She'd clipped her hair shorter than she usually wore it, pulled it back and covered her head with a blue hoodie. She dressed in a black bathing suit, her brother's Bermuda shorts and boys' running shoes. "I realized that my run was going to be more than just my personal challenge," she says. Even when the Boston Athletic Association rejected her application to run the Boston Marathon that year, she still showed up. The thought, Gibb says, was that "women are not physiologically able to run a marathon." And she wanted to change that thought. The farthest women could run in the Olympics was 800 meters. At the time, the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), the national ruling body on amateur sports at the time, limited women's races to 1.5 miles. Women didn't really run then, certainly not long distances. It wasn't until she could call family friend Ewing Mitchell - an actor on the cowboy show "Sky King" - to vouch for her that they let her go.įor many, straying into Mexico on a 25-mile run would be the highlight of any training done for or during a marathon.īut this happened to Bobbi Gibb in 1966. United States Border patrol noticed too, and detained her. On the way back, at high tide when she couldn't run along the ocean past barbed wire anymore, she noticed. So to run that long, that engrossed in her mind, was normal.
That wasn't unusual for Gibb, who had previously driven cross-country in her VW bus with her malamute puppy Moot, stopping to run along the way, and to, when she could, sleep out under the stars.
She didn't think much of it when she crossed the border because she didn't really notice - the barbed wire didn't go that far down the beach, and she was lost in thought. She was fascinated with the "silvery white" of that beach after coming from the New England cold and snow. "I was not a competitive runner, but I felt connected to the earth and air and sky," she says. Running there was a new, even shocking experience for her. She was recently married to a Navy man, which brought her from her home in Massachusetts to San Diego, and to the Pacific Ocean. On a warm day in the winter of 1966, Bobbi Gibb was getting in a long run on the beach when she accidentally ran to Mexico.
You have reached a degraded version of because you're using an unsupported version of Internet Explorer.įor a complete experience, please upgrade or use a supported browserįinally honoring Bobbi Gibb, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon
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