running for a cause that means a great deal to me. I'm raising money for the teenage cancer trust in memory of my cousin who died last year from cancer. She was 20. So, if you'd like to support me, and more importantly support the teenage cancer trust, I'd be enormously grateful.

We'll put a link in the show notes. It's tinyurl.com/harfordmarathon. But in any case, thank you for listening.

“And I hope you enjoy this classic episode of cautionary's hails, run, switcher, run.”

Jasmin Paris had sworn she'd never attempt the spine race.

She was a champion long distance runner, but the spine race was something else. 268 miles up the penine way, the spine of England, carrying your bedding and all your food and anything else you might need on your back. Jasmin Paris had never raised over such a long distance. The spine race is held in January, when it's dark for 16 hours a day. It's cold enough that the route is often covered with snow, but not quite cold enough to stay dry.

Everything, everything gets wet. It's easy to lose your way as you wind through and over the hills and morelands at Northern England, especially if you're running at night. The race sounds hard, and in practice, it's nearly impossible.

The first year it was held in 2012, 11 competitors tried their luck, only three finished.

The fastest took nearly a week. The race doesn't include enforced rest breaks, so if you keep running while others are eating or sleeping, you can gain an advantage if you can keep going. One runner described the effects of sleep deprivation. I was totally confused, I didn't know where I was. What I was doing, I didn't know I was taking part in this event. I simply followed the footprints in the snow ahead of me.

It's though he dawned on me what I was doing and I repeated to myself a few times, the spine race, the spine race. At least Jasmine Paris was used to sleep deprivation. She had a one-year-old daughter. She was still breastfeeding and planned to pump milk during rest stops. This was 2019, which time the race was a firm fixture in the ultra marathon calendar. There were more than 100 entrants, each with a GPS tracker and an emergency button to someone help. In the half-darkness of half past 8, the morning of Sunday, the 13th of January, the contestants lined up.

Some of them had finished the race again and again, such as the 2013 winner, Yujeni Roselo Solo, or the course record holder Ian Keith, both were favourites to win. Others had failed to finish before but had come back to try again. The spine race is brutal. Anyone, man or woman, course record holder or breastfeeding mum, anyone can qualify to start. But that doesn't mean everyone is going to make it to the finish. I'm Tim Hartford, and you're listening to caution retails.

[Music]

After the Greeks unexpectedly smashed an invading Persian army at the Battle of Marathon, a chap called Philipides,

“ran 26 miles to Athens with the good news, and then, so the story goes, collapsed and died.”

Thus began the legend of the marathon. This is a race so grueling, a challenge so overwhelming that it could literally kill you. The idea of the marathon as the ultimate test of human endurance was embellished still further in the London Olympics of 1908. When a little Italian pastry chef, by the name of Durando Pietri, entered the stadium for the final lap with a comfortable lead. He stopped as if stunned by the cheering, and began to stagger towards the finish line. Falling, blacking out, rousing himself and staggering forward again.

“The creator of Sherlock Holmes to Arthur Conan Doyle was on hand to describe the scenes.”

It is horrible, and yet fascinating. This struggle between a set purpose and an utterly exhausted frame. Pietri kept going and falling, and rising again. He was right in front of Doyle when he fell for what seemed the last time. Amid stupid figures and grasping hands, I caught a glimpse of the haggard, yellow face, the glazed expressionless eyes, the long black hair, squeaked across the brow. Surely he has done now. He cannot rise again. The rise again he did, with the assistance of numerous onlookers, his final, desperate stagger across the finish line immortalised by the camera.

Pietri was, of course, disqualified for being helped to finish, and the legend of the horrors of the marathon only grew.

Philipides and Dorando Pietri were, of course, men. Women weren't allowed to compete in the first Olympics let alone in the marathon.

“If it could kill a man, can you imagine what it would do to the fragile frame of a woman?”

The International Olympic Committee were reluctant to let women compete in any events at all, and when they were finally persuaded to admit female athletes in 1928, the longest women's race was 800 meters. It was a disaster. The newspapers of the day reported the disturbing scenes, the New York evening post. Below us on the cinder path were eleven wretched women, five of whom dropped out before the finish while five collapsed after reaching the tape.

Only six out of eleven finishes. That's nearly as bad as the first spine race.

The Chicago Tribune added that one finisher collapsed into unconsciousness and required medical attention, a press syndicate reporter commented, "It was not a very edifying spectacle to see a group of fine girls running themselves into a state of exhaustion." Other writers described the races a disgrace, or dangerous, or a pined that 200 meters was surely the maximum distance a woman could attempt without premature aging and damage to her reproductive capacity. But this is all, of course, nonsense. Not just the stuff about damage to reproductive capacity, all of it.

There weren't eleven women in the race, there were nine. Thought only did the gold medalist Lina Radka Batchauer break the world record, but so did the silver and bronze medalists and the three women behind them, which is, I suppose, what happens when an event doesn't have many precedents? Nobody dropped out and nobody needed a doctor. No matter, rather than celebrating the greatest women's middle-distance race in history, the Pundits wrote whatever sensationalised nonsense they felt like writing, the International Olympic Committee used the fuss as an excuse to keep the women's 800 meters out of the Olympics for the next three decades.

The spine race starts with a steep scramble uphill, and at first there was a group of contenders all moving together.

Eugenie Roselo Solei, Ian Keith, Jasmine Paris, and a few others. At the top, was the confusing and directionless peat molland of Kindest Scout, the highest area in the peak district.

It was tough going, rain, a strong headwind, a difficult terrain, and nearly 50 miles to the first checkpoint.

“By the time they arrived, Paris and Keith had caught Solei, and all three had broken away from the field.”

They unpacked food from their rock sacks, shoveling whatever they could manage into their mouths. Jasmine Paris took a few minutes to express some breast milk. She really didn't fancy developing mastitis,

and then the three of them headed out together into the darkness. The distance to the next checkpoint, 61 miles.

If women couldn't be allowed to run 800 meters until 1960, you can imagine what the male-dominated athletic establishment of the 1960s thought of the idea of women running a marathon.

“But there were a few independent spirited women who liked to run, then naturally enough their thoughts turned to that iconic distance. One of those women was Catherine Switzer. As a girl, she told her father she wanted to be a cheerleader.”

You don't want to be a cheerleader honey he told her? Cheer leaders cheer for other people. You want people to cheer for you. He encouraged her to run a mile each day to get fit for sports, and she did. She became a journalism student at Syracuse where there were no women's sports teams at all, so she asked to train with a men's cross-country team. Sure, said the head coach, and then she had him laughing with the other coaches behind her back. That only made her more determined.

“More encouraging was volunteer coach Arne Briggs, the university male man, and at 50 years of age, the veteran of 15 Boston marathons.”

He was full of stories about the classic marathon, which had first been held in the late 1800s, and one December night on a miserable training run to a snowstorm as cars skidded and hunked around, Catherine heard one too many of those tales. Let's quit talking about the Boston marathon and run the damn thing. No woman can run the Boston marathon. Why not? I'm running 10 miles a night. Arne Relented. No Dame ever ran the Boston marathon. If any woman could do it, you could, but you'd have to prove it to me. If you ran the distance in practice, I'll be the first to take you to Boston.

Now you're talking, she thought. A few months later, and three weeks before the marathon, they ran 31 miles in training.

Arne turned gray and passed out, but Catherine was feeling great. The next day at Arne's insistence, she signed up for the race, signing her name, as she always did, K.V. Switzerland.

She and Arne checked the rule book. There was nothing forbidding women to enter. Arne signed up too, as did Catherine's boyfriend, Big Tom Miller, all 235 pounds of him. He was a promising hammer thrower, had been a serious college football player, and no, he wasn't planning on training. He was pretty fit anyway, and if a girl can run a marathon, I can run a marathon. On Wednesday, April 19, 1967, race day, it was snowing. Most of the field were running in track suits. There were 741 entrance, and Catherine pinned her number to her sweatshirt with pride.

K. Switzerland. 261. From the other runners, she got a few looks of surprise, but a warm welcome. Hey, going to go the whole way. Gosh, it's great to see a girl here. Can you give me some tips to get my wife to run? She'd love it if I can just get her started. Arne was beaming, big Tom, unmissable in his bright orange Syracuse sweatshirt, wasn't happy that Catherine was wearing lipstick, which might attract attention. Take it off. He said, "I'm sure she replied. The crowd of runners squeezed closer and closer together to the coach to start." And then, they were off, and feeling great. Just four miles later, the fun would stop.

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Let us show you it. IHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. Catherine Switzerland was running with her little group, including Coach Arne and Boyfriend Big Tom, feeling good and acknowledging the encouragement of the other runners. At the four mile mile, the press truck pulled alongside the little group to allow photographers a good shot of that Dame who was running the marathon. Then, Switzerland called. A man with an overcoat and felt hat was there in the middle of the road, shaking his finger at me.

He said something to me as I passed and reached out for my hand. Catching my glove instead and pulling it off.

“He wasn't the tester, a crank, but he was wearing an official ribbon.”

A moment later, I heard the scraping noise of leather shoes coming up fast behind me. When a runner hears that kind of noise, it's usually danger. Instinctively, I jerked my head around quickly and looked square into the most vicious face I'd ever seen. A big man, a huge man with bad teeth, was set to pounds. But before I could react, I grabbed my shoulder off, flung me back, screaming, "Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers!" Catherine was terrified. She realized she'd wet her pants in fear, and she turned to sprint away as the furious official tried to rip the number off her sweatshirt.

“The press truck was still there, the cameras were wearing and clicking, and then seemingly from nowhere.”

235 pounds of orange-clad, college football player crashed into the official, flew sideways, landed on the roadside in a crumpled heap. Oh god, thought Catherine. Big Tom's killed him. They're in trouble. But unlike hell, yelled on it, and they sprinted away from the scene with a press truck in pursuit, cameras still clicking.

It was an extraordinary scene. And perhaps the strangest thing about it? Catherine Switzer wasn't the first woman to run a marathon.

She wasn't the first woman to run the Boston marathon. In fact, she wasn't even the leading woman in this race. A mile ahead of her, Roberta Bobby Gibb was making serene progress without an irate race official insight. Bobby Gibb hadn't exactly been welcomed into the Boston marathon. She'd applied to run in the marathon the previous year, 1966, and been firmly rejected with a letter that explained to her, "Women are not physiologically capable of running a marathon. Gibb crumpled the letter and hurled it to the floor. It was ridiculous."

Bobby Gibb was regularly doing 40 mile runs in the countryside near Boston. I didn't know what to do. I didn't have a coach, no books, nothing. I didn't have any way of measuring distance, so I just went by time. She told the BBC. My boyfriend would drop me off on his motorbike and I'd run home. So, two months after throwing away the rejection letter, Bobby Gibb found herself crouching in a bush near the start of the marathon. Once half the men had started running, she stepped onto the course and joined the crowd, disguised in a hoodie and her brother's shorts.

In 1966, the race was on a warm April day, before long, Bobby Gibb shucked off her hoodie and was running in a strappy vest top. I was so nervous, Gibb recalled, "I didn't know what would happen. I thought I might even be arrested." The men around her were quick to delay her fears. They told her, "We won't let them." She had no race number. She was running for the joy of it. A long, blonde ponytail swinging with the rhythm, and the crowd cheering her as the new spread along the course. She passed the Women's University, Wellesley College, the students roar their approval.

As the distant screw Gibb was siding through the field, she set her sub three-hour pace for much of the race,

fast enough to challenge for the first Olympic gold. But in the last few miles, her feet were shredded by the brand new pair of men's running shoes she was wearing.

She didn't have a number, and she didn't get an official timestamp, but she'd done it. And two-thirds of the men were still behind her.

“Maybe the women couldn't just cover the distance, maybe they could teach the men a thing or two.”

In 1954, the women's record for a mile was a minute slower than the men's record. Just days after Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile in Oxford, Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile, not far away in Birmingham. By 1992, the men's lead over the women had narrowed from one minute to just twenty-six seconds. The women were catching up, and two scientists, Brian Whip and Susan Ward, published research claiming that if the rate of improvement in elite women's running continued, then over the marathon distance,

the top women would be faster than the top men, as soon as 1998. That didn't happen, and neither does it look like it will, but what is true is that over long distances, the typical female competitor, has never been closer to her male counterpart.

“In 2020, the international association of ultra-runners published the state of ultra-running 2020, on about running over very long distances.”

This report contained an eye-catching claim, once the race is more than 195 miles that seven and a half marathons, the women, run faster than the men.

I looked into this claim with my colleagues from the BBC programme more or less, and it's not quite what it might seem at first sight. These aren't the world record times.

They're the average times, which really tell you something about what kind of person tries an ultra-distance. In fact, the average speed of runners in ultra-marathons is getting slower, why? Because more and more people who are less and less superhuman, are giving these distances a try.

“More than five times as many men as women run in races longer than 50 miles, so when the report says that the women are faster at the extreme distances,”

what they're saying is that the average female competitor, one of a tiny handful of unbelievably badass women, is faster than the average male competitor who comes from a much larger pool. Someone who might be operating under the big Tom School of Race Preparation. If a girl can run a marathon, I can run a marathon. We've seen a rapid improvement in women's times across all distances, and there's no mystery as to why. Women weren't able to compete for a Olympic gold even over 800 meters until 1960. They were being told in the 1960s that not only were they forbidden to run a marathon, but that it would be dangerous for them to try.

The teenage Katherine Switzer was told by her friends that running even a mile a day might make her infertile, or turn her into a man. It took a determined young woman to run a tall, let alone attempt a marathon. No wonder that once the world saw pioneers such as Bobby Gibb and Katherine Switzer, more women felt able to run long distances and more organisations felt obliged to allow them,

and later to support them, and no wonder that when all this finally belatedly happened, women's times quickly improved.

And the irony was that it's in the very races that women were told were impossible to complete, that they're getting closest to the men, the ultra distances. Those extreme distances give women a fighting chance. The result becomes dependent less on long capacity and muscle mass, where men have a clear advantage, and more on luck on resilience and on a tolerance for pain, where they don't. When the human body is pushed to such extremes, anything can happen. And sometimes it does.

By the time they reach the second spine race checkpoint, the course record holder Ian Keith had dropped back a little.

But he caught up with her by twilight the end of the second day, and they ran on together through the darkness, the path ahead illuminated by their head torches.

Checkpoint 4 was well over halfway through the race, there were still more than 80 miles to go. It was a moment to stop and to think ahead, as she wolfed down lasagna, Jasmine Paris looked over at Eugene. He was getting a massage and perhaps a little nap. There were still one and a half hours of daylight left. She pulled on her shoes, shoulder to her rucksack, and set out.

“To try to put some distance between them.”

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Shortly after Bobby Gill crossed the sun-kist finish line of the 1966 Boston marathon, the state governor warmly shook her hand. And she was invited by her fellow runners for the traditional post-race stew. It all seemed to be going well until she was turned away at the door of the dining room. Sorry. Men only. That figures. Bobby Gill decided that next year, she'd do it all again. In the win-tree cold of the 1967 race, Gib didn't match the pace of her first run, but she still comfortably beat the three and a half hour mark.

As she crossed the finish line, again, running without a number or an official entry, she had no idea of the drama that had been unfolding behind her on the course, as the race officials tangled with Katherine Switzerland. It turns out that registering for the race was the problem. Switzerland had assumed it was the right thing to do, but the short-tempered race director was panicking that hit be sanctioned by the athletic's union. She watched in shock and amazement as the race director tried to rip her numbers off, and her massive boyfriend body-check team into the next county.

Katherine felt like she was going to puke. This wasn't what she'd imagined. It was all going horribly wrong.

The press truck was still tracking her, given the incredible scene that had just unfolded. The journalists were yelling out hostile questions.

“This was obviously just a stunt, so when was she going to drop out?”

But as they kept running, her nausea drained away, to be replaced by cold anger. The race director had tried to physically rip her out of the race, screw him. There was absolutely no way that anyone was going to stop her from finishing. The official bus drove past again. The race director thankfully very much alive, puce with rage and shaking his fist. Katherine started to worry that there'd be arrested. And above all, she was worried that she wouldn't be able to finish. She told her coach Arnie that she was determined to go the distance, even if she had to crawl.

An Arnie told her, fine, just slow down a little, was cold and wet, and the official had pulled off her glove so her left hand was freezing. And then big Tom spoke up.

“You're getting me into all kinds of trouble. What are you talking about Tom?”

I've hit an official. Now I'll get kicked out of the athletics union. I didn't hit the official you hit the official Tom.

A great year thanks a lot for nothing I should never have come to Boston. It was your idea to come to Boston.

And with that, Tom ripped off his numbers and hissed, you run too slow anyway. And he sped away up the course. Man handled by an official, harassed by photographers, wet pants, cold hand, dumped by her boyfriend, and only 20 miles to go. But as the miles went past, the adrenaline drained away, and Katherine found her pace. She began to enjoy the run again.

He was walking, and as Katherine ran past, he begged her to give him a moment to catch his breath.

“What with me a while, I'll get it back. Sorry Tom, so Katherine, she had her momentum.”

She had her race to finish. She ran on. The spine race, final checkpoint, 42 miles to go. Jasmine Paris had a decision to make. She had been running for three days. She had had three hours of sleep.

She was starting to hallucinate. She had seen a tree bend down into a yoga pose.

She saw a bright pink pig running across the walls.

“Like other runners in previous years, should go through phases of forgetting that she was even in a race, at a lone leading it.”

So, should she get some rest, an hour of sleep, or should she press her advantage, trying to extend her lead, after grabbing some more food as strong coffee. She pressed on. When you Janey arrived at the checkpoint, he asked where Jasmine was. No, no, she's gone. She said one of the checkpoint volunteers. Gone?

“Wow, you Janey soaked his feet in a basin of water, put his head in his hands.”

The course record holder, Ian Keith, was hours behind them both. When Catherine Switzer and her coach Arnie crossed the finish line of the Boston Marathon, there weren't many spectators left. It was cold and wet. They'd been running for more than four hours. Or a few grumpy journalists who ordinarily would have gone indoors to file their stories an hour ago, but had been told to wait and get an interview with that crazy Dame. Catherine had been slower than she'd hoped, but under the circumstances, getting to the finish line was an achievement enough.

The feet were bleeding so badly that the race doctor was shocked, but overall, Catherine felt great. All they had to do then was wait another hour for big Tom to cross the finish line. Neither Bobby Gibb nor Catherine Switzer set out to change the world, but between them, they did. The photograph of Bobby Gibb running down the home stretch in 1966 was inspirational, but even more iconic was the image of Switzer being attacked by a race official in 1967. He gave the world one of the most galvanizing photos in women's rights history, said Switzer, and it's hard to disagree. Both photographs and both women provided leverage to campaigners who persuaded the authorities to change the rules.

In 1972, Nina Cusick was the first woman to officially win a Boston marathon. While Bobby Gibb has been retrospectively recognised as a three-time winner.

Gibb told the BBC, back then men weren't allowed to have feelings, and women weren't allowed to have a brain. One of a man wants to knit. Is he any less of a man? No. Whatever woman wants to drive a truck, is she any less of a woman? No. All people can be who they want to be. The spine race had started on Sunday morning. By Wednesday evening, Jasmine Paris was limping down off the final summit towards the finish line. Every step was agonizing. She had developed tendonitis on both legs, and her pace was flagging. She kept looking over her shoulder at the horizon, looking for Yujeyny Roselo Sole.

I kept expecting him to catch me, because I felt that I was going so slowly on that last day, I kept falling asleep and thinking he must be just behind me. Yujeyny was not just behind her. Sleep deprived, exhausted, and dangerously cold. He pushed his emergency bottom to quit the race, and summoned help, with 264 miles completed, and four miles to go.

A crowd of people, the flashes of cameras, a very clingy cuddle with her daughter Rowan, a shower, and then the fish and chips Jasmine had been dreaming of, and the breastfeed that Rowan had been demanding.

“Days, Jasmine started to realise why people were quite so excited. She had obliterated Ian Keith's course record, a more than 12 hours, about 50 miles. Ian Keith himself wouldn't win the men's race until the next morning, 15 hours later.”

Still, there wasn't too much time to celebrate. Jasmine's PhD thesis was due in 10 weeks. It wasn't going to write itself.

Keith's courses for this episode were Jasmine Paris's first handaccount of the spine race, Olivier Jibé Toe's feature article about Bobby Gibb, and Katherine Switz's autobiography, Marathon Woman.

“For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at TimHalford.com.”

Corsionary tales is written by me, TimHalford, with Andrew Wright.

It's produced by Alice Fines, with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise.

“Sarah Nix, edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Guthridge, Stella Halford, Jammer Saunders, and Roofers Wright.”

The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohen, Eric Sandler, Carrey Brody, and Christina Sullivan.

Corsionary tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Tell your friends, and if you want to hear the show add free, sign up for Pushkin+ on the show page at applepodcasts or at pushkin.fm/blast.