Debunking the Myth of the Woman Runner

As a child, I ran for the blue ribbons. I loved those tiny blue ribbons that some PTA mom probably stapled to a little square of cardboard that said “Lockwood Elementary Track and Field.” I earned them by outsprinting other small children on our school’s dirt playfield in suburban Seattle. I ran to beat my brothers from the house to the car door to claim the front seat. I ran to chase my friends around the playground. In ninth grade, I ran because my best friend joined the school cross-country team, so I did too. I didn’t win any blue ribbons, but I still loved the competition and learning the tactics of running a long race. As an adult, I’ve run for all kinds of reasons: to exercise, to clear my head, to work off some frustration or excess energy, to train for a race.

Over time, I found other ways to harness that “blue ribbon” feeling: getting a good grade, writing a paper that made me think in a new way, publishing an article that people wanted to read and talk about. As a journalist, I began writing about women in sports because I had so many questions: Why couldn’t women cyclists ride as far in competition as men? Why do men compete in the decathlon but women only get the heptathlon? Why was ski jumping not a women’s Olympic sport until the 21st century? Why was I seen as “sporty” for being a casual runner and playing a few sports when that was simply expected of my brothers? Why did my own mother, an independent and fearless soul, often exercise by going for long walks while my dad ran marathons, joined adult sports leagues, and coached my soccer team? I couldn’t quit asking “why.”

During research and interviews to answer these questions for various articles over the years, I was often led to one particular historic moment: the women’s 800-meter race in the 1928 Olympics. Women were discouraged, and often disallowed, from running long distances and participating in other sports that might be considered too “taxing” for them because of this supposedly disastrous occurrence. “Eleven wretched women, five of whom dropped out before the finish, while five collapsed after reaching the tape,” went the coverage of the event in Harper’s. The New York Times reported that “six out of the nine runners were completely exhausted and fell headlong on the ground. Several had to be carried off the track.”

But the fact that these outrageous quotes about a race from nearly a century ago kept showing up in contemporary publications and yet weren’t even aligned with the facts of the event—there were nine women in the final race and none had to be carried off the track—seemed like a thread in need of tugging. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I read every mention of the race I could find in newspaper and magazine archives. I tracked down academic papers and scholars who questioned the veracity of the reporting, and then I found a video of the race and watched it endlessly. It was incomplete, but I didn’t see any runners pass out, convulse, or lose consciousness. In fact, they all finished the race in record time. Many of them could be seen smiling and walking around after the race in the silent footage.

Learning how contentious the truth about the race was opened more questions for me: If we’ve been lied to about this, what else have we been lied to about? So many things. Running is only for white women. Never mind, it’s only for Black women. Women who run too far won’t be able to have children. Women who have children won’t be able to run again. Women’s world records can’t be kept in the mile. The woman who ran that marathon wasn’t running a marathon, she merely “covered the same route while the race was in progress.” Losing your period is just what happens to athletes; they become mannish. Women with high testosterone aren’t real women at all. Women will never be as fast as men—no way, nohow.

To set the record straight, I wrote a book about women in running. Over the past six years researching and writing it, I wanted so badly to ask these runners of yore what the truth was. Why they ran, and what they thought about the lies they grew up with. Of course, many of the women in my book died long before they were seen as important enough to ask. But sometimes I was able to find them, or the truths they left behind.

I wrote a letter to an address I found for the son of the only American woman in the final of that infamous 1928 800-meter race, Florence MacDonald. I yearned to know what she’d been like, what had brought her from a Scottish Highland Games festival in Roxbury, Massachusetts, to the Amsterdam Olympics in 1928. As it turned out, there wasn’t much information to gain. She’d left no letters, no diaries. Once he came along, her son told me, his mother wasn’t a runner anymore and didn’t really talk about her days as an athlete.

But someone else had asked her about that hotly contested race, I would discover. Two women historians in the United Kingdom found out that MacDonald was still alive in 2001. They visited her in her Florida nursing home to ask what had really happened. She was 92 years old. When I learned this, I flew to England to go to their home to watch the 22-year-old interview footage myself. “The newspapers said everyone collapsed?” The question was posed to her. MacDonald sits up straight: “That’s not true! They could have run another race. It seems to me that we were as fresh when we finished as we were when we started. ... This collapsing business? That was a lot of nonsense.”

One myth down. Countless more to go.

Maggie Mertens ’09 is the author of Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women (Algonquin Books, 2024).