Cheryl Treworgy
In December 1971, Cheryl Bridges (now Cheryl Treworgy) became the first woman in the world to break 2:50 in the marathon. This marathon, the Western Hemisphere Marathon in Culver City, California, was her second—she had run the first a year earlier, and she had hit the wall at Mile 20, so she wanted another chance. This time, she was better prepared, and even though a man tried to push her off the course repeatedly, she covered 26.2 miles faster than any other woman had.
Treworgy decided to try running in 1964, when she was in high school. But there were no girls’ teams, so she started running around the track by herself after band practice. The boys’ track coach invited her to run with them, but that didn’t last long. The school board decided she couldn’t run with the boys, so she ran on the opposite side of campus from them, by herself. “It was hard. But it fulfilled something in me,” she said.
“The more I did it, the more empowered I felt, which was a really, really odd thing. I don't think I made the connection, truly, until years later,” she says. “But it was happening whether I was cognizant of it or not. I—all of a sudden—had something that was just mine.”
They could tell her she couldn’t run in certain places, but she could go elsewhere. “That in itself…made you feel like you were being rebellious in a really quiet kind of way,” she said.
She started running at a nearby park and on the sidewalk. But when she did that, “carloads of kids would come by and maybe throw a drink at me or yell at me,” she said. People didn’t yet understand why a girl would be out running. At the time, nobody was on the streets running except for high school and college teams.
Treworgy started competing and excelling. She received what may have been the first athletic scholarship for a woman—from Indiana State University. Even at that level, she didn’t have many women to compete against, so to get her some competition, her coach convinced some high school boys’ cross-country coaches to let her race in their meets. They agreed, but they made her wait until five seconds after the gun went off to start. They didn’t want her to get in the way. “I'm not sure what they were envisioning, but that's OK. You know, I think it served a purpose for me. And I don't think that they realized what a motivation it was going to be for their boys. I never got worse than third, even with the delayed start,” she said.
Treworgy ended up running on five world cross-country teams and came in fourth at the 1969 international cross-country championships. When she lined up at the 1971 Western Hemisphere Marathon, she hadn’t been training for a marathon—her training was aimed at the end of her cross-country season. And her coach at that point was Bill Dellinger at the University of Oregon, who was coaching her by mail: He would send her workouts, and she would write back telling him how they went. He had written to her to say he thought she wasn’t ready for a marathon, but she didn’t receive it until after she broke the world record.
When she finished that marathon, no one really acknowledged the achievement. A newspaper article covered it later, but the focus was more on her looks than her running. It was titled “Pretty Cheryl Enjoys Running,” and it included her measurements. Decades later, she met the reporter who had written the article, and he apologized immediately. It was a different time, she said, and “we were still objects to a certain extent, and we were in a place where we weren't supposed to be, according to many.”
Cheryl holding Shalane
Treworgy’s world record was also left out of the record books for many years. At the time, although the International Association of Athletics Federations recognized her time, the Amateur Athletic Union didn’t. So she wasn’t formally recognized as a world record holder until decades after the fact.
A little more than three decades after Treworgy’s world-record marathon, one of her daughters, Shalane Flanagan, started winning championships, and she medaled at the 2008 Olympics. In 2022, Flanagan became an assistant coach at the University of Oregon, where Dellinger had been when he mailed Treworgy her workouts.
As Flanagan’s mom, Treworgy has seen how much the sport has evolved for women. Many things have changed: When Treworgy ran her world record, she was wearing a brand-new pair of Adidas Gazelles. Running clothes for women didn’t really exist, and neither did sports bras. Later on, once someone had made a jog bra, Treworgy found it lacking and decided to design her own. She developed and sold her own line of sports bras.
When Treworgy looks at the differences between her experience and those of current runners, the thing she feels like she missed out on was the ability to run with other women. “Making those world teams, that was the only time I really had women of a similar caliber of conditioning to run with, and it was so much fun,” she said. When they would travel to other countries to compete, “we would just merely kind of warm-up with each other, you know, in anticipation of a meet in a couple of days…But it was just so much fun just to be able to run with other women.”
Once Treworgy retired from competitive running, she stayed close to the sport in other ways, including coaching and becoming a university’s assistant athletic director. When she started traveling to watch Flanagan race, she bought a point-and-shoot camera and then figured she could teach herself photography. So she did, and she spent 20 years covering track and cross-country meets as a professional photographer.
Photo credit: Cortney White
In that role, too, Treworgy saw the potential of encouraging girls and women. “I wanted them to be able to identify—if you're a female and you're 5’10” and you're in sixth grade, I want you to see the possibilities that are out there for you, other than all your peers just making fun of you because, you know, you're taller than they are.”
Because of what she got out of running, Treworgy says she “became an advocate for any woman who really wanted to run or participate in a kind of athletic endeavor.”
Looking back at her career, she says, “I've had to realize that our contributions in life are not always evident at the time that they happen. And I'm feeling the recognition now that I didn't feel at the time.… I'm proud to be part of the group of women who have made a difference for other women in sports.”
Allison Torres Burtka is a freelance writer and editor in metro Detroit. Her writing about runners and other athletes has appeared in the Guardian, Women’s Running, Outside, Runner’s World, espnW, and other publications. She is a co-lead of the Running Industry Diversity Coalition‘s Media Subgroup. You can see her writing portfolio and follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
