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  Violet Piercy is hardly well known. As a dedicated female distance runner, she has no precedents except the professional pedestrians, and it seems she left no legacy. When the Dictionary of National Biography was compiling her entry, the editors made inquiries about her identity to a group of British sports historians. The birthdates of five possible Violet Piercys were put forward. A brief article in a 2009 Track Stats magazine sniffily notes:

  we are still no further forward in establishing for certain the validity of Miss Piercy’s pioneering effort. What we do know is that it was achieved in off circumstances, as were other of her distance-running enterprises, and that she was evidently a skilled seeker after self-publicity.

  ‘Off circumstances’ sounds a bit disreputable. That Piercy sought publicity, spoke to journalists and recorded a newsreel are the reasons we know more about her than about Melpomene.

  The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) credits Piercy with the first women’s world’s best marathon time for her 1926 Polytechnic run. However, there are a number of accreditation bodies for such records, and they don’t always agree. Bickering over the technicalities has overwhelmed an astonishing proportion of women’s marathon records, so the instability of Piercy’s status is typical. Here’s the gist of it: the IAAF has only recognised marathon world records as such since 2004. Before that, the variability of courses meant that it only kept track of ‘world’s best times’. Because Piercy didn’t complete her marathon under official race conditions, some historians argue that it shouldn’t be recognised. If we choose to take her time at face value, and agree that the difference between ‘world’s best’ and ‘world records’ is semantic, hers is the longest-standing record in the history of athletics. An extraordinary achievement. Her record wasn’t broken until 1963, when a young American, Merry Lepper, ran the Western Hemisphere Marathon in Culver City, California.

  An alternative accreditation body, the Association of Road Running Statisticians, lists an earlier world’s best women’s marathon time: a Frenchwoman named Marie-Louise Ledru, according to their books, ran the Tour de Paris Marathon in September 1918 in five hours and forty minutes. This isn’t a fast marathon – Ledru must have walked for long stretches. Her time is a rare world’s best, in that it’s one that most moderately fit, moderately trained marathon runners would be able to surpass. But where was a woman to turn for marathon training advice in 1918?

  There’s even less on the record about Ledru than about Piercy – who she was or why she decided to run a marathon just before the end of a bloody war. What does exist is her photograph, taken at the starting line. A bib printed with ‘171’ is pinned to her loose dress, which has a broad white collar tied into a black bow. Her skirt falls to her ankles over a pair of tightly laced black boots. She’s the odd one out in a crowd of men wearing shorts, jerseys and simple light shoes. The mood is quite different to that of Le Marche des Midinettes: no one is smiling. Ledru stares straight at the camera, her hands behind her back and her hips jutting forward. Something about her demeanour strikes me as defiant, as if she’d had to argue with the photographer or a race official to pose with the men. Was that her only long run, or did she jostle her way to the start of other marathons as Piercy did? We simply don’t know.

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  If I’m looking to grasp some genealogical connection to a running past, it’s because the shared history of women’s running is full of discontinuities and exceptions – and it’s largely bound by the start and finish lines of races, by the records of who ran first and who ran fastest. I was born the granddaughter of two women who wouldn’t, I think, have seen anything amiss about restrictions on the distances women might run. Both those grandmothers are dead and I can’t ask them whether the idea of running a marathon ever grabbed them. Probably not – and my best guess is that neither of them knew of Violet Piercy. I can’t ask my mother whether the women’s 800-metre race at the 1960 Olympics meant anything to her, or whether she ever thought about running a marathon. Again, probably not – but she would have been well qualified to scrutinise medical evidence about the effects of distance running on women’s bodies.

  Even with imagination and guesswork, I’ve found it difficult to answer the questions that really move me. Who were these women, and why did they run? Should I hail them as heroes? What else did they stand for in their lives? They appear to me as the faintest of sketches. What sense is there to make out of Melpomene’s oranges, Stamatha Revithi’s dream of sugared almonds, Frances Hayward’s tea set, Violet Piercy’s chaperones and Marie-Louise Ledru’s weary glare?

  There are surely other names, lost in dusty sports archives and municipal records, that I didn’t find. And then there are the brilliant athletes who might have wanted to run and weren’t allowed to, whether by sports officials, their mothers or their husbands. I wish I knew who they were and why they ran. Nobody remembers. It’s incredible to me that nobody bothered to ask.

  4

  Running like a girl

  If you call yourself a runner, people suppose that you have some innate sporting capacity which you’ve cannily kept hidden. In my case, this simply isn’t true. I was not cast from the same mould as the female running pioneers. There’s no false modesty here – I’m woefully uncoordinated. I never had my hopes of competing with the school cross-country team dashed, because I never would have wished such a burden on myself. I wasn’t chosen last for school sports teams because I was wildly unpopular: I was left waiting because I was a dead loss on the field.

  Everyone has a gruesome story to tell about their adolescent body. The theme of mine is a failure of proprioception, an inability to control my limbs. Athleticism, the fluent realisation of coordination, muscularity, skill, reflexes and, above all, will, was beyond me. For me, as for many other dorky, uncoordinated kids, school sports were an intense and frequent humiliation. I was teased about this, of course, although not with any extraordinary viciousness; what I hated was that my sporting failures couldn’t be hidden. The kids who botched their algebra quizzes didn’t have their mistakes paraded in front of the class. Every catch I dropped, I dropped before an audience. That’s how I remember it, anyway.

  When I matriculated, the headmaster wrote me a reference with a backhanded plaudit about my persistence: ‘Not a natural athlete, Catriona always tries her best on the sporting field.’ Mostly, I did try very hard. Mortified by my lack of coordination, I willed myself to catch the softball as I traced its downward arc. My hands were always in the wrong place and the ball always bounced to a thud on the grass. My parents were firm believers in the virtues of netball, hockey and tennis, and so for years I double-faulted, fumbled catches, tripped over my shoelaces, and generally let the team down. Even though I rarely managed to return serve, my mother was adamant that playing tennis would be a useful social skill when I grew up. Were these ordeals supposed to inculcate some kind of resilience in me? I’ll never know. If my parents hoped that my coordination would improve through practice, they would have been disappointed. I still can’t catch and I don’t play tennis.

  Most of all, though, I hated running. Laps of the school grounds were assigned to pupils as punishment for leaving our maroon and sickly blue sports gear at home. I could think of no crueller consequence for forgetfulness. Running left my cheeks in flames and made me gasp. In my last two years of high school, I counted it a major victory that I was able to avoid consecutive cross-country carnivals in order to sing out of key at the local eisteddfod.

  *

  In the thirty-seven years that passed before Violet Piercy’s marathon time was bested, the world went to war, my mother and father were born, the men’s marathon record plummeted, athletes were anointed heroes – and no one really took seriously the proposition that a woman might want to run a marathon. When Merry Lepper finished the Western Hemisphere Marathon at Culver City in 1963, rather than being delighted by this sentimental first – Twenty-year-old California girl breaks the world record! – the race organise
rs were indignant that she’d run in the first place. Marathoners like Jim Peters, Sergei Popov and Abebe Bikila made headlines around the world when they broke records, but almost no one noticed Lepper.

  The early 1960s marks a transitional period in women’s running: more women ran long distances and even more challenged received ideas about what their bodies could do. Journalists spoke with these pioneering runners and, eventually, so did historians. Some of them even wrote memoirs. And so we know that Lepper hid on the sidelines, in the bushes, as she waited for her marathon to start. Lepper’s concern that she might be pulled off the course was well founded: women in the United States were forbidden from racing any distance over a mile and a half.

  Unlike the women we’ve met so far, Lepper didn’t run alone. She trained and raced with a friend named Lyn Carman, under the guidance of Carman’s husband, a marathon coach. Decades later, Carman recalled, ‘Before the race, there was one official who spent about 20 minutes chewing me out, saying I’d never have babies again.’ When another official tried to haul the two women out of the race, Carman punched him. I imagine these scenes as a sequence of comic frames: the two women concealed in shrubbery; the baby lecture; the punch.

  Twenty miles in, Carman dropped out – but Lepper kept going. She told interviewers that it was Carman’s grit that had inspired her to start the race. What kept her going? She couldn’t bear the thought that the first two women to attempt a marathon in the United States would both fail to finish. Lepper crossed the finish line and somehow, her time – as recorded by a sympathetic official – was accepted. Although she made the front pages of local newspapers, it took a long time for her achievement to be celebrated.

  Because Lepper broke a long-standing record, she’s sometimes hailed as America’s first female marathoner, but this isn’t quite true. In 1959, Arlene Pieper finished the Pikes Peak Marathon in Colorado and managed to escape a scolding. Her nine-hour time in that very strenuous race doesn’t come close to threatening Piercy’s record, but she’s notable for completing the 21-kilometre ascent of the peak with her nine-year-old daughter in tow, then leaving the girl behind so she could run the descent. Pieper is now acknowledged as the first woman to finish an American marathon as an official entrant, although no one realised it at the time.

  Running historians had no contact at all with her, until in 2009, half a century after her run, the Pikes Peak organisers hired a private investigator to find her. Pieper ran a fitness studio for women in 1959, and she’d entered the marathon to promote her business. She told Runner’s World in 2013, ‘I wanted to run the Boston Marathon, but they wouldn’t let me. We were just supposed to stay home, bake cookies, and have babies.’ Until recently she was part of the shadow history of women’s running, one of the little-known women whose achievements were simply forgotten. I wonder how many other stories like hers have been lost.

  Meanwhile, Merry Lepper’s record didn’t last long. It was toppled by Scottish runner Dale Greig, on the Isle of Wight, in May 1964. Familiar themes are sounded in Greig’s story: she was an experienced runner, one of the founders of the Scottish women’s cross-country association – and yet she was only allowed to run her marathon on the condition that an ambulance trail her for the entire race. What a condescending stipulation, and how annoying it must have been. When her record was announced, the organisers of the event, Ryde Harriers, were reprimanded by the British Women’s Amateur Athletic Association for letting her run at all.

  The women’s world’s best actually fell twice in 1964. Here’s how the second world-beating marathon of that year was reported in Sports Illustrated:

  One Saturday last August, a Mrs. Millie Sampson, a 31-year-old mother of two who lived in the Auckland suburb of Manurewa, went dancing until 1 am. The next day she cooked dinner for 11 visitors. In between, she ran the marathon in 3:19:33.

  Actually, Sampson wasn’t married and she had no children. That she knocked eight minutes off Greig’s record passed without comment. Most of the article was devoted to the New Zealand middle-distance runner Peter Snell and his preparations for the upcoming world championships.

  *

  The successes of Piercy, Lepper, Grieg and Sampson demonstrated that at least some women could run marathons. As more women snuck into races and reached finish lines, the question of whether women should be allowed to run long distances became a topic of much wider debate. The consensus among sports officials was that they certainly should not.

  In 1966, a slight woman named Roberta Gibb Bingay crouched in the bushes near the starting line of the Boston Marathon, waiting for the race to begin. She was a tremendous runner, extremely confident, and very well trained. She planned to pass herself off as a male athlete, wearing a blue hooded sweatshirt and a pair of running shoes. Women’s running shoes weren’t in production then, and Bingay – who has entered running history under the name Bobbi Gibb – had trained in shoes habitually worn by nurses as they paced hospital corridors.

  Despite Gibb’s efforts to run in drag, the spectators weren’t fooled. She recalls: ‘as soon as the crowds saw I was a woman there was a great commotion. People called out to me wishing me good luck.’ Her mother later assured the New York Times, ‘Roberta doesn’t want to break any barriers.’ A typical worried mother effort to keep the peace, the kind of thing I can imagine my own mother saying about my early feminist engagement: It’s just a phase she’s going through. It wasn’t strictly true that Gibb was running just for the hell of it: as she ran, she laughed to herself about the ‘preconceived prejudices [that] would crumble when I trotted right along for 26 miles’. Spotted by journalists, by the time she crossed the finish line she was big news.

  The Boston Marathon organisers were furious. They’d already knocked back Gibb’s request for an official spot on the grounds that women weren’t physiologically capable of running such distances. It was for her own good. The co-race director, Will Cloney, was widely quoted in the newspapers the next day as saying that while Gibb had run along the marathon course, she hadn’t run in the Boston Marathon – she’d merely covered the same route as the official race while it was in progress. Of all the rhetorical contortions used to discourage women from running, this ungracious remark merits special mention.

  Gibb’s marathon was a minor media sensation, but when Kathrine Switzer finished the same race a year later, she hit the big time. The Syracuse University student entered the 1967 Boston Marathon by marking her name as ‘K. Switzer’, letting the assumption that she was a man serve as her cover. She’d already chucked convention by training with the Syracuse track team. Her coach, a marathon veteran named Arnie Briggs, geed her up to run the distance. He also ran the Boston Marathon by her side, as did her boyfriend, a college athlete whose forte, helpfully, was the hammer throw.

  Journalists cruising along the course in their press truck drew the attention of a race official, Jock Semple, to the presence of a young woman in the race. He leapt into the crowd of runners and tried to drag Switzer to the sidelines. She describes this intervention:

  A big man, a huge man, with bared teeth was set to pounce, and before I could react he grabbed my shoulder and flung me back screaming, ‘Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers!’

  This sounds like the kind of assault feared by women who run alone after dark.

  Switzer’s two sidekicks stepped in, pulling Semple away so she could keep going. The press truck caught the whole tussle on film, and images appeared in newspapers around the world the following day. The three men appear to be fighting over Switzer; the LA Times captioned the image, ‘Chivalry prevails’. Thanks to these photographs, this episode is probably the most famous in the history of the women’s marathon. Almost fifty years later, it vividly conveys the values of another time, when a woman running was highly controversial, and when men were prepared to demonstrate their power over women in a hands-on fashion. In Switzer’s words: ‘I had never felt such embarrassment and fear. I’d never been manhandled, never even s
panked as a child, and the physical power and swiftness of the attack stunned me.’ The brute physicality of this struggle is still alarming, a reminder that women runners who came of age in the 1960s and 70s didn’t just have to pull a mind-over-matter stunt to complete a marathon – they came up against real human opposition.

  In the photos, Switzer strikes me as very brave and very young. Almost every time I’ve run in a race, whatever the distance, I’ve thought about giving up. For long stretches, I’ve berated myself for being so foolish as to enter in the first place. I remind myself that I’ve done it before, that plenty of other women have too. Friends send text messages. Usually there’s someone waiting for me at the finish line. I wouldn’t have been able to run anywhere without these layers of reassurance, let alone when I was twenty. If I’d had to duck behind the shrubbery before I started, as Bobbi Gibb and Merry Lepper did, I would have been lost. And, once I’d set out, had I been tackled by a big man, would I have had the fortitude to continue? I doubt it. Switzer did – but not without a whole lot of grinding anxiety. She describes feeling sick, humiliated, angry and scared. ‘If I quit,’ she recalls in her memoir, ‘everybody would say it was a publicity stunt.’ As it played out, people did accuse Switzer of seeking the limelight, just as they’d accused Violet Piercy of an untoward desire for fame forty years earlier.

  After running for almost four and a half hours, Switzer crossed the finish line. Will Cloney delivered a fresh set of angry quotes to the media, deploring ‘American girls forcing their way into something where they’re neither eligible, nor wanted. All rules throughout the world bar girls from running more than a mile and a half.’ As this hubbub played out, Bobbi Gibb managed again to complete the race as an unofficial runner. She ran about an hour faster than Switzer did, and avoided both the press and the race officials.