Better, Faster, Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women

Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum and The Journalism & Women Symposium (JAWS) are delighted to welcome journalist, author and editor Maggie Mertens for a reading and discussion of Better, Faster, Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women. Books sold by Elliott Bay Book Company. 

Despite women proving their abilities on the track time and again, men in the medical establishment, media, and athletic associations have fought to keep women (or at least white women) fragile—and sometimes literally tried to push them out of the race (see Kathrine Switzer, Boston Marathon, 1967).  Yet before there were running shoes for women, they ran barefoot or in nursing shoes. They ran without sports bras, which weren’t invented until 1977, or disguised as men. They faced down doctors who put them on bed rest and newspaper reports that said women collapsed if they ran a mere eight hundred meters, just two laps around the track. Still today, women face relentless attention to their bodies: Is she too strong, too masculine? Is she even really a woman?  Mertens transports us from that first boundary-breaking marathon in Greece, 1896, to the earliest “official” women’s races of the twentieth century to today’s most intense ultramarathons, in which women are setting all-out records, even against men. For readers of Good and Mad, Born to Run, and Fly Girls, Better Faster Farther takes us inside the lives and the victories of the women who have redefined society’s image of strength and power.

Maggie Mertens is a writer, journalist, and editor in Seattle. Her essays and reporting have appeared in The Atlantic, NPR, Sports Illustrated, ESPNw, Glamour, Pacific Standard, Refinery29, and Creative Nonfiction, among others. Her book Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women was released June 18.