The Returning Runner

Act 11 – The gender imbalance

I digress… I promised an injury blog this week but I’ve talked enough about injuries for a while so going down a different path…

Let’s go back in time to the mid-1960’s and imagine you are a female runner getting ready for a big race. You’ve done all the right things – your hair is cropped short to fit under a cap, you are wearing a loose-fitting sweat top to hide your breasts, and you entered with a pseudonym to hide your gender and avoid being caught and thrown out. This isn’t fiction – most of the races banned female runners until the early to mid-1970s! Kathryn Switzer was physically thrown out of the Boston Marathon in 1967 when she tried to compete. It wasn’t until 1972 that women were officially allowed to enter Boston and represented by a field of 8 females. I’m proud to say that my mom, Donna Gookin, was a pioneer women’s runner in southern California.

But what happened after that is almost as crazy as banning women to begin with. Following the 1970’s, the ratio of women to men steadily increased from zero until around 2010 when race entries were frequently 2:1(females to males)! It was a quirky thing to check and I frequently found the ratio for large races that I was in to be almost exactly that. For example, the 2016 Sacramento Shamrock ½ Marathon had 66% women and 34% men.  And…I was all set to rant about that. Men have a shorter lifespan (6 years shorter in the US per the CDC) so men should have more reason to get out there and exercise! It seemed to me that men had developed a perception that it was a cowardly thing to be running (of course for racing the opposite is true – really kind of an aggressive hunt and kill mentality). But, in the last few years it seems that things have finally come into balance in the US (at least in my neck of the woods). This year’s Sacramento Shamrock ½ marathon was 53% female and 47% male.

So… questions for you: 1) Why do you think there have been such large swings in gender participation in distance running? 2) Are things near equilibrium in the races / training groups you participate in or markedly different?

Seriously, I’m curious! Respond with your input at using the connect mini-form located the bottom of my home page.

Photo: Donna Gookin (center) and team (Eileen Waters, Carolyn McDonald, Nicki Hobson, Betty Wake, Nadia Garcia, Patty Hurl, Gail Hannah),1974ish

You know we're goin' to Surf City, gonna have some fun
Ya, we're goin' to Surf City, cause it's two to one
You know we're goin' to Surf City, gonna have some fun, now
Two girls for every boy – Jan and Dean