On THE Road

WITH Roger Robinson

A WAVE OF WOMEN

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, June 27, 1998—AIl over the green field were women in red. Meeting, mingling, laughing, leaping to the pulse of the music and the chant of the aerobics leader, all energy, all colors, but mainly that bright good-to-be-aliveand-a-woman red of Avon Running.

They moved in ripples of red in the morning sun, around the colored tents and banners, under the bobbling balloons of the start and finish archways, frisking around the aerobics platform, drifting in swirls of scarlet around the green arena.

“Tt looks as if the Red Army just landed,” I muttered to a friend among the organizers, since I hadn’t yet had my breakfast; but even morning hunger could not diminish the sheer festive vitality of the scene.

We were on Rauch Field, on the Baltimore waterfront, just down the harbor from Fort McHenry, now a park through which the 10K race would pass about 30 minutes from now. It was over almost this exact spot, I reflected in a quiet moment, that Francis Scott Key in 1814 saw the rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting inair. Colorhas meaning, but its meanings can change. If red here today means energy, freedom, and accomplishment of modern women, instead

of the scarlet of forbidden sin or the lurid glare of war’s desolation, well, so much the better for our society, and all credit to events like this one for contributing to the change.

The Baltimore event was the latest of the eleven 1998 races in the United States in the new Avon Running Global Women’s Circuit. I had better declare my bias up front. My wife Kathrine Switzer is director of the Avon Circuit and does that job brilliantly and generously.

My sense that the prerace scene symbolized a new wave in women’s running, and anew vitality for women in society, could, therefore, be mere marital prejudice. It could even have been induced by two relaxed days in a plush hotel, attending Avon functions and visiting local sights like the grave of Edgar Allen Poe. Or maybe it was only euphoria after watching England beat Colombia to qualify for the last 16 of the World Cup soccer. (With my equal interests in literature and sport, I also noticed with delight that Baltimore has the world’s only

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major sports team to be named after a poem: The Ravens.)

Some facts, therefore. The Avon races in America so far (Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Sacramento, New York, Baltimore, Portland, Oregon, and Hartford, Connecticut, as of this writing), have almost all attracted over a 1,000 entries, some many more, despite being new. More than half of those women are completely new to running, walking, or to any form of trained exercise. In most of these cities, Avon puts on a 10-week series of beginners’ clinics. In Baltimore they planned for 40 or 50 women to show up and got 600. They had to divide them up on different high school tracks and hire local elite runners as mentors. In return the constant message these newcomers give back to Avon is “Thank you for changing my life.”

These are facts, not bias. 1am not the only admirer of the main creator of all this. After the Baltimore race, she was buried in women seeking her autograph or a few minutes’ conversation, and I know all too well how often she has to wake and be on camera at 6:00 A.M.

Worldwide, the picture is even more dramatic. Avon’s races in Chile, the Philippines, and Malaysia have had fields of more than 5,000. Many are women from the poorest of homes. In Kuala Lumpur on August 2, 6,000 women ran, this in a city infamous for heat, humidity, and traffic. A third of the women were Moslem, so they ran or walked with their

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heads wrapped, in accordance with Islamic practice. Those modest and traditional wimples made another symbol for women in our era, very different from the swirling, self-confident new red singlets of the Baltimore start area, but equally potent, equally true.

What does it all mean? In South America and Asia, it probably means what such races meant in the United States 20 years ago when the first Avon Circuit was at its height: opportunity for women for the first time in history to be active on their own personal behalf, outside their traditional family and social roles; an opportunity to say, “This is for me: my time, my body, my race, my choice.”

In the States and Europe, that opportunity is now taken for granted. “There are no barriers to break,” Switzer says. “The younger women are fascinated by my story of being physically attacked in 1967 for running the Boston Marathon, butit’s like ancient history, not a cause that calls them to join the fight. Women are running now not to prove that they have a right to do so or to show that women can compete and excel in sport, as we had to. Now they simply run as part of their lifestyle, trying to stay healthy and positive in a busy, overstressed life. And more and more of them are doing it.”

That, I suppose, is why Switzer keeps her standing as a leader and inspirer even though her moment of notoriety came before many of the women at the Baltimore race were