SHE RUNS: THE HISTORY OF WOMEN IN MARATHONS

There is something quietly revolutionary about a woman running. Not because it should be. Not because putting one foot in front of the other at speed is, in itself, a political act. But because for most of our history as humans, the world looked at us in motion and saw something it needed to stop. And yet, here we are. Still running.

Let’s go back, because the story only makes sense if you understand how far back the starting line for women was compared to our male counterparts.

For decades (centuries, really) women were told their bodies were simply not built for it. Not for distance, not for endurance, not for the kind of effort that leaves you breathless and brilliant and completely undone.

Doctors warned that it would damage a woman's reproductive organs. Scientists published papers claiming women who exerted themselves risked their very femininity. The medical establishment, populated almost exclusively by men, looked at the female body and decided, with remarkable confidence, that it was essentially decorative. It would almost be funny if it hadn't caused so much damage.

Women were barred from Olympic track events until 1928. They couldn't officially enter the Boston Marathon until 1972 – 1972, mind you, a year after the voting age in the UK was already firmly 18. A year when we had a woman serving as Education Secretary. The world was moving, in many ways, and yet the open road remained firmly...closed.

The reasons given were never really about physiology, of course. They were about control. About who gets to take up space. About who is allowed to be seen trying, straining, suffering, triumphing. Running, particularly distance running, strips everything back. There is nowhere to hide at mile 20. You are exactly who you are. And for a very long time, those in charge of sport decided that women being exactly who they are, out in public, was simply too much. Did that stop us? Of course not. We – women – ran anyway. And that's the part of this story that makes your chest tighten with something like awe.

Roberta Gibb, denied entry to the 1966 Boston Marathon by organisers who told her women were "physiologically incapable" of running 26.2 miles, hid in the bushes at the start line and ran the whole thing in secret. She finished in under three and a half hours. The year after, Kathrine Switzer registered under her initials, toed the line officially, and when a race official physically tried to drag her off the course, her running companion shoved him aside and she kept going. She didn't run that race to make a statement. She ran it because she wanted to run it. The statement was made for her by everyone who tried to stop her.

Think about what that takes. Not just the physical endurance – though God knows that's enough – but the sheer bloody-mindedness of showing up somewhere you've been told you don't belong and doing the thing anyway. Not performing rebellion. Nothing trying to change the world. Just running.

That spirit didn't belong only to the pioneers with their names in the history books. It belonged to every woman who laced up her trainers in the 1960s and 70s and jogged down her street while neighbours peered from behind curtains. Every woman who ran through catcalls and questions and people asking where her husband was. Every woman who was told she was too old, too big, too slow, too much, or not enough – and ran regardless. All paved the way for bigger things to come. Bigger wins. And when those came, they were nothing short of extraordinary.

Grete Waitz crossed the finish line of the 1979 New York City Marathon having just become the first woman in history to run a marathon in under two and a half hours. She'd broken the world record without even knowing what she was capable of, because nobody had ever let her find out before. Five years later, Joan Benoit Samuelson won the first ever women's Olympic marathon in Los Angeles – an event that only existed because women had fought, loudly and persistently, for the right to compete over that distance. When she came into the stadium, the crowd erupted. She'd won a race that, a decade earlier, women weren't even allowed to enter.

And in 2023, Tigist Assefa ran the Berlin Marathon in 2:11:53. Let that sit for a moment. Two hours, eleven minutes, fifty-three seconds. For 26.2 miles. A time so extraordinary that the running world had to pause and recalibrate its understanding of what the female body – could do.

Progress, when you look at it like this, is breathtaking. Not just in world records. In everything. Because here is what happened alongside those elite achievements: ordinary women of all ages and all backgrounds fell in love with running.

What this has created is something the history books can’t fully capture – a community. Women's running groups that meet before dawn in the dark and cold because that's the only window in a day. Running clubs where friendships are formed over miles that might have taken years to forge over coffee. WhatsApp groups full of split times and blister recommendations and the kind of raw, unguarded support that women give each other when they're sweaty and tired and honest.

There’s a specific kind of freedom in running that is perhaps particularly meaningful for women. It is time that belongs entirely to you. Nobody needs anything from you for those 30 minutes or three hours. You are not what society defines you as – you are just a body in motion, breathing hard, going somewhere. That might sound small. It is not small at all.

And, this International Women's Day, this is what I want to celebrate: the distance we've covered.

Not just the literal miles – but the distance from a world in which a woman running a marathon was considered medically dangerous, to a world in which a woman running a marathon is considered an act entirely, beautifully, unremarkably normal.

We owe that distance to the women who hid in bushes and ran anyway. To the women who trained in secret and competed in disguise. To the women who organised and campaigned and argued and petitioned until the roads finally opened. To the women who laced up and went out and simply refused to be stopped.

And we owe it – let's be honest about this – to every woman who has ever pulled on a pair of trainers for the first time and thought, I wonder if I can. The world once had a very certain answer to that question. She went ahead and found her own.

So if you're reading this and you run: don’t stop. And if you're reading this and you've ever wanted to: start – do it! You are not and never will be too slow, too old, too anything. You are continuing something that women have been doing in the face of everything that tried to stop them.

You are part of a very long, very brilliant story. And we’re nowhere near the finish line.