She had been focused on skiing and then shorter distances after switching to running.Īt the time running a marathon was something of a curiosity. Twelve years previously Kathrine Switzer had famously resisted organisers’ attempts external-link to physically throw her out of the race and become the first woman to officially complete it.īut Benoit Samuelson was only vaguely aware of the episode. Her first was in Boston in 1979, aged 22. This Sunday, had the London Marathon taken place, would have been another - running a marathon in a sixth consecutive decade. On her way she has passed plenty of landmarks the first woman to win Olympic marathon gold, a former world record holder, a three-time Boston champion. Now 62, she estimates that she has done 150,000 miles in that time. “All of a sudden one day, I saw another woman running - she was a coxswain for Princeton - and I thought to myself, ‘well, if she can get out there and run so can I’ and then I just sort of threw it all to the wind and started running on public roads,” remembers Benoit Samuelson. What she lacked was the final nudge of confidence to take on the world. And, after a childhood spent knocking around as an only daughter with three sporty brothers, she was good at it. The simplicity of pulling on trainers and heading out the door immediately appealed to her. It was only when she broke her leg as a teenager that she took up running as part of her rehabilitation. He brought home a love of skiing and Joan’s dreams were initially of racing downhill rather than on a road or track. Her father had been part of the US Army’s 10th Mountain Division during the Second World War - a specialist unit trained for combat in Arctic and high-altitude theatres and deployed in 1944 to help end German occupation. Her love of sport came from more than 3,000 miles away in the Italian Alps.
I would hide out there and do my running alone because I was trying to shed my tomboy image I had.”Īs she jogged back home, Benoit Samuelson would self-consciously slow to a walk if a car appeared on the quiet coastal roads around her home town of Cape Elizabeth. “Back then sport was seen as more of a male-dominated sector of society. “This was a time when there really weren't a lot of runners period, let alone a lot of woman runners,” Benoit Samuelson told BBC Sport. Now, in the early 1970s, it was where the 15-year-old went to push her own boundaries, running faster and further around the abandoned army base, undetected and undeterred.
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