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  Within a few days, Switzer had been tossed out of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) for running with men, running more than the allowed distance, fraudulently entering an AAU event, and, astonishingly, running without a chaperone. Cloney told the New York Times, ‘If that girl were my daughter, I’d spank her.’ Under pressure, the Boston Marathon organisers eventually agreed to recognise Switzer’s time. (They didn’t recognise Gibb’s run for several more years.) The publicity had a galvanising effect on women distance runners, especially on the eastern seaboard of the United States, and they began to train together with events like the Boston Marathon and the New York City Marathon in their sights. This circle of bloody-minded women who kept stealing into marathons and running faster and faster times were all fantastic, ambitious athletes. Not one of them was a recreational runner out to see if she could make a certain distance or turn her life around. Elite women athletes in other sports, especially tennis, were taking a stand against inequity too. Other women were burning their bras, leaving their husbands, dropping acid, refusing to speak to their fathers, writing poetry, setting up refuges, plotting revolution. The women’s movement was fragmenting and reforming and, as all this insurrection was underway, the best women long-distance runners in the world kept on getting faster.

  *

  My schoolgirl self had no intimation that she would one day run a marathon, that she would come to love running. She schemed to skip running events, aped injuries, fatigue, distress. By the time I arrived at university, refusing to participate in sports was an act of overdue defiance. Had I then been aware of any cultural injunctions on women running long distances, I would have viewed them as blessings from the patriarchy.

  Physiology explains some of this resistance: I’m not built like a runner. My wide hips and small shoulders mean that I have a very inefficient gait. My joints are hypermobile, and I have a tiny lung capacity. Characteristics like these are what distinguish great athletes from the very determined, and they’re also what would stop me being a really strong runner if I ever actually threw myself into vigorous training.

  And yet, the stories that get told about the body are what help us make sense of it. Every klutzy kid has heard the advice I was given: relax, keep your eyes on the ball, it’s all in your mind. We hear people chortling when we run, we hear someone sighing with disappointment when we stretch in the direction of a ball without any hope of catching it. What if it really was all in my mind? I wonder now whether some of my discomfort about my uncooperative limbs was drawn from a deeper cultural well, the one that irrigated my grandmothers’ beliefs about orderly bodies and good behaviour, and that made officials so angry with Kathrine Switzer and Bobbi Gibb.

  Those beliefs certainly had a solid cultural foundation. In 1837, an affable Englishman named Donald Walker wrote what was effectively the first exercise manual for women, to be read by the idle daughters of the aspiring middle class. Exercises for Ladies, calculated to preserve and improve beauty was mainly concerned with good posture; it did, however, include a very brief, cautionary section on running and leaping. ‘Owing to the excessive shock which both of these exercises communicate,’ Walker determined, ‘neither of them are very congenial to women.’ He summoned Rousseau to his cause: ‘Women are not made for running: when they fly, it is that they may be caught. Running is not the only thing they do awkwardly; but it is the only thing they do without grace.’

  Even after years of running, on a bad day I would mutter to myself, This doesn’t feel quite right. If people say things like, Just put your mind to it, relax, when I’m trying to park in a tight spot, I’m taken back – just for a split red second – to the humiliated eternity of the maladroit teenager. When my elbow clangs against a doorframe that I thought was metres away, when a yoga teacher tells me to stop thinking and to glide my body through an impossible sequence, I get stuck again.

  I used to hold firm to the belief that any feats of physical endurance were beyond my reach. If I spend too much time thinking about my body, I still fret that it might be slightly ridiculous for me to keep running long distances. I worry that I’ll trip, that I’ll be left behind, that my body isn’t strong enough. If once I thought all this awkwardness was my lonely biological destiny, that I just wasn’t born to run, now I’m not so sure.

  *

  During the first half-century of the women’s marathon, concerns about the effect of running long distances on women’s capacity to bear children ran high. A Swiss IOC official, D.F.M. Messerli, was present at the 1928 Olympics and watched the final of the 800 metres, when all those women keeled over. Seeing himself as a great advocate for female athletes, he nonetheless favoured the imposition of limits in the name of sacred maternity. In 1952, he wrote a chatty paper on women in the Games, which serves as a summary of mid-century attitudes to female athleticism.

  We are of the opinion, that these restrictions are all for the good, seeing that woman has a noble task in life namely to give birth to healthy children and to bring them up in the best of conditions. We must do everything in our power to improve her conditions of living, but on the other hand, we must avoid everything which can be injurious to her health and harm her as a potential mother.

  When Betty Friedan called for a ‘drastic reshaping of the cultural image of femininity’ in her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, she might have been speaking to would-be runners. ‘Fulfillment as a woman had only one definition for American women after 1949 – the housewife-mother,’ she wrote.

  To my surprise, now and then I still get asked if I’m worried about the effect of running on my fertility. The answer to this intrusion is always, of course, no – and if I could be bothered, I might point to the thousands of women who have run long-distance events and been delivered of healthy babies. Women who are trying to conceive are advised not to train for marathons, although some do, and some women temporarily stop menstruating if they rapidly lose a great deal of weight. Questions about the hormonal repercussions of training have more relevance to professionals who run in an intensive fashion over long periods, especially if they begin very young. But for the rest of us, the fertility interventions are retrograde shock tactics. In 2015, Australian newspapers reported that the principal of a Melbourne Islamic school had banned girls from running because the activity might ‘cause’ them to lose their virginity. That’s an extreme case, but it’s located on a spectrum of warnings to women about the physical consequences of running: you will stop menstruating, your breasts will shrink, your body will become unfeminine.

  There is an influential essay, by feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young, titled ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ that explores the body experience of women. When I read it as an undergrad, I didn’t really reflect on how it spoke to my own gloomy experiences with sport; when I re-read it as a runner, the questions Young posed struck me as vital: What is it like to experience the space of the world as a woman? How is it gendered? How are the physical differences between men and women used to explain structural inequalities between them?

  Young emphasises the ‘situation’ of women, scrutinising the different ways that men and women use their bodies to perform tasks, the way they throw – and run. That situation is circumscribed by ‘historical, cultural, social, and economic limits’. If a woman throws like a girl, restricts her movements and doesn’t hurl the ball with full force, it’s not necessarily that her biceps are less developed than her brother’s: her experience of the world bears on the way she brings her body into motion. As her arm moves through space, history moves with it. Young writes, ‘for many women as they move in sport, a space surrounds us in imagination that we are not free to move beyond; the space available to our movement is a constricted space’. Young acknowledges that her analysis is culturally specific – it’s about cisgender women ‘in contemporary advanced industrial, urban, and commercial society’ – and I should issue a similar disclaimer. I’m writing first from a set of experiences that mesh well with Young’s essay. The kind of complex acculturat
ion that she describes is, however, my best explanation for the anxiety that I felt for so long about running and sport, one that so many women I’ve spoken to share. It’s much more convincing to me than a fatalistic interpretation of physiology – or the theory that I alone am a one-woman athletic disaster.

  If being told that you run like a girl carries a derogatory swipe, it’s also the basis for new communities of the body, as the She Runs events, in all their bright pink, marketised splendour, demonstrate. The upbeat t-shirts declaring that the wearer ‘Runs Like a Girl’ or ‘Kicks Like a Girl’ or ‘Fights Like a Girl’ are hopeful rejections of the situation Young describes. It’s a very different statement to ones that Switzer and Gibb were forced to make: that they didn’t run at all like girls, that they could run as well as any man could.

  *

  As I was thinking over how I’d formed the idea that I couldn’t run, I came across a grim study. The researchers found that talented female athletes, those who competed at national and international levels at a young age, were terribly bullied about their successes at school. These were the girls who ran faster than all the other girls, who threw further – who had, surely, spat out some of the inhibitions that I’d swallowed. They reported being ostracised by their peers and weathering nasty taunts. None of the small sample surveyed by Maureen O’Neill and Angie Calder were asked whether they’d been bullied: all the young women and none of the young men volunteered that this was the case.

  Had I made fun of excellent athletes when I was at school? I remember being envious of those girls who made jumping rope, swinging bats and lapping the oval look easy. They weren’t national athletes, but I don’t recall teasing them. My ineptitude on the field made me a target of unkindness, and I didn’t want any more attention. Beyond a bit of what-do-I-care-about-sport-anyway, I didn’t sling anything back. It’s distressing to me now to contemplate that the talented girls might have been tormented for their gifts as much as I was for my lack of them.

  When I did start running, there was no doubt in my mind that women could run long distances – my doubts concerned my own abilities. If I wanted evidence of the strength and endurance of women, I only needed to look around me in the park or watch the faster runners shoot off at the beginning of races. In a strange way, my dismal personal log of athletic accomplishment probably helped form me as a runner. I knew I was slow from the outset and had no peak of youthful achievement to surmount. While I was wary of looking foolish, no adult embarrassment could sear my sense of self in the way being an uncoordinated teenager had. My sporting ego, had it even had a moment to take shape, was non-existent. I had nothing to lose.

  I’m still a crap athlete. Whenever people ask me how fast I can run, what my best times are, it makes me laugh – I should be nobody’s standard for sporting success. To find, eventually, that I could run 14 kilometres in the City2Surf spun my world around. For a woman to run for pleasure is a wildly new concept, one that isn’t endorsed by any historical precedent. It was new for me too. Now, when I run it’s as if I’m pushing the earth away with my feet and, with it, everything I told myself I could never do, and everything that women were told for centuries was beyond them.

  5

  On the road

  I ran the City2Surf in the morning, and in the afternoon I did what I now know most runners do post-race: I went to the pub and talked up my run. I pulled a wobbly chair to a sticky table and let friends who weren’t runners buy me beers. In return, I put together a big story about having run 14 kilometres just after dawn.

  I’d twisted my hair high into a messy knot and hooked in a pair of earrings that tinkled against my shoulders. I looked nothing like a runner; that person who’d shivered in her black shorts in the chalky morning light was just a character in a long series of anecdotes. I rolled cigarettes, and all afternoon smoke trailed around me, my bangles clattering an off-key accompaniment. For years I’d staked out these footpath tables at the Darlo Bar and watched runners go by in their risible shiny kit. I’d wondered why they bothered. And here I was, an emissary returned from the realm of runners, an ethnographer set to deliver her preliminary findings.

  Running yarns typically involve an elaboration of the physical and mental obstacles overcome by the runner on her way to the finish line: lessons learned, morals revealed. It had been bewildering to wait for a siren blast with tens of thousands of runners, but the run itself had lacked drama. Thanks to my overconscientious preparation, my legs were conditioned to carry me across the line – it took me a long time to twig that usually it’s possible to get away with far less training. The horror stories I’d heard about muscle seizures had made an impression too, so I had stretched for a sensible amount of time in the finish area at Bondi. I know now that a slow 14K run, even if it involves a few hills, is unlikely to provoke paralysing muscle cramps.

  Sitting on a pub chair, my legs were pleasantly sore, and though I was tired, I was hardly wiped out. All I’d had to do that morning was keep running till I passed through the inflatable tunnel that marked the finish line – and then a kid in a volunteer t-shirt gave me a medal and shrugged me in the direction of the drinks stand. I had no scars, no blisters, I wasn’t even limping: so what story did I have to tell?

  After a few beers, the bones of it fell something like this: Ha! I’m the last person anyone ever expected to run the City2Surf and I did it. I ran all the way! This element of surprise was what gave shape to my story, not some epic confrontation with my physical and psychological limits. I was a fish out of water, a boozy old dog learning new tricks. I’d thwarted the stereotypes about runners: it was intriguing iconoclastic me against the tens of thousands of other participants – all of whom, at least for pub purposes, behaved like the drones I needed them to be. I yammered on about the weirdos in costumes, the parents chasing their skinny-legged kids, the metal band playing on the rooftop of the Golden Sheaf, the dudes sinking beers as they ran. The runner in my story was entirely subordinate to the woman at the pub; you could have been forgiven for doubting that they were the same person. The details were slipping away from me fast: I could barely remember what the cold morning air had felt like on my throat, or whether the pressure that began to sink into my hip in the last few kilometres retained any intensity.

  I was with a forgiving circle of old friends who were point-blank impressed that I’d run 14 kilometres. They knew I wasn’t an ascetic who lived and died by her gym schedule. Not one of them dampened my glee by scrutinising my slow time. Jim, a former boxer and a unionist, asked me questions about my strength training, and the very fact that I had answers for him made me laugh. Squats and lunges, mate. I grabbed at similes: it was like being part of a moving stadium; we were lemmings, dancers, a swarm of overgrown kids chasing the Pied Piper. I knew my friends shared my scepticism about corporatised leisure, and I played to our prejudices. Was the City2Surf a dismal burlesque of contemporary life, all of us running in the same direction, obeying the rules, chipped for time – or was it a glorious celebration of the body, an electric experience of the blazing multitude? As my friend Jarrah and I waited for drinks at the bar, I reeled off yet another minor anecdote, and a bloke sitting nearby chimed in. ‘You ran the City2Surf? Well done, love. I could never do that.’ I thrilled at the strangeness of being hailed as a runner in a bar, instead of just a regular Sunday drinker. ‘Good to see you haven’t given up on the finer things in life,’ he added as we picked up our beers. It got late quickly, and as I wandered home I was pleased to sense a new stiffness in my legs, a little discomfort to balance the exhilaration.

  Pub blarney never adds up to the whole story. I could’ve told a very different one that night if I’d started in India, or in Albury – or some wretched sad night, five or six or nine years earlier. Instead, I’d revelled in the endorphin-razzled flippancy of the present. The fact that I’d just had a good time with a bunch of bloody runners was something new. The maxim that we are what we repeatedly do is attributed to Aristotle. Could it be, I wondered
, that the further I ran, the merrier I’d be? What would it feel like to encounter and overcome a little more resistance? Maybe I’d simply forget the inconvenience of training and the discomfort of racing. All kinds of self-improvement fantasies made themselves available. Before I turned in for the night, I resolved to run a half marathon before the year was out.

  *

  This resolution proved very easy to put into gear. A week after the City2Surf, two of my cousins, Ali and Danny, suggested that we sign up to run a half marathon staged by the local triathlon club in the little town of Mudgee. This was an element in their scheme to run a marathon later that year.

  People visit Mudgee for wine and food weekends, not sport. It isn’t quite in the middle of nowhere, but it’s a long way away from the Darlinghurst pavements where I’d held court on my training philosophy. This race was selected solely for its location: the three of us lived in Newcastle, Dubbo and Sydney, and we’d all have to travel roughly the same distance to reach Mudgee. There was just enough time for me to figure out how I was going to run 7 kilometres further than I had in the City2Surf – and I agreed.

  Everyone told me I needed a plan if I was going to do this: only with a plan would I make progress, and I had to make 7 kilometres of progress in under two months. I knew I couldn’t train on a treadmill this time. It would take me about two hours to run a half marathon, maybe a bit longer, and I’d go mad if I stayed on a treadmill for that length of time. I had to get out of the gym. It’s all about endurance, my dad’s friends in Albury told me, and I said I’d take their word for it because they were triathletes, and because they’d known my father so well that their advice was stamped with his authority. If I could build my endurance, I’d be fine. Prepare to run the distance – don’t worry about your speed. It sounded like a lesson for life. Most running tips do if you’re in the market for bromides.