A WAVE OF WOMEN

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, June 27, 1998—All 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-alive-and-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.

“It 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 in air. Color has 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 a new 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 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. I am 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 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, but it’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 born, and although she can no longer be an elite competitor. She is admired for her history of creating opportunity for women; but she is a role model now as a high-profile 51-year-old who keeps in shape by running four or five times a week through a frenetically busy and mobile schedule, who lays down her briefcase and microphone to run the race with other mid-pack women.

That counts more now than winning. Switzer says, “Their role models are no longer Joan Benoit-Samuelson and Frank Shorter, even though their names will always be revered. Now they look to Oprah Winfrey and Al Gore—famous and incredibly busy people who still made the time to train for a marathon, and completed it. The finish line doesn’t matter. It’s a case of ‘If Oprah can do it, I can do it. If fitness mattered that much to her, it should matter for me.'”

So for this new generation, which includes all age groups, the emphasis is on participation, not on pushing through personal records in a competitive career. That’s why the distances in the Global Women’s Circuit have to be attainable. Avon has a 10K run and 5K walk at each event, not marathons anymore. They provide advice on the very beginner’s basics of exercise: shoes, nutrition, sleep, organizing your time, how to begin, and above all answering the question “Why do it?”

Twenty years ago, women’s running was a movement of women catching up with men, about being combative. Now it’s part of a rise in consciousness about health and lifestyle, among both women and men. And women are leading it.

I didn’t only swan about Avon and blob out in front of the World Cup. I worked with circuit announcer Sharon Barbano to identify and call the names of as many finishers as we could (never as simple as it might seem).

Baltimore winner Alicia Harvey had an international career as a track runner (as Alicia Hill), but what mattered more was her combination of lissome fitness with graciousness and warmth. It was the fit woman, again, they applauded, more than the winning athlete.

There was equal acclamation for other finishers—for 80-year-old Hedy Marque (whose time of 62:53 is remarkable by any standard), and for the many Avon sales representatives who walked and ran. One of the best receptions was for Avon’s Director of Sports Marketing, Carolyn Aishton, another busy and fit woman, who ran the full 10K, rather as if Juan Antonio Samaranch should finish the Olympic Marathon.

So Sharon and I peered through binoculars at flapping numbers and fumbled through lists on elusive curling sheets of paper, and called the names. It matters. That public moment—your name announced or in print, the finish-line photo, the few seconds when a crowd is cheering for you—is one big reason why many of us run races instead of jogging another day in solitude round our suburb. There is nothing vainglorious or unusual about that. Humans are social animals, and to win a place in the consciousness of others gives meaning to any activity. That applies to music, religious worship, study, playing football, or cooking. On which thought I left Switzer to her fans and went off to have breakfast and watch Italy vs. Norway.

TORONTO, CANADA, July 5, 1998

The same was true as we called another 1,000 women across the finish line in Toronto a week later, despite the cultural differences those few hundred miles bring.

The Canada stop on the Avon Global Circuit was just as impeccably efficient and professional as Baltimore was in its operation and presentation. There was music, a bagpiper to lead the runners to the start, a professional broadcaster (Paul Kennedy) and a top marathoner (Olympian Peter Fonseca) as announcers, rousing speeches, start-line aerobics. Yet by comparison with Baltimore it was all—in a word—quieter.

I might even risk saying more “British.” Instead of zestfully swirling in red ripples around the whole start area, here the runners waited in quiet clusters inside Commerce Court. They trickled out after the bagpiper as if they had not quite noticed him. Their aerobic stretches were whoop-free. I’m familiar with these cultural differences in my international travels on the road of running. A month earlier I was an announcer at a top New Zealand event, the Christchurch Marathon. Try getting low-key Kiwis to do aerobics or go whoop. They even stay taciturn doing bungee jumps.

As so often, in Toronto the course gave character to the race. Baltimore had taken the runners through a key moment of American history with the loop through Fort McHenry. The Toronto course toured the downtown in a way you could never do with traffic on the streets. From Wellington Street, across Yonge, down to the Harborfront (world famous for its literary festival), past the Archway of the Great Expo, and back up to Wellington—a big circle, in effect, around Toronto Tower. No Canadian could ask for a more privileged route. I sometimes wonder if runners know how many thousands of hours have to go into negotiations and planning to secure such a course.

The way around it was led by Elizabeth Carmichael of North York, winning her second 10K of the weekend in a commanding 35:55. Even at this late date in the history of women’s running it’s worth pausing over that word “commanding,” and the case for women-only races. Sometimes it is seen as reverse discrimination. But the reality is that Elizabeth Carmichael’s race could never have been called commanding if she had run it surrounded by minor male runners. For all the emphasis on lifestyle and health, Avon still aspires to create incentive and give support for rising competitors. Every local winner (and masters winner and first Avon repre-

sentative) are funded to go to the National Championship—this year on November 8 in Chicago.

Since all the Avon races are women-only, every winner has had to take the burden of being in front, of tactics and breaking and leading, of being 1st overall, not 21st among men. To win as a long-distance runner, you have to know how to be lonely. And how to be commanding. Those are not easy responsibilities, but they go along with the opportunity to compete.

Recently in a collection of old posters, I came across one for a rural sports festival in Wiltshire, England, in 1826. There were two events for women: “Girls running for smocks” and “Old women running for a pound of tea.” They are advertised alongside “Hunting a pig with a soaped tail” and “Jumping in sacks for a cheese.”

Another poster, from Alton, Hampshire, in 1835, advertised the “women’s smock race” as the intermission entertainment during a program of horse races, a glimpse of ankles, I suppose, to provide relief from the serious sport of horses.

So things do change. In 1998 big races around the world are reporting that their women’s entries are steadily overtaking the men’s. The recent Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon was one of the first megaraces where women were in the majority. The Avon circuit looks to be riding or creating a new wave, a health and fitness message taking running deeper into society than ever before.