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Photo courtesy of The Final Sprint. Kathrine Switzer was the first woman to officially run the Boston Marathon, in 1967. Race officials tried to push her off the course, but were unsuccessful.

The modern marathon has not always had a women’s division. But women have been running the race on the sly for a long time. The course for the first Olympic marathon was run by a Greek woman, Stamatis Rovithi, a month before the Games. Another woman, Melpomene, tried to run the marathon in that first Olympics but was not permitted to enter. She sneaked in anyway, and completed the course. The first woman to officially complete a marathon was Violet Piercy of Great Britain, who ran the race in 1926. However, distance races for women were eliminated from the Olympics after 1928, when three women collapsed during one of the middle distance runs. From that time until the 1960s very few women officially attempted the marathon. One exception was American Merry Lepper, who completed a marathon in 1963. Three years later Roberta Gibb sneaked into the Boston Marathon and completed it. But the first woman to officially enter the race was Kathrine Switzer, in 1967. She filled out the entry form for the race with her initials and was not identified as a woman until she started the race. Boston Marathon officials tried to push her off course, but Switzer had some friends from college with her and was able to stay in the race. That moment was captured in a famous photo, and Boston Marathon officials stopped barring women from the race. However, the New York Marathon was the first to create an official women’s division, in 1971. Boston soon followed suit. Since then, marathoning for women has grown substantially.