When Joan Benoit Samuelson was a high school track athlete in the mid-1970s, the longest competitive race available to girls was the mile. And that event didn’t become an option until Samuelson was a junior. Before that, she settled for winning 880-meter races.
“The fear was a girl or woman couldn’t run long distances and still bear children,” said Samuelson, 41. “Eighty-five thousand miles and two children later, I am still running.”
Samuelson’s comments produced both laughter and applause at last week’s reunion luncheon of women who ran in Avon-sponsored road races in the early 1980s. The lunch recalled old times and celebrated the 1998 return of the Avon Running Global Women’s Circuit, which staged its national championship 10-kilometer race in Morton Grove last Sunday. These female competitors knew plenty about running through limiting stereotypes as if they were tapes stretched across the finish line.
“Running cured me of arthritis, bursitis and all of my aches and pains,” said Anne Clark, an 89-year-old Chicagoan who took up running in her 60s when Avon started its all-female running circuit. Because of financial difficulties and restructuring, Avon stopped its support in 1985. But Clark kept going.
“I still run a bit each day and enter some 5K races,” she explained. “I did my last marathon at 81 years old in just under six hours. I will never go through such torture again. My knees were wobbling.”
Samuelson credited Avon’s sponsorship for calling International Olympic Committee attention to the women’s marathon as a potential track event at the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles. Samuelson was especially grateful because she won that inaugural gold medal. She followed the feat about a year later by using the Chicago Marathon course in 1985 to set the American women’s record of 2:21 that still stands.
Samuelson still runs competitively — her time of 2:41 placed her as the second American and 12th overall among women at the New York City Marathon earlier this month — but her commitment these days is more about inner self than shoe endorsement deals.
“Running is part of who I am,” she explained after the luncheon’s formal program ended. “It is part of my constitution. I wouldn’t care much if someone said I couldn’t race again, but I don’t know what I would do with myself if I was told I couldn’t run another step altogether.”
Samuelson appeared serene, almost soothing in conversation.
“I use my daily runs (after her grade-schoolers head off for the day, totaling about 50 to 60 miles weekly) to prioritize life and let off some emotional steam and stress. I run for my being. It is my form of meditation.”
Grete Waitz finished second to Samuelson at the 1984 Olympics. She won the first women’s marathon world championship in 1983 and crossed the finish line as the first woman nine times in New York. The Norwegian is beloved in running circles all over the world, no more so than in her own country, where some 45,000 female participants enter an annual “Grete’s Run” event in Oslo.
“About six year ago I convinced my mother to participate in the walk portion of the event,” said Waitz, who founded the race in 1984, drawing 3,000 women that first year. “My mother was 65 at the time and never owned a pair of sneakers in her life. She agreed to do it. Her participation inspired so many more women to enter. It just took off.”
Waitz attended all 11 of the Avon events in the U.S. this year. She said meeting women face-to-face is the best way to convince them fitness accommodates even the latest of comers.
“I can’t tell you the number of women who walked the 5K this year and have promised themselves to do the 10K next year.”
At last weekend’s race, about 40 percent of the nearly 2,000 participants were first-timers. The beginners were predominantly women in their 40s and 50s, mimicking a trend at races throughout the Chicago area this year.
The 45-year-old Waitz would prefer to run every day but tries “to limit myself to five times a week because I still want to be running at 65.” Kathrine Switzer, the 1974 women’s winner of the New York City Marathon and longtime broadcaster in the sport, said she fits in four runs every week, “treating myself to one day of an hour or more.”
“Treat” and “one hour of running” wouldn’t fit in the same sentence for many people. Switzer, who is program director of the reborn Avon circuit, said running is her way of taking control of personal health. She recommends physical activity to the alternative of feeling victimized by not having enough time in one’s day.
“It is astonishing what 30 minutes of aerobic exercise three to four times per week can do for your self-esteem and body,” said Switzer, 51, who details the benefits in a new book, “Running and Walking for Women Over 40: The Road to Sanity and Vanity (St. Martin’s Griffin). “The extra time I take on a longer run is for creative problem solving. It’s a wonderful cure for writer’s block.”
