Running
Meet the boundary-breaking woman who forever changed marathon history
Before 1966, the sports establishment considered women physically incapable of distance running. A young upstart named Bobbi Gibb proved them wrong and she tells us how in the Why I Run podcast.
Bobbi Gibb has always loved to run.
“I think it's a very natural thing when you're a kid. You love to run. You go to the beach and you run up and down and just have this wonderful sense of joy – and I still do,” says Gibb aged 80, a native of the US state of Massachusetts.
But it was as a 21-year-old in 1964 that Gibb experienced a pivotal moment: her first view of a marathon, a distance that back then was run only by men.
Women didn't run, period. So I was pushing into the unknown
“This is the first time I'd ever seen a whole bunch of people running together, and it's like, 'wow, these people feel the way I do,'” she recalls. “I wasn't thinking men or women or anything. I was just thinking, ‘I want to be part of this thing.' It was like falling in love – it made no sense. For a grown woman to run in those days was thought to be totally improper and unladylike.”
Never having considered endurance running, her first challenge was just finding out if she actually could run the required distance of 26.2 miles (42.2km). In those days, there was no marathon training guide for women. In fact, she says, “Women didn't run, period. So I was pushing into the unknown.”
But that was far from her biggest running challenge. After two years of building her stamina, the young woman wrote to apply for the Boston Marathon. The race director responded flatly that females were not physiologically able to run marathon distances – which must have come as quite a surprise to Gibb, who by that point was covering up to 40 miles (64km) in training. To add insult to injury, she was informed that the longest race possible for a woman was 1.5 miles (2.4km). The curt rejection only fueled her fire to take part.
Listen to Season 2, Episode 11 of Why I Run below to hear Gibb describe how she persevered to start a new chapter in Boston Marathon history – and to write the opening page of women’s marathon history – by becoming the first woman to run the classic race from start to finish. It’s a tale of courage, suspense and ultimately, inspiration and affirmation for dreamers everywhere.
You can follow Why I Run on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon and wherever you listen to podcasts.
One of the high points of Gibb’s story is the bond she felt when she joined the community of runners on the Boston racecourse. On May 7, you can join men and women around the globe – including Gibb – in the Wings for Life World Run, where all participants are running to realize another dream: finding a cure for spinal cord injury. Registration for the App Run remains open until one hour before the global start time of 11am UTC, right here.