When I was born, the Women's Marathon was not an Olympic sport

Alas, once women WERE allowed to run it, no uteruses fell out.

A book to read: BETTER, FASTER, FARTHER: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women

One of my favorite things on the internet right now is Maggie Mertens from My So-Called Feminist Life interviewing Dave Berri about women’s sports. They discuss the WNBA, the economics of sports (why the whole “the WNBA doesn’t make a profit” line is ridiculous), and how the song Take Me Out to the Ball Game is a feminist anthem. Read all about it right here:

A Sports Economist Tells the Trolls They're Wrong About Women's Sports

But this interview isn’t the only brilliant thing from Maggie Mertens. Her whole newsletter is feminist gold. So I was VERY excited to attend the launch of her first book: BETTER, FASTER, FARTHER earlier this week at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle.

Elliott Bay Book Company and BETTER, FASTER, FARTHER. Photos by Jenna Vandenberg

Maggie Mertens documents the history of men discouraging/forbidding women to run. At every turn of the track, women were told “NO!” It was claimed that women collapsed in exhausted heaps after running a mere half mile. Women were told that running would strip them of their future ability to carry babies. (All these falsities make for great history lessons on sourcing - see the teaching section below) Women’s World Records were ignored or not officially recorded. When Bobbi Gibb wanted to run the Boston Marathon in 1966, her parents sent her to a psychiatrist.

Women were finally allowed to run the 800-meter, and then the mile, and then the marathon. But they were are assured by society that they will never, ever, ever be faster than men. It is biologically impossible.

Perhaps it’s time to stop believing such assurances.

Mertens writes: “Today, the mile world records between men and women are less than 25 seconds apart. The 100-meter records are less than one second apart…According to UltraRunning magazine, around thirty ultramarathons in North America are won by women every year.”

In 2019 Jasmin Paris smashed the course record of UK’s Spine Race (268 miles with 37,000 feet in elevation gain), which included her pumping breast milk at aide stations along the way. Mertens writes about how, in 2023, a man won the race: “the host makes a flub: he says the winner, Damian Hall, has set a new course record. But, in fact he’s only set a record for the men.”

Jasmin Paris still holds the overall record.

If you are inspired to start running ultramarathons after reading BETTER, FASTER, FARTHER, be sure to check out Sarah Lavender Smith’s newsletter:

A place to explore: Austin, Texas. February 2000. My First Marathon

Unlike Jasmin Paris, Sarah Lavender Smith, and one of my best friends (HI, RACHEL!), I’ve never run an ultramarathon. So the longest race stories I have are about marathons.

Here goes:

I was seventeen when I ran my first marathon. My high school required students to complete a senior project - a passion project that we’d research, work on, write papers about, and present to the community.

A marathon seemed a little iffy though. As a junior, I’d never run more than 10 miles. Plus, I’d been sidelined with stress fractures my sophomore year. Did I really want to attempt to train for a marathon, risk another overuse injury, and putting my senior track season at jeopardy?

Yes. Yes I did.

Where did I get this crazy idea from?

Was it Oprah?

I’d never been an Oprah fan (not that I have anything against her, but I had a VERY strict TV limit as a kid and daytime talk shows did not make the cut), but Oprah had completed the Marine Corps Marathon a few years earlier, kicking off a frenzy. Suddenly, the zeitgeist was full of women running marathons, and I soaked up the vibes.

This was the theme of Maggie’s book. Once women started running, more women realized they could run. Then they got better, ran faster, and went farther.

If I’d been born twenty or thirty years earlier, I totally would have given credence to the falsity that running would hinder my future childbearing capabilities. I would have never jogged a step in my life.

Being born in the 80s was one of the luckiest breaks of my life.

The week after my cross-country season ended I started my marathon training program, with a plan to run those 26.2 miles during the last weekend in February.

The biggest marathon in the USA that weekend, complete with Runner’s World pacing groups, was in Texas. So I got a job to pay for plane tickets, and found myself in Austin, Texas in February of 2000.

• I remember driving past the Governor’s Mansion. The cab driver pointed it out to us, proudly proclaiming that Guv’nah Bush would be in the White House next year.

• I remember sometime around mile 20, when I runner pulled a CELL PHONE out of his pocket and started talking. So crazy - who in the world would run a whole race with a cell phone in their pocket?!? Hahaha.

• I remember visiting LBJ’s presidential library with my mom the next day - she was obsessed with the library, saying that she felt like we’d just walked through her entire childhood.

• I remember visiting UT’s campus, how it seemed like the only green space in Texas.

I don’t have pictures of this trip, but twenty years later I returned to Austin for a conference and made sure to carve out space to go running in the city that made me a marathoner.

A lesson to teach:

During Maggie’s author talk, she read the excerpt of her book that discusses the 1928 Olympics. It was the first year that featured track-and-field events for women, including the 800-meter (which is two laps around a track, or very close to a half mile). The event was reported as a disaster, with women collapsing in wretched heaps during and after the race. However, when Mertens watched footage of the event, no mass-collapsing occurred. She writes:

“As I dig into the story of that race, I find that the whole spectacle that unfolded, the video clips, the newspaper headlines - all of it - was a setup…allowing women to run in international competitions, especially in long, grueling distances that only the most masculine athletes could perform, was dangerous to the world order.”

And so it was reported that women were incapable of running two laps around the track.

The ruse held up for over thirty years. The 800-meter wasn’t reinstalled as a Women’s Olympic event until the 1960s.

While this is infuriating, it’s also a great history lesson. At the beginning of each year, I introduce my students to the concept of sourcing and we discuss the pros and cons of primary and secondary sources. Often, students will assume that primary sources are superior, but pages 19-20 of BETTER, FASTER, FARTHER provide excellent examples of why historians should bring a healthy dose of skepticism to primary sources.

For this lesson, I’ll divide the class into seven groups and give each group a cut-up paragraph from pages 19-20, wherein Mertens provides quotes from several media outlets regarding the 1928 race. The groups will read their quotes and then everyone in the group will sketch a picture (stick figures are fine!) of their quote. Since all reports indicate that several women collapsed after the race, so I’m anticipating drawings featuring piles of disheveled stick figures - it’ll be a good time. It’s summer break now, but once I teach this lesson in September, I’ll do a recap, complete with student illustrations. Get excited!

Then we’ll discuss as a class. I’ll go around the classroom, having someone from each group read the quote. And then everyone in that group will hold up their pictures. After each group, I’ll record conflicting information on the board. (6 contestants? Eleven? Nine?)

Then I’ll show footage of the event (I can’t find footage of the complete race, but the link to what I did find is here and below) and read Maggie’s analysis of all these sources (pages 20-24 of her book). This will give students a window into how a historian pieces together conflicting sources of data in order to figure out history.

What an excellent way to teach my students about sourcing AND sneak in some feminism while I’m at it!

I can’t wait to start teaching again.

Happy teaching (or summer-ing), reading, traveling, and running! See y’all next week.

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