"If you saw a car coming, you'd leap into the ditch, wait till it had gone, then scramble out." "People thought we were totally nuts." "A doctor friend says all that stuff about endorphins is rubbish." "But there is a moment when you push yourself." "You're tired." "You've got into a rhythm." "And suddenly you feel great." "There's a moment when your body is like a machine." "It frees your mind." "That's when you start to think." "And get a bit closer to heaven." "Women in competitive sport is clearly a problem." "We've had conferences about it." "It can be good for them or downright wicked." "They were told to do gym instead." "Gymnasts are graceful, so are skaters." "Runners aren't." "There's nothing more unattractive than a woman who's not built for laps." "She has to be graceful." "I probably read about it in American magazines, the incident in 1967 when she was thrown out, that famous photo." "So I arranged for her to come and run in Switzerland, not really to shock people, but to provoke reactions, to show people a woman running." "The spirit of the organisation was friendly, but very regimented." ""You've got your orders, now execute them!"" "There was no arguing with those people." "Now, as tradition demands," "I ask you to shout three times, after me," ""Murat," ""Murat," ""Marat!"" "SHE LOVES MARATHONS!" "It was a real eye-opener." "People remembered the picture from the Boston Marathon." "And they said to themselves, "Now it's happening here!"" "It jolted attitudes quite a lot." "WHAT ABOUT WOMEN?" "It would be totally misogynistic..." "That's not the point." "This is a national event." "We have to deal with crowds, numbers, lavatories, showers..." "I don't interfere with your family!" "The conditions are clear." "We have 140 ladies in our club, including distance runners." "But we can't have a ladies' section in the race." "Who mentioned a ladies' section?" "She enrolled as a man." "Then it's cheating." "Even worse!" "You'll ruin the whole thing!" "She did it last year, with no fuss." "We'll do it again this year." "Thank you for your input." "Ultimately, you could say" "Spiridon magazine was born from a powerful feeling that everyone can understand, love of freedom." ""Beautiful because they run!"" "I tried my hardest to say that running won't harm you physically." "Look, these girls run a lot and they're beautiful!" "For some people the magazine was a bit polemical." "But we had to campaign for everyone to be able to run, especially women." "It provided the necessary spark." "Noél Tamini, Jeannotat and the others wrote with a warmth, a poetry that made running seem different from any other sport." "It came out every two months." "You looked forward to it more than Christmas." "You'd get home." "It would be in the post." "You'd pounce on it and read the articles from start to finish." "He was sort of the bard of running because he was a runner himself." "Before, we just had reporters who described a race, but only from outside." "Noel experienced it from inside." "He could motivate readers and persuade them to take up running." "Spiridon was about a passion." "I wrote what I felt, hoping people would respond to it." "I was amazed when people said to me," ""Your article made me cry."" "I wondered how I'd done it, actually made people cry." "Then there were people who told me," ""Now I've got Spiridon, my life has changed!"" "People nowadays want to run." "They need to do something different." "It's a social trend." "In a race, there would often be 100 or 150 of us in Spiridon running shirts." "The shirt was synonymous with freedom." "Spiridon equalled freedom." "People who ran in club shirts were licensed." "Federation members had to run in club shirts." "Non-federation members ran in Spiridon shirts." "It became a symbol of opposition to the federation." "Marvejols-Mende was a breakthrough in the quest for freedom to be yourself." "Until then, we had been conditioned." "There were barriers." "You couldn't do this, you couldn't do that." "We had women running with men, federation members with non-members." "Two things that were banned." "Supposedly, after the races indescribable things went on." ""Orgies," they said." "But they were just parties." "We'd dance, drink and have fun." "The federation people couldn't bear that." "They said our distances were crazy." "Youngsters would be ruined for life!" "It was members they wanted, of course." "Their membership was dwindling, and we were getting more and more runners." "They wanted all those runners." "They started trying to suspend us." "Jean-Claude Moulin paid the price." "They suspended me for a year." "They tried to ban me for life." ""You're killing athletics." "You're murderers!"" "French federation representatives even came to Marvejols-Mende to try and stop the race using their cars as a road-block." "They tried to stop Jean-Claude Moulin." "His car was at the start." "They jumped on him." "It was really tense." "RUNNING RACES ON ROADS?" "OVER OUR DEAD BODIES!" "Now I'd like to organise races for women in the Third World." "We want a Women's Marathon in the Olympic Games." "Gabi Andersen-Schiess is in agony." "It's taken the Swiss athlete over four minutes to cover 300 meters, the first 300 meters of the lap, and now she is trying, look, she's moving from the fourth lane to the first." "She's bent right over, she's staggering." "She's utterly exhausted and completely dehydrated, but determined to finish." "What a harrowing image this is!" "Will she make it to the finish?" "She's got 60, no, 50 meters to go." "We thought marathon tragedies were over for good." "Dorando Pietri collapsing at the finish before the First World War." "Gailly staggering over the line in Wembley in 1948, overtaken by Cabrera and Richards." "Now it's a Swiss girl in this state." "She's got just 20 meters left to go." "This is the most terrible image of a marathon since television has existed." "Six more meters." "She's in the third lane." "Five meters to go." "Three." "Two." "One meter!" "She's made it!" "She's over the line and collapses to the roars of the crowd." "2 hours 48 minutes and 41 seconds." "Gabi Andersen-Schiess." "What determination, what courage!" "But it will be very hard for her to recover." "Her marathon is over." "It's been painful to watch, but what a lesson in determination!" "Now there is no city worth its salt that doesn't have a marathon." "Why did people keep coming back?" "Perhaps because of Fred Lebow." "He used everything available." "He met people's needs." "He looked at the demand for it, what people wanted." "When Spiridon readers came to me saying," ""It's scandalous, what they're charging to run in New York!"" "I'd say, "Look, it's like soap." ""A plain bar of soap will do the job," ""but if you want to buy fancy soap no one can stop you." ""It's supply and demand."" "BACK TO THE ESSENTIALS" "The revolution has become diluted." "It hasn't entirely vanished, but it's become diluted now that running is a mass sport." "Spiridon opened a Pandora's box." "It helped unleash those hordes of people." "As their numbers increased, they wanted the movement to be more organised and commercial, whereas it started off totally free." "Free as in gratis and free in the sense of having liberty." "Just for physical enjoyment." "What could I do?" "Repeat myself?" "Write the kind of thing people do nowadays?" ""Run your first marathon in just three hours!"" "I couldn't do that." "It would have been fake, and I didn't like that." "I was glad to have given it up and be free to do something else." "Even if I was very poor, at least I was free." "You only had to leave Fifth Avenue to realise the scale of the disaster." "We knew they'd emptied some of the hospitals to take in emergencies." "The organisers were determined to maintain the illusion until the very last moment." "People left Paris yesterday thinking the marathon was on." "They get through customs and immigration, and all for nothing." "It's not cool." "A marathon did take place." "The "Run Anyway" Marathon." "They ran on the Sunday when more bodies had been dug out right near the starting line, two miles away." "The bodies of a mother and daughter dug out that morning." "It was easy." "An invitation on Facebook and 10,000 of us showed up for a run in Central Park." "Some runners had eggs or stones thrown at them." "The crowd didn't want it." "They didn't want to see people who were determined to run in tragic circumstances." "What must Noél Tamini think?" "It's a far cry from the values he initially promoted." "So long as we can run in the woods whenever we like, life is great." "We're not grumbling!" "For the moment we're free to run in the woods whenever we like." "At the end of the day, getting back to holistic running, alone, not in a gathering of people, without any notion of competition, getting back to nature, all by yourself," "nothing can replace the inner joy it can bring." "That was my magazine."