Running with Sherman: How a Rescue Donkey Inspired a Rag-tag Gang of Runners to Enter the Craziest Race in America

by Christopher McDougall

Hold on now, Edna demanded of the miners and muckers. Why can’t women run? The miners and muckers looked at one another and shrugged. Who said they can’t? Well, how about the International Olympic Committee, the Amateur Athletic Union, and the American Medical Association? For decades after 1949, physicians were still spouting the theory that too much exertion would make a woman’s uterus and ovaries shake loose. Or explode: As recently as 2010, the president of the International Ski Federation was explaining that ski jumping was “not appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view” because, of course, it was well known that the uterus could “burst” upon landing. Naturally, the ladies couldn’t be trusted to take care of their own organs, so men stepped in. Until 1980, women were banned from any Olympic track event longer than 800 meters: not a 10K, not a 5K, but a 0.8K—less than half a mile. Meanwhile, in Boston, Running While Female was literally a crime: any woman who dared attempt the Boston Marathon in the 1960s was subject to arrest by the cops or, if your dad was in charge, a beating. “If that girl were my daughter, I would spank her,” race director Will Cloney famously snarled after Kathrine Switzer finagled her way onto the course in 1967.