Run, Switzer, Run: The Women Who Broke the Marathon Taboo
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Pushkin.

This summer, Pushkin is going to the Olympics. Shows across the network have got all sorts of stories to share, including the latest on sports science in What's Your Problem?, a suite of swimmers on Slight Change of Plans, a Happiness Lab conversation with a coach who coaches the coaches, and an epic season of revisionist history about why, in 1936, America participated in Hitler's Olympics.

Here on Cautionary Tales, loyal listeners will already have heard the Battle of Boots and Brothers featuring Adidas and Puma, with guest appearances from Dick Fosbury, Jesse Owens and Pele. And now, sit back and listen to a cautionary tale about what happens when women try to run long distance. Jasmine Parris had sworn she'd never attempt the spine race.

She was a champion long-distance runner, but the spine race was something else. 268 miles up the Pennine Way, the spine of England, carrying your bedding and all your food and anything else you might need on your back. Jasmine Paris had never raced over such a long distance.

The spine race is held in January when it's dark for 16 hours a day. It's cold enough that the route is often covered with snow, but not quite cold enough to stay dry. Everything, everything gets wet. It's easy to lose your way as you wind through and over the hills and moorlands of northern England, especially if you're running at night.

The race sounds hard, and in practice, it's nearly impossible. The first year it was held, in 2012, 11 competitors tried their luck. Only three finished. The fastest took nearly a week. The race doesn't include enforced rest breaks, so if you keep running while others are eating or sleeping, you can gain an advantage, if you can keep going.

One runner described the effects of sleep deprivation. I was totally confused. I didn't know where I was, what I was doing, and I didn't know I was taking part in this event. I simply followed the footprints in the snow ahead of me. It slowly dawned on me what I was doing, and I repeated to myself a few times, the spine race, the spine race. The spine race.

Elise Jasmine Paris was used to sleep deprivation. She had a one-year-old daughter. She was still breastfeeding and planned to pump milk during rest stops. This was 2019, at which time the race was a firm fixture in the ultramarathon calendar. There were more than 100 entrants, each with a GPS tracker and an emergency button to summon help.

In the half-darkness of half past eight, the morning of Sunday, the 13th of January, the contestants lined up. Some of them had finished the race again and again, such as the 2013 winner, Eugenie Rossellos Soleil, or the course record holder, Ian Keith. Both were favourites to win. Others had failed to finish before, but had come back to try again. The spine race is brutal.

Anyone, man or woman, course record holder or breastfeeding mum, anyone can qualify to start. But that doesn't mean everyone is going to make it to the finish. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. For sheer myth-making about distance running, you can't beat the marathon.

After the Greeks unexpectedly smashed an invading Persian army at the Battle of Marathon, a chap called Philippides ran 26 miles to Athens with the good news and then, so the story goes, collapsed and died. Thus began the legend of the marathon. This is a race so gruelling, a challenge so overwhelming that it could literally kill you.

The idea of the marathon as the ultimate test of human endurance was embellished still further in the London Olympics of 1908, when a little Italian pastry chef by the name of Durando Pietri entered the stadium for the final lap with a comfortable lead. He stopped as if stunned by the cheering and began to stagger towards the finish line,

Falling, blacking out, rousing himself and staggering forward again, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was on hand to describe the scenes. It is horrible and yet fascinating, this struggle between a set purpose and an utterly exhausted frame. Pietri kept going and falling and rising again,

He was right in front of Doyle when he fell for what seemed the last time. Amid stooping figures and grasping hands, I caught a glimpse of the haggard, yellow face, the glazed, expressionless eyes, the long, black hair streaked across the brow. Surely he is done now. He cannot rise again.

The rise again he did, with the assistance of numerous onlookers. His final, desperate stagger across the finish line, immortalised by the camera. Pietri was, of course, disqualified for being helped to finish, and the legend of the horrors of the marathon only grew.

Philippides and Dorando Pietri were, of course, men. Women weren't allowed to compete in the first Olympics, let alone in the marathon. If it could kill a man, can you imagine what it would do to the fragile frame of a woman?

The International Olympic Committee were reluctant to let women compete in any events at all, and when they were finally persuaded to admit female athletes in 1928, the longest women's race was 800 metres. It was a disaster. The newspapers of the day reported the disturbing scenes.

The New York Evening Post. Below us on the cinder path were 11 wretched women, five of whom dropped out before the finish, while five collapsed after reaching the tape. Only six out of 11 finishers. That's nearly as bad as the first spine race.

The Chicago Tribune added that one finisher collapsed into unconsciousness and required medical attention. A press syndicate reporter commented...

Other writers described the race as a disgrace or dangerous or opined that 200 metres was surely the maximum distance a woman could attempt without premature ageing and damage to her reproductive capacity. This is all, of course, nonsense.

Not just the stuff about damage to reproductive capacity. All of it. There weren't 11 women in the race. There were nine. Not only did the gold medalist, Lina Radka-Batschauer, break the world record, but so did the silver and bronze medalists and the three women behind them. Which is, I suppose, what happens when an event doesn't have many precedents. Nobody dropped out and nobody needed a doctor. No matter.

Rather than celebrating the greatest women's middle distance race in history, the pundits wrote whatever sensationalised nonsense they felt like writing. The International Olympic Committee used the fuss as an excuse to keep the women's 800 metres out of the Olympics for the next three decades.

The spine race starts with a steep scramble uphill. And at first, there was a group of contenders all moving together. Eugenie Rossello-Sole, Ian Keith, Jasmine Paris and a few others. At the top was the confusing and directionless Pete Morland of Kinder Scout, the highest area in the Peak District. Eugenie made a break and accelerated off into the mist.

There were days of running ahead of them, and the rest of the group felt confident that they'd reel him in over time. It was tough going. Rain, a strong headwind, difficult terrain, and nearly 50 miles to the first checkpoint. By the time they arrived, Paris and Keith had caught Soleil, and all three had broken away from the field.

They unpacked food from their rucksacks, shoveling whatever they could manage into their mouths. Jasmine Paris took a few minutes to express some breast milk. She really didn't fancy developing mastitis. And then the three of them headed out together into the darkness. The distance to the next checkpoint? 61 miles.

If women couldn't be allowed to run 800 metres until 1960, you can imagine what the male-dominated athletic establishment of the 1960s thought of the idea of women running a marathon. But there were a few independent-spirited women who liked to run. And naturally enough, their thoughts turned to that iconic distance. One of those women was Catherine Switzer.

As a girl, she'd told her father she wanted to be a cheerleader. 'You don't want to be a cheerleader, honey,' he told her. 'Cheerleaders cheer for other people. You want people to cheer for you.' He encouraged her to run a mile each day to get fit for sports. And she did. She became a journalism student at Syracuse, where there were no women's sports teams at all, so she asked to train with a men's cross-country team. 'Sure,' said the head coach.

and then she heard him laughing with the other coaches behind her back. That only made her more determined. More encouraging was volunteer coach Arnie Briggs, the university mailman and, at 50 years of age, the veteran of 15 Boston marathons. He was full of stories about the classic marathon which had first been held in the late 1800s.

And one December night, on a miserable training run through a snowstorm, as cars skidded and honked around, Catherine heard one too many of those tales. Let's quit talking about the Boston Marathon and run the damn thing. No woman can run the Boston Marathon. Why not? I'm running ten miles a night.

Arnie relented. No dame ever ran the Boston Marathon. If any woman could do it, you could. But you'd have to prove it to me. If you ran the distance in practice, I'd be the first to take you to Boston. Now you're talking, she thought. A few months later, and three weeks before the marathon, they ran 31 miles in training. Arnie turned grey and passed out. But Catherine was feeling great.

The next day, at Arnie's insistence, she signed up for the race, signing her name, as she always did, K.V. Switzer. She and Arnie checked the rulebook. There was nothing forbidding women to enter.

Arnie signed up too, as did Catherine's boyfriend, Big Tom Miller, all £235 of him. He was a promising hammer thrower, had been a serious college football player, and no, he wasn't planning on training. He was pretty fit anyway, and if a girl can run a marathon, I can run a marathon. On Wednesday, April 19th, 1967, race day. It was snowing. Most of the field were running in tracksuits.

There were 741 entrants, and Catherine pinned her number to her sweatshirt with pride. K. Switzer, 261. From the other runners, she got a few looks of surprise, but a warm welcome. Hey, you going to go the whole way? Gosh, it's great to see a girl here. Can you give me some tips to get my wife to run? She'd love it if I could just get her started. Arnie was beaming.

Big Tom, unmissable in his bright orange Syracuse sweatshirt, wasn't happy that Catherine was wearing lipstick, which might attract attention. Take it off, he said. I shan't, she replied. The crowd of runners squeezed closer and closer together as they approached the start. And then they were off and feeling great. Just four miles later, the fun would stop. Cautionary Tales will be back after the break.

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Catherine Switzer was running with her little group, including coach Arnie and boyfriend Big Tom, feeling good and acknowledging the encouragement of the other runners. At the four-mile mark, the press truck pulled alongside the little group to allow photographers a good shot of that dame who was running the marathon. Then Switzer recalled...

A man with an overcoat and felt hat was there in the middle of the road, shaking his finger at me. He said something to me as I passed and reached out for my hand, catching my glove instead and pulling it off. Who was it? A protester? A crank? But he was wearing an official's ribbon.

Moments later, I heard the scraping noise of leather shoes coming up fast behind me. When a runner hears that kind of noise, it's usually danger. Instinctively, I jerked my head around quickly and looked square into the most vicious face I'd ever seen. A big man, a huge man, with bared teeth, was set to pounce. Before I could react, he grabbed my shoulder and flung me back, screaming, ''Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers!''

Catherine was terrified. She realised she'd wet her pants in fear and she turned to sprint away as the furious official tried to rip the number off her sweatshirt.

The press truck was still there. The cameras were whirring and clicking. And then, seemingly from nowhere, 235 pounds of orange-clad college football player crashed into the official, flew sideways and landed on the roadside in a crumpled heap. Oh God, thought Catherine. Big Tom's killed him. We're in trouble.

Run like hell, yelled Arnie, and they sprinted away from the scene with the press truck in pursuit, cameras still clicking. It was an extraordinary scene. And perhaps the strangest thing about it? Catherine Switzer wasn't the first woman to run a marathon. She wasn't the first woman to run the Boston Marathon.

In fact, she wasn't even the leading woman in this race. A mile ahead of her, Roberta Bobby Gibb was making serene progress without an irate race official in sight.

Bobbie Gibb hadn't exactly been welcomed into the Boston Marathon. She'd applied to run in the marathon the previous year, 1966, and been firmly rejected with a letter that explained to her, women are not physiologically capable of running a marathon. Gibb crumpled the letter and hurled it to the floor. It was ridiculous. Bobbie Gibb was regularly doing 40-mile runs in the countryside near Boston.

I didn't know what to do. I didn't have a coach, no books, nothing. I didn't have any way of measuring distance, so I just went by time, she told the BBC. My boyfriend would drop me off on his motorbike and I'd run home. So, two months after throwing away the rejection letter, Bobbie Gibb found herself crouching in a bush near the start of the marathon.

Once half the men had started running, she stepped onto the course and joined the crowd, disguised in a hoodie and her brother's shorts. In 1966, the race was on a warm April day. Before long, Bobbie Gibb shucked off her hoodie and was running in a strappy vest top. ''I was so nervous,'' Gibb recalled. ''I didn't know what would happen. I thought I might even be arrested.''

The men around her were quick to allay her fears. They told her, we won't let them. She had no race number. She was running for the joy of it. Her long blonde ponytail swinging with the rhythm and the crowds cheering her as the news spread along the course. As she passed the women's university, Wellesley College, the students roared their approval.

As the distance grew, Gibb was scything through the field. She set her sub-three-hour pace for much of the race, fast enough to challenge for the first Olympic gold. But in the last few miles, her feet were shredded by the brand-new pair of men's running shoes she was wearing.

In training, she usually wore nurses' shoes because at a time when sports shoe companies were engaged in cutthroat competition to sell shoes to men, nobody could be bothered to make running shoes for women. She slowed markedly but kept going to cross the line in three hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. She didn't have a number and she didn't get an official timestamp, but she'd done it. And two-thirds of the men...

were still behind her. Maybe the women couldn't just cover the distance. Maybe they could teach the men a thing or two. In 1954, the women's record for a mile was a minute slower than the men's record. Just days after Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile in Oxford, Diane Leather broke the five-minute mile not far away in Birmingham.

By 1992, the men's lead over the women had narrowed from one minute to just 26 seconds. The women were catching up. And two scientists, Brian Whipp and Susan Ward, published research claiming that if the rate of improvement in elite women's running continued, then over the marathon distance, the top women would be faster than the top men as soon as 1998. That's

didn't happen. And neither does it look like it will. But what is true is that over long distances, the typical female competitor has never been closer to her male counterpart. In 2020, the International Association of Ultrarunners published The State of Ultrarunning 2020, all about running over very long distances. This report contained an eye-catching claim.

Once the race is more than 195 miles, that's seven and a half marathons, the women run faster than the men. I looked into this claim with my colleagues from the BBC programme More or Less, and it's not quite what it might seem at first sight. These aren't the world record times. They're the average times, which really tell you something about what kind of person tries an ultra-distance.

In fact, the average speed of runners in ultramarathons is getting slower. Why? Because more and more people who are less and less superhuman are giving these distances a try. More than five times as many men as women run in races longer than 50 miles.

So when the report says that the women are faster at the extreme distances, what they're saying is that the average female competitor, one of a tiny handful of unbelievably badass women, is faster than the average male competitor who comes from a much larger pool. Someone who might be operating under the Big Tom school of race preparation. If a girl can run a marathon, I can run a marathon.

We've seen a rapid improvement in women's times across all distances, and there's no mystery as to why. Women weren't able to compete for Olympic gold even over 800 metres until 1960. They were being told in the 1960s that not only were they forbidden to run a marathon, but that it would be dangerous for them to try.

The teenage Katherine Switzer was told by her friends that running even a mile a day might make her infertile or turn her into a man. It took a determined young woman to run at all, let alone attempt a marathon.

No wonder that once the world saw pioneers such as Bobbie Gibb and Katherine Switzer, more women felt able to run long distances and more organisations felt obliged to allow them and later to support them. And no wonder that when all this finally belatedly happened, women's times quickly improved.

And the irony was that it's in the very races that women were told were impossible to complete that they're getting closest to the men. The ultra distances. Those extreme distances give women a fighting chance. The result becomes dependent less on lung capacity and muscle mass, where men have a clear advantage, and more on luck, on resilience and on a tolerance for pain, where they don't.

When the human body is pushed to such extremes, anything can happen. And sometimes it does. By the time they reached the second spine race checkpoint, the course record holder, Ian Keith, had dropped back a little. Eugenie Rosello-Soleil and Jasmine Paris were running together. Paris tried to lose Soleil after the checkpoint. I was feeling strong and keen to run on my own for a bit.

But he caught up with her by twilight at the end of the second day, and they ran on together through the darkness, the path ahead illuminated by their head torches. Checkpoint four was well over halfway through the race, but there were still more than 80 miles to go. It was a moment to stop and to think ahead. As she wolfed down La Sagne, Jasmine Paris looked over at Eugenie,

He was getting a massage and perhaps a little nap. There were still one and a half hours of daylight left. She pulled on her shoes, shouldered her rucksack and set out to try to put some distance between them. Cautionary Tales will be back after the break.

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Shortly after Bobby Gibb crossed the sun-kissed finish line of the 1966 Boston Marathon, the state governor warmly shook her hand and she was invited by her fellow runners for the traditional post-race stew. It all seemed to be going well until she was turned away at the door of the dining room. Sorry, men only, that figures. Bobby Gibb decided that next year she'd do it all again.

In the wintry cold of the 1967 race, Gibb didn't match the pace of her first run, but she still comfortably beat the three-and-a-half-hour mark as she crossed the finish line, again running without a number or an official entry. She had no idea of the drama that had been unfolding behind her on the course as the race officials tangled with Catherine Switzer. It turns out that registering for the race was the problem.

Switzer had assumed it was the right thing to do, but the short-tempered race director was panicking that he'd be sanctioned by the Athletics Union. She watched in shock and amazement as the race director tried to rip her numbers off, and her massive boyfriend body-checked him into the next county. Catherine felt like she was going to puke. This wasn't what she'd imagined. It was all going horribly wrong.

The press truck was still tracking her, given the incredible scene that had just unfolded. The journalists were yelling out hostile questions. This was obviously just a stunt, so when was she going to drop out? But as they kept running, her nausea drained away, to be replaced by cold anger. The race director had tried to physically rip her out of the race. Screw him! There was absolutely no way that anyone was going to stop her from finishing.

The official bus drove past again. The race director, thankfully very much alive, puce with rage and shaking his fist. Catherine started to worry that they'd be arrested. And above all, she was worried that she wouldn't be able to finish. She told her coach Arnie that she was determined to go the distance, even if she had to crawl. And Arnie told her, fine, just slow down a little. It was cold and wet inside.

and the official had pulled off her glove, so her left hand was freezing. And then Big Tom spoke up. You're getting me into all kinds of trouble. What are you talking about, Tom? I've hit an official. Now I'll get kicked out of the athletics union. I didn't hit the official. You hit the official, Tom. Oh, great, yeah. Thanks a lot for nothing. I should never have come to Boston. It was your idea to come to Boston. And with that, Tom ripped off his numbers and hissed, You run too slow anyway.

And he sped away up the course, manhandled by an official, harassed by photographers, wet pants, cold hand, dumped by her boyfriend, and only 20 miles to go. But as the miles went past, the adrenaline drained away, and Catherine found her pace. She began to enjoy the run again, and some way past the halfway mark,

Looming out of the mist ahead of her was the unmistakable orange sweatshirt of Big Tom. He was walking, and as Catherine ran past, he begged her to give him a moment to catch his breath. Walk with me a while. I'll get it back. Sorry, Tom, said Catherine. She had her momentum. She had her race to finish. She ran on. The spine race. Final checkpoint. 42 miles to go.

Jasmine Paris had a decision to make. She'd been running for three days and she'd had three hours of sleep. She was starting to hallucinate. She'd seen a tree bend down into a yoga pose. She saw a bright pink pig running across the moors. Like other runners in previous years, she'd go through phases of forgetting that she was even in a race, let alone leading it. So, should she get some rest?

An hour of sleep? Or should she press her advantage, trying to extend her lead? After grabbing some more food and a strong coffee, she pressed on. When Eugenie arrived at the checkpoint, he asked where Jasmine was. No, no, no, she's gone, said one of the checkpoint volunteers. Gone? Wow. Eugenie soaked his feet in a basin of water, put his head in his hands.

The course record holder, Ian Keith, was hours behind them both. When Catherine Switzer and her coach Arnie crossed the finish line of the Boston Marathon, there weren't many spectators left. It was cold and wet, and they'd been running for more than four hours. There were a few grumpy journalists who ordinarily would have gone indoors to file their stories an hour ago, but had been told to wait and get an interview with that crazy dame.

Catherine had been slower than she'd hoped, but under the circumstances, getting to the finish line was an achievement enough. Her feet were bleeding so badly that the race doctor was shocked, but overall, Catherine felt great. All they had to do then was wait another hour for Big Tom to cross the finish line. Neither Bobby Gibb nor Catherine Switzer set out to change the world.

But between them, they did. The photograph of Bobby Gibb running down the home stretch in 1966 was inspirational. But even more iconic was the image of Switzer being attacked by a race official in 1967. He gave the world one of the most galvanising photos in women's rights history, said Switzer. And it's hard to disagree.

Both photographs, and both women, provided leverage to campaigners, who persuaded the authorities to change the rules. In 1972, Nina Cusick was the first woman to officially win a Boston Marathon, while Bobbie Gibb has been retrospectively recognised as a three-time winner. Gibb told the BBC, Back then, men weren't allowed to have feelings, and women weren't allowed to have a brain.

What if a man wants to knit? Is he any less of a man? No. What if a woman wants to drive a truck? Is she any less of a woman? No. All people can be who they want to be. The spine race had started on Sunday morning. By Wednesday evening, Jasmine Paris was limping down off the final summit towards the finish line. Every step was agonising.

She'd developed tendinitis on both legs and her pace was flagging. She kept looking over her shoulder at the horizon, looking for Eugenie Rosello-Sole. I kept expecting him to catch me because I felt that I was going so slowly on that last day. I kept falling asleep and thinking he must be just behind me. Eugenie was not just behind her. Sleep deprived, exhausted and dangerously cold.

he pushed his emergency button to quit the race and summon help, with 264 miles completed and four miles to go. And by then, Jasmine Paris had long since finished. After the solitude of the Pennine Way, the finish line was bewildering.

A crowd of people, the flashes of cameras, a very clingy cuddle with her daughter Rowan, a shower, and then the fish and chips Jasmine had been dreaming of, and the breastfeed that Rowan had been demanding. Dazed, Jasmine started to realise why people were quite so excited. She had obliterated Ian Keith's course record by more than 12 hours, about 50 miles.

Ian Keith himself wouldn't win the men's race until the next morning, 15 hours later. Still, there wasn't too much time to celebrate. Jasmine's PhD thesis was due in 10 weeks. It wasn't going to write itself. Key sources for this episode were Jasmine Paris's first-hand account of the spine race, Olivier Giberteau's feature article about Bobby Gibb,

in Catherine Switzer's autobiography, Marathon Woman. For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at timharford.com. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fiennes, with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts.

It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohn, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Tell your friends. And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm.com.

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