Women Running Through Time
Women have fought for the right to run marathons for at least the last century
In my own journey working toward 26.2 miles, I realized marathons symbolize so much more.
I shouldn’t consider it an accomplishment to wake up at 4:30 a.m. Monday through Friday. But I do, even though I’m a morning person and waking requires little effort on my part. I shouldn’t consider running nearly every day much of an accomplishment either. But I do, especially because now, almost fifty years old, my running self has only recently reemerged. My pace is slow, yet I plan to run until I finish a marathon.
Thirty years ago, I jogged all the time. I released pent-up anxiety by coursing through my neighborhood after school and on weekends. The single-family homes in my small western New York town provided smooth sidewalks to avoid the uneven trail terrain of the defunct apple orchards that bordered the tracts. I’d pass friends’ houses, kids playing in front yards, fathers mowing the lawn, and mothers watering their flowers as my mind focused solely on the rhythm of my body and the music playing through my headphones.
My mother let me know that others always watched. “The soccer coach told his team about your runs.” She looked up at me, proud. “He said that they were being lazy and that he saw Cheryl Weaver running through town all the time, even after her practices.” She smiled. “See? Your drive and ambition are what will get you through. People notice, Cheryl. People notice.”
Embarrassed, I didn’t want them to.
During my first undergraduate semester at the University at Buffalo, my advisor — whose name and looks I don’t remember — tried to guide me. “What do you want to study?” She looked at me, pen poised to begin writing.
I listed everything that interested me: history, literature, journalism, women’s studies (in the nineties, we hadn’t evolved to a spectrum of gender).
“Terrific!” Excited, she leafed through the course catalog, diagramming a plan. “You could study all of those subjects!” In mere minutes, she crafted a four-year plan toward graduating with two majors and two minors. She handed me the schedule, and I folded. I left her office overwhelmed, no longer interested in the Sisyphean task of success. I hadn’t been popular in high school beyond being elected to lead the student council and voted “Most Likely to Succeed.” But I didn’t have any solid plans to succeed because I didn’t know what that meant. Do you just make a lot of money? How do you do that when you’re interested in literature and women’s studies? You don’t.
What I could succeed at was becoming the girl who wasn’t doing what she was supposed to. I started smoking cigarettes, an excuse to join students lingering outside of class or to strike up conversations with the rebellious classmates sporting pink or blue hair. I partied in the dorms during the week and at the house parties every weekend. I smoked weed for the first time. The last run I remember taking that year, panting around the campus late one night, ended just before I dropped acid with a few friends. By my sophomore year, sedentary and party-fatigued, my stomach, arms, and thighs had softened.
An artist friend noticed, too. “You’d be a perfect figure model for us artists. You know they pay, right? You should do it!”
I took this as a compliment and lounged, naked and still, in the fine arts building, comfortable in my body until I saw the finished products: my faceless breasts and stomach sagging in countless student renderings hanging outside the first-floor classroom. During the era of heroin chic, unnaturally thin models inundated the pages of magazines I bought — Vogue, Cosmopolitan, People — and I mimicked what I thought the models did to look that way, which didn’t include running. I counted calories, eating only a pack of Wheat Thins a day procured from vending machines for just 75 cents. I never had any money, so the deficit plan hit every marker: lose weight and try not to run out of money. I went to work and class and then did an hour of aerobics, following Cher’s newest workout tape, wondering how much it was to have ribs removed like it was rumored she’d done. My weight fell from 140 pounds to 125 pounds to 113 pounds to, finally, 108 pounds, when I started fainting and blamed it on the heat.
For calories’ sake, I stopped drinking alcohol in the summer of 1993. The three-month sobriety signaled my declining health as I chain-smoked in clothes hanging off my body like they were on a hanger. I didn’t last too long in this monk-like devotion, and when I did start drinking again, at the beginning of my junior year, my physical activity slowed to runs down the block to buy liquor from the man who barely glanced up from his paperback to cash me out, pretending it was legal for me to buy whatever bottle I placed in front of him.
I never thought about more than the next day.
About one hundred years ago, in 1926, the International Association of Athletics Federation officially recognized a woman marathoner when Violet Piercy completed the London Marathon in three hours, forty minutes, and twenty-two seconds. Until Piercy ran that marathon, women were thought to be too weak, too fragile, for the sustained effort of a 26.2-mile race, and they were only (officially) permitted to run up to 800 meters. But Piercy must have run long distances prior to that race. How did she train? Who supported her?
Women participating in marathons present a historical problem, a problem of accuracy. A quick Google search of Piercy’s name brings up articles with titles including “overlooked” and “rediscovering” to introduce their subject. Some even attempt to create timelines of women finishers to dethrone Piercy. These lists include roughly ten names from antiquity to the 1960s of documented finishers.
The official list of history’s women marathoners is a sprint at best.
My twenties were a blur. I finished school, I had two children, and I worked. My job teaching English at a city high school left me drained. My hair came out in clumps. I ate whatever I could get my hands on. I smoked away the stress.
Sometime around 2008, my mom suggested yoga. “Cheryl, you have got to try it. It is so good for stress and it has helped me so much. Boy, I really feel it when I don’t do my A.M. P.M. Yoga with Rodney Yee.” She sighed. “Oh, I just love Rodney Yee.”
For Christmas, she gifted me a copy of the DVD she had been using. The morning sequence lasted just ten minutes; the afternoon sequence lasted twenty. I could manage the time it took to move through the short series of poses. Begrudgingly, I had to admit she was right. Maybe it would calm me down. I tried following Yee’s soothing voice through stretches and forward folds, through warrior one and two. I practiced here and there, never dedicated to the practice. It took too much effort that I could put to work, to family, to having some control. My kids were becoming more independent and my husband decided, against my objections, to start law school. He would need at least three years of schooling, putting off employment now for the promise of greater financial stability later on. I wasn’t convinced. He made it clear it wasn’t my decision.
I needed discipline and regularity.
So, I worked on my body. I changed my diet. I ate less, packing a lunch to avoid overeating processed school cafeteria food. I didn’t necessarily eat healthy, but I did spend less money and ate fewer calories. I set yoga goals. Though I wouldn’t be an impressive yogi in the full expression of each pose, I could at least shoot for something more than I could do when I started. I progressed to wheel pose and headstand, slowly losing weight until the people around me offered compliments. I felt better. And I didn’t have to leave home to do it. If anybody needed me, I was right there.
Yoga grounds you, but it keeps you confined to the four corners of your mat.
Women started infiltrating marathons by the mid-twentieth century. In 1966, Roberta Gibb snuck into the Boston Marathon by hiding in the bushes before the race began. The next year, runner Kathryn Switzer officially registered for the Boston Marathon using her first initial and having a man pick up her race packet. Pictures of Switzer being assaulted mid-stride by race official Jock Semple provide, perhaps, the most famous photographs from that year’s contest, gracing the front page of international newspapers. Her friend Thomas Miller intervened, and Switzer finished the race in four hours and twenty minutes. The Boston Marathon didn’t officially admit women until 1972.
Globally, slowly, women’s marathons sprang up shortly after. West Germany held the first all-woman marathon in 1973; Tokyo hosted the first women’s marathon sanctioned by the International Amateur Athletics Federation in 1979. It wasn’t until 1984 that the Olympics included the women’s 26.2-mile contest. I watched snippets of those Olympic games in the cool confines of my parents’ screened-in garage on a small television amid lawn chairs and pool toys, happy I was on summer break from school, not yet thinking about my fifth-grade year, still reeling from the joy of turning ten.
Thirty-seven years later, I sat reading in my own air-conditioned house I shared with my son Alec. I had been admitted to the PhD program in the English Department, returning to the campus where I lost my running self so many years ago. Alec, who floundered a few years after finishing his own undergraduate degree, decided to start a couch to 5K program. He came home from his first run breathing heavily, his t-shirt soaked with sweat.
“I’m doin it, Ma,” he said as he grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, shaking his head. “I’m not diggin it, but I’m doin it.”
I watched him, envious. Running now seemed an impossibility. “What’s the app you’re using again?” He held out his phone and I looked at the little yellow icon. He tapped it and I saw the beginning week’s plan. “Okay. So you only run for thirty seconds and then you get walk breaks?” It tempted me.
“Yeah, it’s awesome. I just ran down the street and back. I haven’t ever run that far. Who would have thought I could do that after playing video games all day my entire life?” He laughed and I cringed. Why hadn’t I encouraged him to be active before? Sure, he’d seen me do yoga, but he laughed it off as being what every middle-aged white woman did to seem fit and woke.
Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe this was the next step now that COVID-19 had helped me quit smoking. I downloaded the app and I signed us up for the end of summer 5K held at the park in our neighborhood. The next day, the early morning July air still cool, I logged in and started walking, greeted by a woman’s voice through my earbuds. “Hey there, awesome runner!”
By August, I could run thirty-five minutes. Alec and I walked to the end of summer race as a warm up. When the horn sounded, we moved in sync, our breath in unison, until we passed the two-mile marker and he slowed down, telling me to keep going. I held my slow steady pace for the last mile, the finish line music growing louder as I rounded the final bend. Alec caught a second win and, laughing, passed me. I finished in just over thirty-two minutes — slow for so many runners, but the farthest and fastest I had ever run in my life.
Last year my discipline seemed unparalleled. I woke at 4:30 a.m., jogged on the treadmill for an hour, went to work teaching high school students before driving to the local college campus to teach freshmen writing. Finally, at 6:30 p.m., I would arrive home to work on my dissertation for a few hours before crashing in bed. Every day was the same fourteen-hour day: an hour of running, ten hours of work, and three hours of dissertating.
But as the deadline to defend my dissertation approached, I just couldn’t run anymore. My mind drained my body of any energy it had. Stress headaches debilitated me as I wondered how to defend my project: What had I even written about? Was my work good enough to earn a PhD?
In April, as my running body broke down, my university announced a step challenge. School community members and alumnae would compete to see who could walk the highest number of steps in a day. Steps I could do, I reasoned. I needed something low-skill and low-effort. I signed up and began walking. By month’s end, I was averaging between 30,000 and 50,000 steps a day, still not enough to catch the top steppers but enough that each night I lifted my legs into bed with my hands, my thighs and calves no longer capable of moving another inch until they refreshed at night and the whole process started over again.
I walked between fifteen and twenty-five miles every day.
While there had been a few runners in the nineteenth century, women — specifically white women — -were deemed too fragile, too gentle, too weak to be serious athletes. Smock races, named after the apron awarded to the winner, allowed women to race one another to the delight and jeers of a drunk audience. Races happened, but not necessarily in any seriousness. At least not to the non-runners. Around the same time, something else happened. Women became pedestriennes — distance walkers. They walked for competition, for sport, and for women’s rights.
I remember hearing how Louisa May Alcott was a runner, hiking her skirt above the dirt to fly through the streets of Concord, Massachusetts. But I’ve never come across any serious study of her athletics. Alcott’s running remains anecdotal, a way to show her well-roundedness. Mostly, it seems a ploy to cast her as a groundbreaker bucking traditional feminine norms to encourage excitement among modern readers. Young readers today aren’t as interested in the coming-of-age Little Women, a tale that might have found its readership in the twentieth century as parents encouraged their young daughters to read the story of the March girls. Jo, a seeming beacon of women’s rights, falls into marriage herself by the end, much like many of Jane Austen’s characters. Acknowledging women as runners is a more recent development, the effect of second-wave feminism.
What is running for me? Is it a modern feminist stance to include myself, a nearly fifty-year-old woman, in the running world?
Last summer, I spent four weeks on a research fellowship in Sleepy Hollow, New York. I brought my running shoes and for the first three days, I ran in a nearby park, taking in the trees and trails, hopping over branches and swatting away bugs. Then the research took over, and I sat, consumed, staring at a laptop in the frigid temperatures of a conference room, transcribing page after page of letters written from 1835–1837 by Eliza Storrs to her friend Emma Hoffman. Eliza was an artist, and never once mentioned doing anything physical. She drew. She studied literature. She died at just twenty-three years old, a month after her father passed.
I got antsy sitting in the cold library hunched over my computer. Unbalanced, I spent more time in my head than in my body, remaining focused on a young woman’s voice from nearly two hundred years ago. I drove to Connecticut to visit Eliza’s grave, nestled among the buildings of Yale University, and wondered at the fact that her body, which had always been so frail in life, now dusted the grounds of elite academia.
Would she have ever thought about running? Would any nineteenth-century doctor advise physical exercise of any sort to a frail young woman?
As autumn’s chill signaled the end of my summer research, I started signing up for different races. I did a quick Google search for 5Ks in my area, and I came across a run minutes from my home whose course wound through a cemetery (one of my favorite places to appreciate history, artistry, and life) and whose proceeds contributed to multiple sclerosis research, the affliction that left my maternal grandmother bedridden for years. I struggled through that October run with my slowest time yet.
The next month I ran in Buffalo’s annual 8K Turkey Trot, where runners hoot and holler in costume and grab a beer from onlookers who sit along the route with thirty packs. Through December, I signed up for any holiday run I saw: a 5K through a park lit for Christmas, a Christmas Eve run, the double-header of a New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day race. I participated in a St. Patrick’s Day race and a Hip Hop Hooray 5K trail run the day before Easter. My times crept up, then faltered, but I kept moving, happy just to be running.
Next month is the Ellicottville half-marathon. It’s a ten-mile longer run than I’m used to. I’m trying to be more intentional about my training, unlike the more haphazard plans of the past. I drag my body out of bed early in the morning for a run and drag my body back after a full day of teaching to hit the treadmill for the second half of my daily plan. I’ve taken a week off here and there, yet given myself grace. I’ve added yoga to my plan — each mindful breath takes me to my runs even as I stay rooted within the four corners of my mat. Just like instructors say, when you fall out of a pose, get right back in. It’s strength and its breathwork. All of it. The running, the yoga, the rising out of bed to stay rooted in my goal.
It’s an ebb and flow of mind and body, a precarious balance of falling and getting back up.
Since 1977, the Barkley Marathons have challenged runners from all over the world. The Barkleys take place in the mountainous forests of Frozen Head State Park, Tennessee, last five days, and cover over a hundred miles. Only forty runners are admitted and they have sixty hours to finish. Each participant navigates the five twenty-mile loops with little guidance other than a map and unique landmarks.
Social media during this year’s contest increasingly focused on one runner, British ultramarathoner Jasmin Paris. Content creators, their excitement growing with each day, followed her progress until she slumped over the finish line’s yellow gate — eyes closed, mouth open, legs folding beneath her. With ninety-nine seconds to spare, Paris became the first woman to finish the Barkley Marathons.
After watching Paris’ historic, sleep-deprived run, I shouldn’t consider it an accomplishment to wake up at 4:30 a.m. Monday through Friday. But I do. I shouldn’t consider running nearly every day an accomplishment either, after following Paris’ grueling five-day achievement. But I do.
Maybe that is what running has always been for me, and maybe for women throughout history. We depend on our own wills, our own bodies, our own minds to bolster us. We fight worlds still excluding us from entry and we adjust to worlds that have only recently included us. We spend our lives trying to solve seemingly insurmountable problem of balancing intellectual and physical work, merging our minds and bodies into an unsteady union. We walk. We jog. We run. We read. We think. We write. We breathe. Whatever form it takes, whatever recognition we do or do not get, we run the marathon.
