Long Road to Boston. Mr Mark Sutcliffe
and beloved runner in the history of the Boston Marathon. He won the race in 1935 and 1945, and finished second a record seven times. From 1934 to 1950, he placed in the top five fifteen times.
According to his obituary in the Globe, Kelley had wanted to be a baseball player. But when he was twelve years old, his father took him to watch the finish line of the marathon and he was hooked. For decades, he was synonymous with the race, so much so that “Here comes Johnny Kelley” became a familiar refrain sung by spectators along the route.
There’s a monument to Kelley just to the side of the course in the Newton Hills, depicting both a younger and older version of the accomplished runner. It’s not easily visible from the route on race day, buried in some trees and behind the spectators. But many runners make a separate trip to Newton to see the monument.
Kelley ended up running Boston sixty-one times, the last when he was eighty-four years old. “The Boston Marathon was his heart and soul,” his nephew told reporters when Kelley died in 2004 at the age of ninety-seven.
Like so many Boston champions of his time, Kelley was an amateur. He never collected any prize money and labored full-time in electrical maintenance, doing his marathon training in the evenings after a physically demanding day at work. He claimed that running offset the harsh conditions of his job, including working with asbestos. “The fact that I ran at night after work, in the fresh air, probably saved my life,” he said. “I owe an awful lot in this world to my running.”
In another interview, Kelley said: “People always ask me why I keep on running. I keep running because I love it. To me, there’s nothing else like it in the world.”
CHAPTER 7
At the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, the legendary Finn Paavo Nurmi won his ninth gold medal in the 10,000 meters. Johnny Weissmuller, the future movie Tarzan, won two gold medals in swimming. And several conventions were established that continue at the Olympics to this day: a flame was lit at the opening ceremonies, the athletes from Greece, the founding country of the modern games, marched first in the parade of athletes, and all the events were condensed into a sixteen-day schedule spanning three weekends.
But something happened at the 1928 Olympics that set back women’s running for about half a century. For the first time, women competed in athletics. But according to several media reports at the time, the 800-meter race ended in disaster, with several women collapsing at the finish line.
“Below us on the cinder path were eleven wretched women, five of whom dropped out before the finish, while five collapsed after reaching the tape,” wrote John Tunis of the New York Evening Post. Other journalists followed up by reporting that running was dangerous to a woman’s reproductive system, or that it caused women to age prematurely.
Faced with such a distressing sight, Olympic officials withdrew the 800-meter women’s race from future games. Hey, it was their duty to protect women from the potential for grievous and irreparable harm after two-and-a-half minutes of running, right? So until 1960, women were not allowed to move more than 200 meters at a time at the Olympics. The widespread belief, supported by purported experts who cited medical evidence, was that even medium-distance running was unhealthy for women.
To this day some people refer back to the collapsing women in 1928, even as they’re deploring the resulting restrictions that were imposed on women for decades. But the media reports were no more factual than the legend of Pheidippides meeting Pan. According to running historian Roger Robinson, there were nine women in the race and all of them finished. One competitor fell after leaning across the finish line, but was helped to her feet after a few seconds. Others lay down to rest after a tough race. The film footage of the event shows no collapses.
Olympic organizers had been pressured into including a wide range of women’s track and field events in the 1928 games. The all- male committee resisted and added only a handful of competitions, which led to a boycott of the women’s events by the United Kingdom. So there was already a bias against women’s participation, and all it took was a bit of erroneous media reporting to justify rolling back the clock and keeping women away from running anything but sprints for decades.
Today, there is evidence that women not only thrive in long- distance events, but might even be better-suited to them than men. In 2002, Pam Reed became the first woman to be the overall winner at the Badwater Ultramarathon. Billed as the world’s toughest footrace, Badwater is a scorching test of one-hundred and thirty-five miles through Death Valley. In 2003, Paula Radcliffe set the women’s world record at the London Marathon in a time that was less than ten minutes off the men’s standard. In 1970, the gap between the men’s and women’s bests was more than fifty-three minutes.
Less than six months before Reed was born, the 800 meters was restored to the Olympics at the 1960 games in Rome. But that was it; women were not allowed to run more than half-a-mile. The limit remained in place for the 1964 and 1968 Olympics. Perhaps organizers needed to make sure that it wasn’t just a fluke that the entire field hadn’t collapsed at the finish line.
In 1972, a women’s 1,500-meter race, just slightly less than a mile, was added. That was the limit for the next three Olympics, until finally, in 1984, women were allowed to run in a 3,000-meter race and the marathon.
That was twelve years after women were officially allowed to run the Boston Marathon, and eighteen years after they started doing so. The trail was blazed primarily by two women.
Bobbi Gibb says she fell in love with the Boston Marathon in 1964. “I was running through the woods with the neighborhood dogs when I first saw it,” she once wrote. “I didn’t know the marathon was closed to women.”
Gibb started training seriously. Her boyfriend would drive her somewhere on his motorcycle and she would run home. She gradually increased her distance from one mile to ten. Eventually she was running back and forth to school, where she studied sculpture. She didn’t follow a specific training program or book, and she ran in nurse’s shoes because there was no footwear designed for female runners.
“For me, running was a form of communion with nature and a way to rejoin my mind and body,” Gibb wrote.
Gibb and her dog Moot traveled across the United States in a Volkswagen bus in 1965. Every day, she says, she ran for hours in a new place – “the hills of Massachusetts, the grassy fields of the Midwest, the open prairies of Nebraska, the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevadas, the coast of California. I’d never seen this earth before, and to me it was wondrous.”
Some of her runs extended to forty miles, more than one-and- a-half marathons. “I’d see the top of a distant mountain, small and pale blue in the distance, and I’d spend all day running there, just to stand on the top. Then I’d turn around and run back. I made camp and slept outside every night, feeling infinitely close to nature. I was on a spiritual journey discovering something basic about existence.”
After she moved to California, she kept running long distances. According to ESPN, one day, while running on a beach from San Diego, she accidentally ran into Mexico and was detained by border security officials when she returned to the U.S.
Gibb wrote a letter to the Boston Athletic Association, asking for an application to the 1966 marathon. The race director wrote back sayingwomenwerenotphysiologicallycapableof runningamarathon distance. All the more reason to run, she thought. “At that moment, I knew that I was running for much more than my own personal challenge. I was running to change the way people think. There existed a false belief that was keeping half the world’s population from experiencing all of life. And I believed that if everyone, man and woman, could find the peace and wholeness I found in running, the world would be a better, happier, healthier place.”
Gibb’s journey to the marathon, on a bus from San Diego to Boston, took three nights and four days. She arrived the day before the race. The following morning, Gibb’s mother drove her to Hopkinton. Gibb hid in the bushes near the start and jumped into the pack after the gun went off.
Gibb has said that she was afraid she would be thrown out of the race, that the police might