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The 1st Woman to run the Boston Marathon -- 50th anniversary 4/13/2016 1:52:55 PM
A few months after I moved to Toronto in 2007, I received an email from my high school sweetheart, whom I hadn't been in touch with since Christmas, 1960. We've exchanged emails, talked on the phone, and visited together a few times, most recently in the San Diego area at the beginning of this year.
Bobbi Lou has achieved quite a bit in the years since i knew her when we were both teenagers. You may have heard of her, since she is the first woman to run the Boston Marathon from start to finish and may have been one of the first women ever to run such a long distance.
As a student of biology and philosophy, she had a serious purpose for taking on such a big challenge. She wanted to overcome the discouragement that came her way and to disprove negative voices that said a woman's body wasn't capable of running 26.2 miles. She made her point in April, 1966, surely one of the first gestures in what has become the thriving women's movement.
Now, next month will mark the 50th anniversary of her landmark accomplishment. She's received inquiries from print journalists and folks from TV and radio and will probably get more attention.
I'm glad that notice is coming her way because her story offers encouragement not only to runners and supporters of the women's movement but to everyone who needs to climb a mountain to reach a major goal. A determined person can usually get past any number of obstacles and dodge a legion of naysayers. That's a feature of life -- if we want a good thing badly enough we can often get what we're looking for, but we must persist and persevere.
Without professional coaching or the advice of experts, Bobbi Lou trained rigorously both in New England and as she travelled across the United States with a malamute canine companion. She wrote about her experiences in a memoir that also includes reflections based on her training in biology and philosophy. She calls it Wind in the Fire: A Personal Journey. It's available on amazon kindle by clicking this link.:The Wind in the Fire. I hope you'll take a look at it.
Here are a few sentences she wrote about getting ready to sleep outdoors in Nebraska: "Far above, subtle stars quiver and disappear when I look at them. Deep blue evaporates from the day sky revealing volumes of darkness. Specks of burning light appear as the stars flicker on. It takes my breath away as I realize this unutterably beautiful earth is my home. A milky swath, looking like a celestial road that arches overhead, is really the disc of my own galaxy."
Now, in addition to her other accomplishments, Bobbi Lou is also a painter and sculptor. A group of her supporters is currently raising funds to enable her to create one or more life-sized sculptures of runners to place near the start of the Boston Marathon route. I surely hope that her admirers can carry out their plans.
