You’ve Come 26.2 Miles, Baby : Roberta Gibb and K. Switzer Made Boston Marathon a Coed Course

BOSTON —  It was a warm April morning, and she was leaning on a stone pillar on Hayden Road, dressed in a hooded sweatshirt and trying hard to look like somebody waiting for a bus.

Nearby, men milled about in shorts, then gathered and were sent on their way by a pistol shot. As they ran toward the green in Hopkinton, Mass., and on to Boston, Roberta Gibb slipped in among them.

Five hundred men and Roberta Gibb in the Boston Marathon.

It was 1966.

There was no Olympic race longer than 200 meters for women and there hadn’t been one from 1928-48, because after that last long race, 800 meters in 1928 in Amsterdam, the top three finishers, all of whom had beaten the world record by as much as two seconds, looked beat themselves.

“You have to remember that in those days, there were people who were saying, ‘If you run a race like that, you can never have children,’ ” said Kathrine Switzer, who came to Boston in 1967 in a celebrated--and at the time cursed--effort. “They said your uterus would fall out and you would never attract a man.”

Bobbi Gibb, a Boston native who had moved to San Diego, knew nothing of that.

She was not trying to knock down any gates in 1966. Until February of that year, when her application to run was rejected, she didn’t even know there was a gate. It was the ‘60s, a time for draft-card and bra burning, but she was feminine, not a feminist. She was a 23-year-old Navy wife, occasional poet, aspiring sculptor and future lawyer who liked running. And here was a lot of running.

“A friend of my father’s told me about the Boston Marathon, and I couldn’t believe it--26 miles long?” she says. “I went out in 1964 to look at the race and I fell in love with it. People seemed to have this real earthy quality I was looking for.

“All I saw was people. It never occurred to me that there were never any women allowed or there weren’t any women running. I had never run into any discrimination. I had gone to school with boys in my class. I just didn’t know.”

She found out quickly enough.

As she ran that April Monday, she wondered and worried. Unschooled in the sport, she ran in a swimsuit and shorts, as she had on San Diego’s beaches, and boys’ running shoes.

Water stations were passed.

“I had been told in high school that if you drank water when you exercised, you got cramps,” Gibb said.

And dinner the night before lay heavy on her stomach.

“I figured you needed protein for energy,” she said, “so I ate a huge roast beef dinner.”

She had spent four days on the bus from San Diego, arriving just before the race. She was tired and scared.

And a curiosity.

“I was running along, and after a few minutes, the guys behind me were studying me,” Gibb said. “They said, ‘Hmmm, that looks like a woman.’ I turned around and laughed. ‘Well, it is a girl.’ They were very receptive. I don’t know what I would have done if they had said, ‘Get out of here,’ but they didn’t. They said, ‘This is great, a woman. I wish my girlfriend would run.’

“I said, ‘I wish I could take off this hood, but I’m afraid they’ll throw me out of the race. But if I don’t, I’ll die of the heat.’ They said, ‘Oh, well, it’s a free road and we won’t let them throw you out.’ ”

She threw off the sweatshirt.

“I’d see a policeman at a corner and say, ‘Oh, boy, wonder if I’m going to get by him,’ ” Gibb said. “But they’d all laugh and say, ‘Hey, girlie, he went thataway.’ Or, ‘If you’ll slow down a bit, he can catch you.’ ”

She was in no danger of being thrown out. She wasn’t an official entrant, so to Boston Marathon officials she was a non-person.

And as she ran, she began to get the idea that she wasn’t just getting 26.2 miles of exercise.

“There was a woman standing at Wellesley,” she said. “She was sort of a plump woman with her children and her husband, and she started saying, ‘Ave Maria, Ave Maria, Ave Maria.’ ”

Amen.

As Gibb ran under the finish line, somebody threw a blanket over her. Her time was 3 hours 21 minutes 40 seconds, 126th among the 500 runners.

The men went off to warm up with the traditional bowl of beef stew. She was left standing at the finish line.

Gibb had pinned a $10-bill inside her swimsuit, so she took a taxi to her parents’ home, where she found reporters and photographers trying to make certain she was a woman. They took pictures of her making fudge in the kitchen, a woman’s place.

A few days later, Switzer, a student at Lynchburg College in Virginia, interviewed a Boston Marathon runner and decided it was something she wanted to try. The runner, Robert Moss, had been beaten by Roberta Gibb by more than a mile.

Switzer had run the mile with the Lynchburg men’s track team, and when the Associated Press in Richmond, Va., picked up the story, she got a letter that said, “God will strike you dead.”

She transferred to Syracuse University and began to train with Arnie Briggs, who had run Boston several times and told her that a woman couldn’t do it. Roberta Gibb, he said, had joined the race at Wellesley, well into the course.

They argued, Switzer showing him magazine stories that indicated that Gibb had run the whole way.

He remained unconvinced until Switzer ran 26 miles with him--and then five extra miles to show she could do it. Briggs passed out after the extra mileage.

He went along to Boston, as did Tom Miller, a hammer thrower at Cornell who became Switzer’s first husband.

She had an AAU card and travel permits and had completed a physical examination, and her application to the Boston Marathon read “K. Switzer.”

It was unintentional subterfuge, she maintains.

“I had been signing my name K.V. Switzer since I was 11 years old,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to deceive them, but I’ll be honest with you, I wasn’t flaunting the fact that I was a woman in that race. I didn’t want to be stopped. I did want to run it legally, with numbers. I considered myself a legitimate runner.”

She was No. 261, just another runner in a sweatsuit on a cold, snowy April morning in 1967. Nearby, Bobbi Gibb was back at her post, still looking for the bus.

She was still not entered in the race, and officials didn’t care if she ran. The media did, though. When Gibb arrived in Boston, a student taking time away from UC San Diego, she saw headlines: “Will she run? Is she coming?”

She ran, finishing in 3:27:17.

Far behind Gibb, Switzer plodded along with Briggs, Miller and her No. 261. The press bus happened by with Jock Semple, the patron saint of the Boston Marathon aboard, and he was being razzed by the reporters.

“People on the bus told me they had been telling him, ‘Hey, Jock, there’s a broad in your race wearing a number,’ and Jock just lost his temper and started screaming for the bus to stop,” Switzer said.

Semple jumped off and started screaming.

“I heard footsteps in leather shoes and I turned and Jock . . . grabbed me by the shirt and shoulders,” Switzer said. “He jerked me back and said, ‘Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers.’

“Then there was a flash of orange, and my boyfriend, who was running with me in the race, hit Jock with a shoulder block and took him right out. You could hear the smack. He just crunched him. Jock went flying through the air and I thought we had hurt him. Then Arnie, my little coach, said, ‘Run like hell.’ I could feel the tears coming, I was so scared.”

Off she ran, and Semple picked himself up, got back on the bus, and it caught up with her and her group.

“By then, a lot of runners had gathered around me to protect me, and Jock got on the running board of the bus and yelled at me, ‘You are in big troooooble’ in that Scottish accent of his,” Switzer said.

She was also almost an hour behind Gibb.

“The AAU in ’66 was already talking about opening marathons to women,” Gibb said. “They were sort of apologetic, saying if women want to run this badly, why don’t we let them?

“Then there was another woman (Switzer) who had gotten an ‘illegal’ number. I guess Jock was angry, and then the marathon really closed down. By the time I got to the finish line, I didn’t know what was going on. She was an hour behind me, and I had no idea that there was all this turmoil going on. At the finish line, they weren’t as friendly as they were the year before, and I wondered why.”

Gibb and most of the other runners had gone by the time Switzer finished, in 4 hours 20 minutes, an embarrassing time.

“When I finished in 4:20, that was when I learned how fast 3:20 is,” said Switzer, who at 48 still runs and has a personal best of 2:51.

She went home to Syracuse, N.Y., stopping along the way in Albany to stretch her legs, learning from a newspaper there that the picture of Semple trying to get her number during the race had made her a celebrity.

“It changed my life,” she said. “When that official tried to pull me out of the race, I decided I was going to finish, even if I had to crawl, and I was going to work to try to give other women the opportunity to do this. . . . I created clubs, events, press conferences.”

The change was more of an evolution. Too scared to return, she didn’t run Boston again until 1970, still as an unofficial participant but with a place at the starting line and almost an hour faster to the finish.

In 1972, women ran officially for the first time, with Nina Kuscsik winning.

Semple’s memory of that April morning in 1967 was long, though.

“In ‘72, I finished third, and the trophy was broken,” Switzer said. “They said they would replace it, but when Jock handed me my trophy, he said, ‘I’ve been mad at you for five years. You deserve a broken trophy.’ I kept it broken.”

Peace was made, though. A year later, at the starting line, Semple threw his arm around Switzer’s shoulder, turned her toward a camera and said, “C’mon, lass, let’s get a bit o’ notoriety.” The picture, which ran in newspapers the next day, was captioned in one: “The End of an Era.”

Gibb had gone back to San Diego in 1967, returned to Boston to run in ‘68, still at the post, still waiting for the bus, still running as unobtrusively as possible. Others could make the statements. She just wanted to run--not compete, run.

“Kathy Switzer was going around telling everyone she was the first woman to run the Boston Marathon, and I didn’t know this until the ‘70s, when I saw it on TV,” she said. “I guess I was naive. I’m just not into militant feminism.

“They were going to lower the barriers, but when Kathrine Switzer pulled this thing with the fraudulent number, the situation seemed to polarize. That’s not my style.”

They have talked frequently since, and Switzer has written about Gibb and done television segments on her. She acknowledges Gibb as the first woman to run the race.

Gibb spends part of her year in Fallbrook, Mass., with a law practice just big enough to support herself, her 19-year-old son Leif and her art. The rest of the year is spent in Santa Fe, San Diego and San Francisco, showing and selling the sculptures of athletes and dancers.

Gibb ran Boston twice in the ‘80s, officially, with a qualifying time from the New York Marathon.

Switzer has run Boston eight times and spends part of her year in suburban Washington, the rest in New Zealand. She takes a week every year to help with KCOP-TV’s coverage of the Los Angeles Marathon.

She was in Los Angeles in 1984 to work with ABC and see work that began in 1967 in Boston come to fruition in the first Olympic marathon for women.

Joan Benoit won in 2:24:52, but the lingering picture from that race is of Gabriela Andersen-Schiess, accompanied by doctors as she lurched around the track at the Coliseum, staggering for 5 minutes 44 seconds before falling across the finish line.

“When we fought so hard and got the women’s marathon into the Olympic Games . . . and Gabriela Andersen-Schiess looked so bad coming in and television sensationalized it and (The Times) had a two-page spread, I thought this was going to be 1928 all over again,” Switzer said.

“But I guess people realized that we had come so far, we had the right to sweat and the right to know our bodies, so they let us run.”

And earn money and stand alongside men at the finish line. No more jumping from the bushes. This year, the Boston Marathon logo features a woman running.

The bus has come.