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I have always loved traveling far on foot. While not what anyone would call "athletic" — and never fleet afoot — I could always go far. For a time, I lived in Washington, DC, and it is (or was) a tremendous city to explore on foot. Not every neighborhood, naturally — no city is unambiguously safe — but lots of it was, and the public spaces were grand indeed. I ran my first marathon there — the 1977 Marine Corps Marathon. So I'm a fan of distance events. I've written here before about my pick for the toughest distance event — the Barkley Marathons. And about one of my personal favorites — The Great Saunter in NYC. But today is the anniversary of a signal achievement in a much more traditional distance event: the Olympic Marathon. August 5, 1984, was the inaugural running of the Women's Olympic Marathon. The winner was American Joan Benoit — now Joan Benoit Samuelson — in 2:24:52, in front of a packed Los Angeles Coliseum.
What made it more remarkable was the road she took to get there. In 1981 she'd had surgery on both Achilles tendons to deal with chronic heel pain from years of hard training. Then, just seventeen days before the 1984 Olympic Trials, she injured her knee on a training run and had to have arthroscopic knee surgery — with barely more than two weeks to recover before racing for a spot on the team. She made the team, and then she made history.
At age 69, she is still running. She raced the Bix 7 in Davenport, Iowa just two weeks ago, and said she plans to keep running until she turns 70. She was also at the Beach to Beacon 10K, a race she founded, in Cape Elizabeth, Maine at the end of July, though it's not clear from the piece I read whether she ran it or just appeared. She's kept up a remarkable streak — sub-3:00 (under 3 hours for 26 miles 385 yards) marathons across five decades, and she completed all six World Marathon Majors at age 66. But it's the 1984 memory of her in that goofy white hat that sticks with me. Well done!
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Wow. She's a champion in my book!
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Brava, Joan!
The ability to pursue goals with courage and persistence in the face of adversity are among the virtues that we all ought to value most highly, irrespective of how highly we value the goals to which they are directed.
We are fools if we attach any value at all to the goal of merely besting others in any game, whether it's a footrace or a debate game or a political game, with no purpose except to satisfy one's desire for undeserved esteem, power, or pleasure.
The reason I do value the achievement of selfish, hollow goals is rather that they are measures of the ability of the achiever to overcome the obstacles to achieving worthwhile goals--to doing the Creator's will--should he re-direct his remaining few hours, resources, and virtues to those goals.
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Beautiful, Mark.
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Is anyone else kind of blown away by how recent this was?
I'm about the least Feminist woman anyone would hope to meet, but occasionally I'll learn something that causes me to throw a teeny retroactive thank-you to the second-wavers. There really were things that women were structurally prevented from doing (in this case, for no apparent reason!), and I am glad that women have the opportunity to do them now.
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Very true. And one thing we’ve learned is that in distance races - not marathons but longer distance … ultra-marathons - women may actually have biological advantages over men. They carry less mass (on average). They usually have a higher proportion of slow-twitch muscle fibers. Their metabolisms are better at burning fat for energy. Women have outright won several ultras…including the Barkley Marathons.
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