Sara Mae Berman
In 1969, 32-year-old Sara Mae Berman was the first woman to cross the finish line in the Boston Marathon. She did it again in 1970 and 1971. But women weren’t allowed to enter officially, so her times—3:22:46, 3:05:08, and 3:08:30, respectively—were unofficial.
Sara Mae racing the 1977 Bonnie Bell 10k
Berman started running after she had her first two kids. Her husband, Larry Berman, was a runner and encouraged her to try it. "The two children were born 15 months apart, which is pretty close, and I was feeling I didn't even have control of my own body," she said. So she agreed to give it a try.
The Bermans lived close to the MIT track, so they took the kids there, set them down next to the track, and started running laps together. At first, Berman wasn’t enjoying herself. “I wasn't very good. I had no endurance at all. And, you know, it just wasn't something that I understood," because she had never gotten involved in sports before, she said.
But she kept at it, and when her running ability improved, she started to like it. Eventually, she could run two miles without stopping. She said to her husband, “’There, I've done it.’ He said, ‘Yeah, now you have to do it faster,’” she said. Larry coached her, giving her interval workouts and running alongside her. Then he set a goal for her: to run five miles at an eight-minute pace. She tried but kept falling short.
Larry had an idea. “He said, you know, we should go into a road race, because with all the people around you—and of course, they were all guys—it's worth 40 seconds a mile. Well, that sounded terrific . . . suddenly you're 40 seconds a mile faster,” Berman said. So they showed up at a five-mile race in Marlboro, Massachusetts, in 1964.
Berman couldn’t officially enter the race as a woman, but she ran it anyway, and she surpassed her 40-minute goal, finishing in 38:37. She found that the men running around her were supportive, even though she was an anomaly. “They encouraged me, and I learned, as I went into other road races, that long-distance runners respect each other's training. You can't cover the distance if you haven't done the training,” she said.
In the next few years, Berman ran other races around New England. By 1969, she felt ready to run the Boston Marathon.
Nina Kuscsik and Sara Mae Berman post-Boston 1971.
She was the first woman to cross the finish line. “I finished in 3:22:46, which wasn't even an unofficial record. I think Roberta Gibb had had a 3:21 in her first [Boston Marathon in 1966], but I finished. I wasn't dead. I didn't do serious injury to my reproductive systems,” as many people believed at the time, she said.
During Berman’s 1969 and 1970 Boston Marathons, she didn’t see other women runners. But in 1971, “As I rounded the hill past Boston College, suddenly Nina Kuscsik came by with some guys from New York,” Berman said.
“You see, there were so few women, and we didn't start together,” she said. They were scattered throughout the crowd, “So I had no idea where she was. She had no idea where I was . . . until she passed me.” Berman decided she didn’t want Kuscsik to beat her, so she sped up and passed her, beating her by about a half-minute. That was the only time Berman had raced another woman.
In 1972, women were finally allowed to run Boston. Unfortunately, Berman had the flu on race day, but she was determined to run anyway. She finished fifth, in 3:48:30. (Kuscsik finished first.)
“Larry said to me, ‘Couldn't you get a blister or something and drop out?’ I said, ‘Larry, the officials have always said that women weren't strong enough to run a marathon. If any of us dropped out, they would say, see!’” Berman said. “It was a sort of unwritten code among all of us women who ran in the early marathons that we would finish no matter what—so they couldn't say we couldn't do it."
In the meantime, the Bermans had also been organizing cross-country races for women, and forming a running club, which later included cross-country skiing and ski orienteering, both of which Berman competed in as well.
Celebrating 50 years of women running Boston (LR): Joan Benoit Samuelson, Eleonora Mendonca, Sara Mae Berman, Nina Kuscsik, Julia Chase Brand, Jacqueline Hansen and Cheryl Treworgy.
Berman became interested in cross-country skiing after watching it in the 1964 Olympics, and she started entering races in the wintertime. "We now recognize that cross-country skiing is terrific cross-training for running. . . . We didn't know that—we just thought it was an interesting sport to get involved in.”
In 1968, she was named to the U.S. national team for Nordic skiing. She was 32, and her teammates were teenagers. At a training camp, they competed for spots on an upcoming European trip. Three athletes would be selected. In the race, Berman came in fourth. She wasn’t selected, but two women who finished behind her were.
“I was devastated. I had left my husband with three children to come to this event. I had taken time away from my mothering, which I felt very serious about, to train for this event, and . . . on the basis of favoritism, they were picking other people,” Berman said. She’d also given up a chance to earn a spot on the national team for cross-country running, because the selection events conflicted. But the next spring, she got to run her first Boston Marathon.
"All we ever wanted, us early women, was to be allowed to run the distance, and we weren't in any blood thirsty competition with each other. We just wanted to be able to run the distance and improve our times."
Allison Torres Burtka is a freelance writer and editor in metro Detroit. Her writing about runners and running has appeared in the Guardian, Outside, Runner’s World, Well+Good, espnW, Lonely Planet, and other publications. You can view her writing portfolio and follow her on Instagram
