Spring is a time of marathons. It began with that of Rome on previous Sunday and now there are London, Paris, Boston, Berlin, Prague to name just a few. It’s a sport which now gathers hundreds of thousands of practitioners and individual practice is certainly more prevalent among adults. What attracts people to run, probably the ease of access, have friends who already run and do it with them, the opportunity to run outdoors and inside parks, to run for as long as you want, alternating it with the walk and then stretch at pleasure the time, to choose when to do it depending on the free time. Another interesting aspect is that it is a sport, running, much practiced by women. It seems trivial to mention it but instead it was not always possible. In fact Kathrine Switzer (USA) was the first woman to run and finish a marathon (Boston, 1967), five years before the official acceptance of women. She participated in the race as K.V. Switzer, so the organizers could not discover that it was a woman. During the race, she managed to escape from the organizers’ attempt to eliminate it. She ran 35 marathons and won the New York Marathon in 1974.
Listen Switzer talk about her first marathon:
