It’s within living memory that women were banned from running marathons. Our bodies were deemed not strong enough and we’d hurt ourselves and, God forbid, maybe even mess up our reproductive system. As women always knew and the world has now acknowledged, this is nonsense that served only to segregate men and women and keep marathon running the preserve of ‘big strong men’.


The trailblaizers of women’s marathon running: Roberta Gibb ran Boston marathon unofficially three times; Katherine Switzer who famously ran Boston marathon with a number but had to battle officials who ran onto the course to physically try to remove her from the race; and Stamata Revithi (AKA Melopomene) who apparently ran alongside the first marathon of the modern Olympics, were after one thing – the right to run just like men.


Nina Kuscsik was the first female winner of the Boston Marathon when women were finally allowed to take part in 1972. Her winning time for the 1972 New York City Marathon was on the slow side as the women had a sit-down strike for ten minutes after the gun went off to protest women’s inequality in marathon running. It was another 12 years before Joan Benoit Samuelson became the first woman to win an Olympic marathon gold medal when women were finally allowed to run the 26.2 mile race in the 1984 games.


Given the exclusion of women from the sport of marathon running for so long, it’s no surprise that a gap of 12 minutes separates the men’s and women’s world records. When the Olympics come round or one of the top men in the world line up to compete in Berlin or London (fast world-record courses) all the talk is of when a man will break the 2-hour barrier for the marathon.


A much more pertinent question is when women will close the gap on the men’s record. Because, unlike sprinting where men’s physiological advantage when it comes to strength and size give them a head start, marathon running is more of an even playing field. In fact, some evidence suggests that women’s ability to tolerate suffering and a ‘window’ after pregnancy when women seem to be able to run much better, might even work in our advantage.


So, it saddened and angered me when the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) decided that only races run by women in a single-sex environment should be allowed to stand as world records. This meant that Paula Radcliffe’s 15min 25sec record set while racing alongside male athletes in London in 2003 was no longer regarded as the women’s world record but instead become a “world best”. As Christopher McDougall wrote in The Guardian “Radcliffe has committed the twin sins of being good and a woman.”


Instead Radcliffe’s time of 2:17:42 became the official world record – a move, not only backwards on the clock, but also to an era that we thought had been put behind us. Radcliffe stated in an interview with Runners’ World that it hadn’t been her choice to use a pacer when she set her world record but that of the race organisers, and furthermore she’d deliberately run alongside the pacer, never behind him.


But had she wanted to use a pacer, as the fastest woman in the world with only men faster than her – shouldn’t she be allowed to use a male pacer? Is using a pacer of a different sex any different than using a pacer of the same sex? Given the headstart that men have had when it comes to running marathons, the gap between men and women won’t be closing any time soon unless we can all run together.

UPDATE: Since this post was first written the IAAF decided to let Radcliffe’s world record stand, but from 2012 only times run in a all-female environment will count as valid for world record classification.