First female Boston Marathon runner Bobbi Gibb on starting a running revolution: “We knew the world was never going to be the same”

As far back as Roberta 'Bobbi' Gibb can remember she always loved running.

From the very moment she inched up onto her feet just shy of her first birthday to breezing through local forests with dogs alongside her years later, the movement felt as natural to her as the world itself.

“I just had this sense of joy and I just ran as fast as my little legs could carry me,” the 80-year-old American tells Olympics.com podcast, looking back.

When her friends began to outgrow the childish fun of chasing each other around and playing pretend, she never stopped despite her mother’s pleas.

“‘How do you expect to find a husband running the woods with the dogs?’” Gibb says her parents would cry out as they tried to dissuade her. But she refused to listen.

“In the woods, I could be myself. I could run.”

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Bobbi Gibb: Discovering the Boston Marathon

It wasn’t until she was 21 that Gibb learned for the first time what a marathon was.

Knowing how much she enjoyed running, the father of one of her high school friends suggested Gibb go and watch the Boston Marathon to see elite runners in action. And as soon as she laid eyes on the men running past, her imagination changed forever.

“I saw these people running and I wasn’t thinking men or women, strangely enough. I just saw these people running. I said, wow, this is incredible. They’re so strong, so silent, so enduring.

“It’s something basic about being human is being lost in this modern world, and here is this tribe of people running by and that’s my tribe. I belong there. I want to be part of this. It was like this inner decision. I want to be part of this.

“I had never heard of the Boston Athletic Association or the Amateur Athletic Union. I didn't even know these people had numbers. I just wanted to be part of this incredible phenomenon: these people running.”

Resolving to one day race alongside them, Gibb immediately began to train, but with no real running movement at the time to speak of and little research to study she had no idea how.

She began first by clocking in a mile. Then her boyfriend at the time began driving her on his motorcycle further and further away from his home before leaving to her run back: "We'd often get up to eight miles," she recalls.

When her parents went on a sabbatical Gibb decided to make the most of the moment to go on her own transcontinental trip across the United States in her father’s campervan. With a malamute puppy for company, for the following two years, she ran.

She ran across the plains, she ran up the Rocky Mountains, she ran past the Pacific Ocean and when she wasn’t running, she slept under the stars turning on life’s big questions that came to her as she travelled.

"It was an amazing way to train for the marathon."

‘Women are not physiologically able to run marathons'

After settling in California, Gibb decided she was then ready to race.

Learning from a friend that she needed to apply for a number in order to run, she wrote a letter to the Boston Athletic Association asking if she could participate. The response that followed blew her away.

“I got a letter from Will Cloney and it said ‘Women are not physiologically able to run marathons. We can’t take the medical liability. And furthermore, it’s a men’s division race for which women are not qualified. He said the longest accredited race for a woman is a mile and a half.”

Shocked at what she had read, and knowing that she could, and had often, run more than a mile and a half Gibb knew at that moment, she needed to race now more than ever.

“I realised if I could show that this false belief about women was wrong, I could throw into question all the other false beliefs that have been used for centuries to keep women locked in this little box. My running took on this sort of social significance. I was going to change the way people thought about women. I was going to change the social consciousness about women.

“Now, I had this mission.”

Bobbi Gibb: "It’s going to set women free"

Set in her mind that she was going to run, Gibb began the journey from California back to Boston.

Over the course of several bus rides, she reflected on the hurdles that awaited her beginning first with her own parents. Having decided not to tell them of her plans until she arrived in Massachusetts the day before the race, Gibb remembers their shock at her announcement:

“My dad had slammed out of the house, ‘Now let’s hear no more about this marathon stuff.’

“My mother’s there and I said, Mum, you’ve got to drive me. I’ve trained for two years for this. Don’t you see? It’s going to set women free.’

“My mother had spent almost my entire adult life trying to get me to conform to the same deadening norms that had kept her so miserable for my god. She said, ‘You’re not going to survive in this world if you keep acting like this.’”

After some insisting and a lot of persuading, Gibb finally managed to get her mother to agree to drive her to the start of the race. But after she arrived in Hopkinton, she quickly realised joining the marathon wouldn’t be as easy as she first thought.

Facing swelling fears of being arrested, officials throwing her out and even the race runners turning against her, Gibb hid in a clump of bushes as near to the race start as she could find.

Just after noon the race gun fired and after waiting for around half the pack to pass, Gibb then joined the race.

Dressed in her brother’s Bermuda shorts and a blue hooded sweatshirt with a black tank top bathing suit underneath, it didn’t take the other runners long to figure out that Gibb was a woman.

But her anxiety that they might reject her for what she was trying to achieve was quickly assuaged when they reassured her that they would protect her if anyone came to take her off the course.

“They were protective,” Gibb remembers. “We were friends. We were running this thing together and they loved it. They absolutely loved it.”

Gibb’s fellow runners weren’t the only ones that spotted she was in the race defying expectations.

A local radio station had seen her on the road and word quickly began to spread of her efforts. When Gibb ran past Wellesley College, a women-only college, she was overwhelmed by their reaction.

“The women were going crazy. They were jumping and screaming and jumping up and down. One woman, an older woman with a bunch of kids around, she was going ‘Ava Maria! Ava Maria!’ I go by and there are tears running down her face. And I could feel tears on my own face.

“At the moment we knew the world was never going to be the same. There’s no going back. We aren’t going back to the way things were. This is something new. This is going to change the way things are.”

Bobbi Gibb: Changing the Boston Marathon forever

Tiptoeing to the finish line having been hampered by blisters triggered by the men’s running shoes she had worn, Gibb was greeted by eruptions of cheers.

The then Governor of Massachusetts shook her hand as the press swarmed around her eager to snap the woman that had just made history as the first-ever to run the Boston Marathon.

Her feat made headlines around the world with some still refusing to believe she had genuinely completed the race. But to Gibb, it didn't matter.

Her actions had thrown into doubt previously held convictions; it had fundamentally changed the way people thought about women, which is all she had wanted.

In the autumn of 1971, thoughts became action. The Amateur Athletics Union announced it was permitting its sanctioned marathon members to allow women to enter meaning in the spring of 1972, the Boston Marathon had its first female official champion.

For Gibb, who ran the race unofficially again in 1967 and 1968, the shift indicated an important moment for women’s equality both in running, and outside it.

“I do think it was a pivotal event in changing the way people thought about women and in igniting the next wave of women’s movement,” Gibb says.

“If a shapely blonde housewife can run a marathon, so can you, and so can anyone. At least, for the first time, people started thinking maybe I can run a marathon. And that was an important step for women on their path to autonomy. If you can run from A to B, you can do just about anything.”

Bobbi Gibb: 'The Girl Who Ran' lives on

In the same spirit of defiance that had compelled her to keep running when everyone had told her not to, Gibb continued to push the limits in other areas of her life.

After making history she completed her degree, applied to medical school (where she was rejected on the grounds that she was ‘too pretty’), went to law school and had a son. Her curiosity about the world which had fuelled her mind as she ran led her to pursue neuroscientific research as well as sculpture and design.

To recognise her role in the women’s long-distance running revolution Gibb was commissioned to create a life-size statue of herself. The sculpture, titled “The Girl Who Ran” now stands proudly on the corner of Main Street and Hayden Rowe in Boston, just 70m ahead of the official marathon start line.

Even today, Gibb continues to run.

"An hour a day keeps the doctor away,” she chimes with a smile.

The magic she finds in the movement is still something she cherishes and hopes people can also are able to do, whether they elite runners or simply amateurs.

"I think one thing is to open your eyes, your mind and your heart so that you realise that you're living in this incredible miracle and running is one way of experiencing it physically.

"Be grateful that you have this incredible body. Be grateful that you have an earth to run on and other people to run with. This idea of wonder and gratitude for life I think is fundamental."