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  As I sat in the airport bar, watching the departure screens and nursing a glass of plonk, I would’ve said yes to anything: a marriage proposal, a job on an oil rig, an ultramarathon, a full sleeve ink-job. My arms were so sore that the effort of lifting the glass to my lips seemed almost magnificent. For the next few days, that marathon zipped me between fatigue and mania; had I knocked back a few margaritas with some bad-living friends in the Cross, I might easily have woken up with the words I ran a fucking marathon tattooed across my clavicle.

  *

  Marathon – μάραθον – is also the Greek word for fennel. The fragrant feathery herb, growing wild, gave its name to the plain 40 kilometres from Athens where the Battle of Marathon was fought. And since 1896, the marathon has spread like a weed.

  The Association of Road Running Statisticians (ARRS) started keeping records about marathons in 1910 – fourteen years after the first was run, only 186 athletes logged a finish in one of the fifty-four marathons conducted worldwide that year. Marathons are now booming: in 2012, the ARRS counted 3586 of them – and 1,608,848 runners who finished. An Australian man recently wrote a book about running a marathon in a different city every week of the year: his itinerary took him to Havana, Reykjavik, Mumbai, Belfast, Luxor, Chicago. Marathons have a slot in the global leisure industry that serves the desires of moneyed fit people. Enthusiasts can schedule their holidays around marathons: shopping trips to Paris and Tokyo can be combined with a marathon, as can east African safaris and trips to the North Pole and the Great Wall of China.

  Marathons aren’t the toughest endurance event an athlete can contest – they never have been. The brutal, days-long professional footraces of the late 19th century, corrupt as they were, were contested over much longer distances. The marathon hasn’t been the longest amateur footrace for runners for the better part of a century either. The 89-kilometre Comrades Marathon – the one run by my cousins in South Africa – was established in 1921, twenty-five years after the first marathon. And no marathon is anywhere near as tough as ultramarathons such as the Badwater (217 hot kilometres in Death Valley, California), the Barkley (a crazed 160 kilometres in the Tennessee hills, with no aid stations and no track) or the Marathon des Sables (a six-day, 247-kilometre event run through the Saharan sands of southern Morocco).

  There may be higher bars to clear to prove that you’re invincible but the marathon retains its rhetorical prestige as a marker of endurance. The easy adaptation of the word ‘marathon’ to spheres that have nothing to do with running is evidence of its sentimental pull: if you want to emphasise that an activity is a slog, call it a marathon. A long week at work is a marathon in the office; pulling an all-nighter to meet a deadline is a marathon effort. Marathons are everywhere. Finish a marathon writing assignment and ask someone to buy you a drink. The suffix ‘-athon’ has been broken off, like a branch snapped from a stem of fennel, and now works as a modifier that adds kudos to pretty much any time-consuming activity: shopathons, walkathons, talkathons, swimathons, readathons, dance marathons. Sit in a dark room and watch a screen for enough hours, and someone will call that a marathon too.

  All this might suggest that a marathon – at least when the term applies to a running race – is an objective indication of a physical achievement, but the dimensions of the event were hardly established through rigorous scientific processes. The marathon that I ran on the Gold Coast was a few kilometres further than the 1896 event – not until 1908 was the distance stretched to the standard 42.195 kilometres. Forty-two and a bit kilometres is such a raggedy quantity that you might be forgiven for thinking it’s an expression of the exact distance between two points. That’s not the case. At the 1908 London Olympics, the race was started beneath the nursery windows at Windsor Castle – because the grandchildren of the king wished to watch the Princess of Wales send the runners on their way. The starting line was moved back a few kilometres to accommodate the wishes of the royal family (hardly a win for the democratic tradition). The finish line stayed in its original position: in front of the royal box in the new London Stadium. This distance was standardised by the International Amateur Athletic Federation in 1921.

  What’s more, as I later discovered, runners have all sorts of systems for ranking marathons against each other. It turns out that not all marathons are the same. The Gold Coast Marathon is regarded as very easy because the course is flat and the weather tends to be mild. First-timers run it in the hope of a cruisy ride; experienced runners enter with plans to notch up a fast time. There are marathons with big hills, and those with notoriously slow climbs; marathons that are run in hideous heat, and those that hurl snow and ice at runners. In other words, no one runs the same marathon twice. And yet, the same question is asked of every single marathon: How fast did you run it?

  *

  I’m not a fast runner, and I do what I can to evade questions about speed. ‘Somewhere in the middle of the pack,’ is my standard answer. I told a friend that it took me over four hours to run the Gold Coast Marathon. ‘Four hours?’ he replied. ‘My son finished in less than three and he’s just a kid.’ Another mate let the time linger over the pints between us just long enough for the silence to seem a rebuke. ‘What’s the world record these days, two hours?’

  Speed is the easiest and most conventional way to measure a runner’s performance – and a host of complementary techniques can be used to square up a run and assess its worth. Good runners pay attention not just to their average speed over the course of a race or training session, but also to splits, their average speed per kilometre. If I run 8 kilometres in under fifty minutes, I call them six-minute kilometre splits and claim an even speed of 10 clicks an hour. If I run those 8 kilometres in forty minutes, then I’m up to 12 kilometres an hour, my heart is pumping faster, the world spins around me like a crazy diorama.

  As I’ve written, having some understanding of how far and fast I ran helped me prepare for my first marathon. Many smartphone apps are available to help gather running statistics – heart rate per minute, calories burned, metres climbed – and gadgets for gathering data about the body proliferate. If you’re making progress, the counting can be hard to resist; even if you’re not, it still feels like a game. I don’t own a Fitbit, but I was startled recently to discover that my phone, bidden only by an operating system upgrade, had started to record the number of steps I take every day. No matter how I crunch the data, I don’t seem to get much faster.

  It may be thrilling to run at speed, but I don’t do so very often. At the end of my first year as a runner, I finished a 10 kilometre race with a gentle, fast friend and logged what’s still my fastest per-kilometre time in a race. It was a humid November morning, and florid storm clouds filled the sky. The grey heat made me dizzy; just before the finish line, I had to sit down for a few minutes. Even so, I was fast.

  On rare occasions, propelled by some spiky cocktail of emotion and sugar, I’ve run with such furious determination that to halt has seemed like a greater effort than tearing into the space ahead. The blood throbs in my head, and I hear a child chant, I will not stop, I cannot stop. The world accelerates with me. After runs like this, I arrive home startled, shaky on my feet. I’ve flown so fast down hills into the wind that the momentum has turned my body into a glider ready to soar. Running on flat courses on still mornings, well rested and full of energy, I’ve experienced the lack of resistance to movement as something akin to ecstasy, and fought the urge to run even faster so as to conserve that energy and prolong that sensation.

  I can see the beauty in speed and, now and then, the appearance of a fast runner stirs me to acceleration. On the right kind of day, if a really elegant runner with a body that moves like a liquid passes me, I try to match her pace for a couple of hundred metres the longer to admire her gait. I pull my torso higher and hold my shoulders into firmer alignment in an aesthetic homage; I will more strength into my step and keep up for as long as I can.

  This isn’t how I ran the Gold Coast Marathon.
I ran as slowly as I could manage at the beginning of the race to ensure I’d be able to finish. Had I whizzed away on adrenaline and training and run a fantastic first 20 kilometres, I wouldn’t have had a hope. With discipline and determination, I could up my averages, I suppose, but I’m never going to be really fast – and if I appraised my running experiences solely through the metric of speed, I’d be miserable.

  Career athletes can be forgiven a focus on speed, but from everybody else the focus on competition and speed seems utterly ridiculous. At first, I found the quick questions about my pace a little gauche, and I still marvel if they’re laced with competitiveness. When committed, gifted runners compare their performances to mine and smile smugly to find themselves the faster, I’m never sure whether to tell them that outrunning me is a paltry achievement. One day I’ll stamp my foot and shriek, Find someone else to chase around the playground!

  *

  The problem of the slow marathon runner is a perennial topic for opinion writers seeking to dish up a bit of controversy. Slow runners, they claim, are killing the marathon. I’ve overheard a few lager legends give this line a whirl in person, though usually they’re trying to rationalise not running in an upcoming race. Better not to run at all than to bear the iniquity of a slow time – that sort of thing. Slow runners pull back the entire pack, they reckon. This foolish argument is demonstrably untrue: for all the slow runners on marathon courses around the globe, the world marathon record continues to drop; more and more amateur athletes clock times that would have smashed a world record a few decades ago. The front of the pack is faster than ever. Worse to the complainers is this threat: that the achievements of runners who train until they vomit – whose marathons cost them knee joints, marriages, kidney function – are downgraded by those who do what they can, who are just happy to finish the race.

  To me, complaints about slow runners often sound like proxies for objections to women running. Getting worked up about speed tends to put women in second place, even those who run spectacularly fast. Some women run faster than some men, it’s true, but broadly speaking men run faster than women at every level of competition. At publication, the world women’s marathon record is held by British runner Paula Radcliffe, who ran 2:15:25 in the 2003 London Marathon. Radcliffe would have been bested by only a matter of seconds by Sergei Popov, the male Soviet runner who broke the world record in 1958 with a time of 2.15:17 at the Stockholm Olympics. Runners of this calibre take just over three minutes to run a kilometre; I wouldn’t be able to run even 1 kilometre that fast – neither, I’d wager, would most readers of this book.

  If my slow pace and low ambitions raise eyebrows, Radcliffe, who is breathtakingly fast, has been subject to extraordinary scrutiny. In 2011, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) changed their criteria for the women’s world record, decreeing retrospectively that it could only be set in women-only events. Radcliffe’s fastest time, set under ‘mixed conditions’, was relegated to world’s best, and her slower 2005 Chicago Marathon time became the record. The lingering insinuation is that her top speed wasn’t quite her own doing, that she owed it to male pacemakers. The rules for the men’s world record remained the same. Later that year, the IAAF reluctantly issued a special ruling to restore Radcliffe’s 2003 time as the world record. A range of opinions have been put forward about whether mixed conditions give elite women an unfair edge, and although Radcliffe’s record stands, future contenders must run in women-only races.

  Another example of the convoluted dynamics of women, speed and recognition: an Australian runner, Adrienne Beames, is sometimes recognised as the first woman to have run a sub three-hour marathon in 1971. Her time was disputed, as Beames – like Violet Piercy before her – ran the distance in a time trial rather than a race, so her name isn’t in the record books. ‘Women don’t usually run marathons,’ was the opening gambit of The Age’s report on Beames’ run. ‘I just wanted to do something different,’ Beames told the newspaper. (The story wasn’t exactly big news: it ran on page fourteen, beneath a picture of Collingwood footballer Des Tuddenham relaxing in the bath.) As if to reinforce Beames’ point that women could run very fast, later in 1971, US athlete Beth Bonner broke three hours in the NYC Marathon – and her time was recognised. At the beginning of 1980, the women’s marathon record had dropped by thirty minutes (the IAAF credits Norwegian runner Grete Waitz with a time of 2:27:32 in the 1979 NYC Marathon), a staggering rate of increase in speed – but women still weren’t allowed to race the Olympic marathon.

  With the exception of She Runs the Night, all the races I’ve run have been conducted under mixed conditions. When the results are reported online the following day, each competitor is classified according to age and gender. I can find out where I finished relative to the whole pack and to women of my age – however, separate awards are given to women and to men.

  Gender segregation by religious organisations is cause for sporadic outcry; in sport, it’s a given. Reporting of gender statistics in the workforce, for example, or in universities, serves a greater analytic purpose: gender can help us understand the dynamics of these institutions. In sport, the biological fact of smaller lungs and less muscle mass makes splitting men’s competition from women’s a no-brainer. Doesn’t it? Men run faster; they hit tennis balls harder; the bodies they slam against each other on the field are larger. Some notion of procedural fairness governs this thinking. Women competing against each other are on some kind of level playing field and therefore have a chance of proper recognition that wouldn’t be available if they were competing against men. And yet, the fairness of the separation is belied by the outcomes: wherever we look in sport – marathon running, tennis, soccer, cricket – we find a multi-tiered inequality that diminishes and marginalises the achievements of women athletes.

  The ‘natural’ appeal of speed and strength complements nicely the cultural hold of patriarchy. Men’s sport is better funded; male athletes are paid more than women; they compete for bigger prizes and sponsorship deals; media outlets devote the bulk of their sport coverage to men. Women athletes – just a peg lower on the citius, altius, fortius scale – are disproportionately under-recognised.

  To pluck just one scandal from a deep pit of grotesque examples: the Australian women’s soccer team, the Matildas, went on strike in 2015 in protest against being paid far less than the minimum wage for their full-time training and game schedule. Their vice-captain was receiving welfare payments; she reflected to a journalist, ‘I’d just be cleaning toilets going, “Oh, if only I was a boy I’d be able to not have to do this and live comfortably.”’ Finally, a deal was negotiated that gave the players a living wage – but only a fraction of the income enjoyed by their male counterparts, the Socceroos. That the Matildas were vastly more competitive on international rankings than the Socceroos didn’t seem to matter much to the sport’s governing authority.

  Such stories make headlines, but women athletes are soon displaced when footy grand final fever hits, or when the men’s Wimbledon final is played. You could fill several shelves with books about the men’s marathon and male distance runners; relatively few have been written about women distance runners and almost all that have are autobiographies. Most sports writers, both literary and journalistic, focus on men’s sports at the expense of female athletes. The exceptions aren’t enough to break the trend. I asked a group of peers on social media to point me in the direction of interesting essays about sport – not one recommendation was about women’s sport.

  The priority accorded the fastest and strongest shapes a history that has demanded women athletes prove their worth in a thousand insulting ways – and then ignored them. Why was it that race officials in the 1970s slowly started to change their minds about women marathon runners? What tipped their thinking? Not the fact that many women demonstrated that their bodies were quite able to cope with the training load. Not the fact that women ran marathons without collapsing, and before and after bearing children. No, this
empirical evidence was insufficient.

  Scientists needed to declare an official shift in the status quo on knowledge about women’s bodies. No male athlete has had to endure such a convoluted greenlighting process. Concerned that marathons weren’t well understood from a scientific or medical point of view, the New York Academy of Sciences devoted their 1976 conference to them. The immediate backdrop to that conference was the intensifying campaign for a women’s Olympic marathon, alongside the passage of the Title IX equality legislation in the United States in 1972: laws that prohibited sex-based discrimination that had a particular impact on women’s sport. Delegates, most of them male, finally agreed that no persuasive scientific evidence existed that marathon running was bad for women. They voted unanimously on the following resolution:

  That it is the considered judgment of the participants of this conference that a women’s marathon event as well as other long distance races for women be included in the Olympic program forthwith.

  I think back to one of the captions on that famous photograph of a race official trying to drag Kathrine Switzer off the Boston Marathon course: ‘Chivalry prevails’. Male experts needed to open the door for women athletes, medal hopefuls and, ultimately, average runners like me.