Word: marathoner
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...such a momentous event, history's fastest all-woman marathon began in a quaint setting at the compact track of Santa Monica City College, where the mood was suitable for a high school pep rally, and so few tickets were sold at just $4 a head that the gates eventually were thrown open to all. Being a 5-ft. 3-in. feather in the wind, Benoit found that just 50 jostling women caused a terrific congestion. She hurried into the clear under a delightful painter's hat with the bill brushed back. About three miles out, Benoit...
Norway's gaunt and great Grete Waitz finished second, 1 min. 26 sec. late, without encouraging any discussion of her chronically creaky back. It had been in severe spasm the day before. Benoit was "too strong," said Grete, who had never before lost a marathon that she finished. By the halfway point, according to her old Norwegian saying, "the train had already left." Waitz was one of the few runners who viewed the Swiss straggler with a totally unmixed emotion: "I would have taken her right off the track. I don't like to watch that." Benoit sighed...
Before anyone could read women's frailty into the issue, Benoit added, "Wait until you see some of the men Sunday," when the race would be later in the day, and the cloud cover figured to be less. Aside from Pheidippides, the gasping Greek who established the marathon distance in his farewell appearance as a messenger, the most famous Olympic swooner before Andersen-Schiess was, of course, a man: Dorando ("Wrong Way") Pietri, an Italian who mislaid the finish line in 1908 in London...
When last the Los Angeles Coliseum greeted a winning Olympic marathon champion, he was Juan Carlos Zabala of Argentina, in 1932. Zabala would have finished a poor tenth to Benoit...
Like all top athletes, Joan Benoit is accustomed to pain. But one day last March, more than halfway through a routine 20-mile run in Maine in preparation for the Olympic marathon, she felt a sharp stab on the outside of her right knee. Within the next mile, she recalls, "the knee completely prevented me from running another step." Her doctor, Orthopedic Surgeon Robert Leach of Boston University Medical Center, gave her an injection of cortisone. After a week's rest Benoit resumed training, but in early April she again had to "walk out of a run." This time...