“I will do it. Just not now.”
I will do it. Just not now. That’s what Dr. Joan Ullyot said to me the last time we talked. And now I will have to induct her into the Original Gangsters of Running without her help. And she was great at helping.
Dr. Joan Ullyot, born 07/01/1940, passed away, 06/18/2021, of an apparent heart attack.
She was a trail blazer of the highest order. The highest.
Joan opined in a New York Times article (4/16/76) about the wisdom of women running.
[Katherine Switzer] became proof that women could run that distance without becoming ill, as had been assumed, and without becoming masculine, as had been whispered.
And soon, other women joined her on the roads.
“It snowballed,” said Dr. Joan Ullyot, a marathoner and physiologist from San Francisco. “When I started running in 1969 I was the only woman out there. I seem to have recruited a lot of women to it just by example. Where I live it’s a social thing now. We run instead of going to cocktail parties.”
Later in the piece, written by Tony Kornheiser.
Dr. Ullyot explained that the body uses up glycogen—“muscle starch”—during an extended run. She said that no body had enough stored glycogen to sustain a run of 26 miles 385 yards. So the body must burn its fat deposits as a reserve.
“Women seem to be able to burn fat better than men,” she said. “After 20 miles or so when the glycogen is used up, men tend to ‘hit the wall.’ They have to go the last few miles on sheer guts. Women don”t seem to hit the wall, because they convert from glycogen to fat more easily, more naturally. So there is reason to theorize that their bodies are more adaptable than men to long distance running.”
Not every doctor accepts that theory.
Dr. Ernest Jokl, a physiologist from Lexington, Ky., who has worked with Dr. Ullyot, called her theory “a lot of unproven rubbish.”
I raced Joan once.
Tasked with putting together a group of experts for a marathon symposium in Greece, Dr. Ullyot was an obvious choice. Not many female running experts in 1978. She was fun in a no-nonsense kind of way.
Joan and I ran at about the same level. So, when we raced the original course from Marathon to the Olympic Stadium in Athens, she was one of my targets. I took off like a bat out of hell on a difficultly hot day, like a guy without much sense. Joan started like a calm scientist in complete control. I got way out ahead of her.
One huge hill looms in front of me. I am sure if I can get to the top of that one huge hill, I can finish. It is literally all downhill from there. I slow to a walk. Soon I hear footsteps. Two guys walking faster than I am walking. Then Dr. Joan Ullyot, running at the same pace at which she began. There is something Medusan about her. I look into her eyes and turn to stone. The other two men see her and break into a jog, chasing up the hill after her… can’t let a woman beat them. I can. I can let a woman beat me. No problem. Not that I am “letting” Joan beat me; she’s doing it by herself, by her strength and wisdom. Me, by my stupidity and hubris. The pain would be incredible if I didn’t believe it. But I do. I think of George Sheehan’s maximal stress test and I, too, wonder: “When can I see the baby?”
I start to laugh and then I cry.
https://www.jackdogwelch.com/?p=7717
The first question on the application to the Original Gangsters Of Running is When did you start running and why?
Joan supplied the answer to Gary Cohen.
| GCR: For anyone under the age of 40 or 45, it is difficult to fathom the lack of opportunities that girls and women had to compete in sports until sometime in the mid-1970s. What it was like for you growing up as a teenager in the 1950s and then during your young adult years in the 1960s as far as sports and athletic opportunities? Joan: Girls didn’t run. I don’t know why, but they just didn’t. I grew up in the 1950s mostly and at school I was on the swim team. A lot of other girls were playing volleyball and sports like that. There was no running team for girls. There were some girls in Pennsylvania that I heard about later who were good runners but were not allowed to run competitively because they were girls. None of us ran and we weren’t particularly interested in running. |
| GCR: You didn’t start running until well into your young adulthood. How and why did you start running? Joan: When I got married at age twenty-five to Dan Ullyot, who had been a 400-meter runner in high school and college, he took me to the track with him one day and I ran a quarter mile. Oh, that was painful, so I didn’t try to do that again. The way I got started is that I read Dr. Kenneth Cooper’s ‘Aerobics’ book and it was very good. The book finished up with instructing readers to do a one- or two-minute run and that was very painful for me, too. It was not very interesting. |
| GCR: After that painful introduction to running, what led you to start toward really becoming a runner? Joan: We moved to San Francisco when I was twenty-nine and I didn’t start running until I was thirty years old. The reason I started was because I was getting a little bit plump around the middle. Somebody said that running was good for that, so a friend and I went down to Golden Gate Park, which was near where I worked at UCSF Medical Center. My girlfriend and I went with our jeans and sneakers and it seemed everyone was staring at us while we jogged around the mile loop in the park. We managed it which was good. She called up her husband and said we had run a mile and he said, ‘You’re a gazelle!’ I told my husband I had run a mile and he said, ‘How fast?’ I felt like Ferdinand the Bull. I liked to be out in the park running along the trees smelling the flowers. When she could no longer run with me there were some men out there and I joined them and ran along to get up to a three-mile run and I took off from there. I met a couple of girls from UCSF who were in their late twenties, one is Gail Rodd, and who are still good friends of mine. We started running together in the park and we were joined by other girls. We would run down to the beach and back a couple of miles every day. |
| GCR: Since you were getting in better shape were there races that attracted you to enter? Joan: My first race was when I ran the Bay-to-Breakers race in 1971. It had a few thousand runners but nearly all were men. I think there were only three or four women. One was Mary Etta Boitano. Her last name now is Blanchard, but Mary Etta was just a little girl of about eight-years-old. She was such a good runner that she would win all of the local races for girls. She also won the Dipsea one year. But back to the Bay-to-Breakers which was a seven-mile distance and I had never run more than three miles. So I ran the first three miles of the race to the base of the Hayes Street hill and then walked up the hill. Then I walked and jogged the rest of the way to the beach. Actually, it wasn’t too bad. I think I ran it in 57 or 58 minutes, which was pretty decent. I didn’t know I was fast. |
| GCR: From this longest distance of seven miles you ramped up to your first marathon two years later in 1973. Why did you start thinking about running a marathon? Joan: Everybody in those days who ran, all of my friends, started thinking about running marathons. One ran a five-hour marathon and one ran a 4:50 marathon but I couldn’t run one because I got injured and had a stress fracture in my foot. When I recovered from that, I ran my first one in 3:17. |
| GCR: What was your training like before your first marathon in 1973? Joan: I did a long run and I remember it because I was running with Mary Etta Boitano. I ran twenty miles with Mary Etta and Walt Stack and some others a week or two before my first marathon. Mary Etta said, if I could do that twenty-miler then the marathon is nothing because so many people are there helping you out in the marathon. In these twenty-milers there is no one helping you along the way, so she thought, compared to a twenty-miler, a marathon was easy. Walt Stack also sponsored weekly runs and was encouraging us all. I had been at a running camp with him and some others in Colorado in 1972 and had done the Pikes Peak Marathon afterward, which was only up to the top, and a half marathon distance. Walt said, if you ran up to Pikes Peak that your time for that half marathon would be about your time for a regular full marathon. He was right. I went to the top in about 3:20 and my first marathon was 3:17. |
| GCR: What was the local racing scene in San Francisco like for women at that time? Joan: Walt Stack was a great promoter of women in running, even though there were so few of us. In local races put on by the DSE club, which is the Dolphin South End Runners, there would be about one hundred runners and only about ten were women. He would give everyone who finished a ribbon, which was nice, with the name of the race on it. The top five men and the top five women would get place ribbons, one through five, and they were very sought after. People used to criticize Walt for giving five place ribbons to men and five to women when there might only be five women in the race. Walt would always say, ‘We have to support the women because they have been discriminated against for so long.’ He was a real pioneer. He is the one who told me I should run whatever pace was comfortable in my first marathon. |
The rest of the interview can be found at http://www.garycohenrunning.com/Interviews/Ullyot.aspx
Jacqueline Hansen, the first female OGOR, offers this remembrance.
Joan Ullyot
A pioneer distance runner, author, and medical physician, Ullyot’s expertise and lobbying helped open doors for women in running. Notably, her efforts helped changed the minds of the IAAF and IOC, who had previously clung to an archaic view that the sport was detrimental to a woman’s health.
A 1961 graduate of Wellesley College, Ullyot was an accomplished runner herself, having finished the Boston Marathon ten times, winning the masters title there in 1984. Additionally, she was the only woman to run in every women’s international marathon championships, held in Waldniel, West Germany (1974, 1976, 1979) and she set a PR of 2:47:39 in winning the St. George Marathon in 1988 at age 48.
However, her biggest contributions to the sport came off the race course. In the early 1980s, her research on the sport’s impact on women was presented to the IOC by the organizing committee for the Los Angeles Olympics, leading to a vote to include the women’s marathon in the 1984 Games.
Additionally, Ullyot’s work as a writer both through her regular columns in Runner’s World and Women’s Sports & Fitness magazines and her books, Women’s Running, and Running Free helped an unknown number of aspiring participants in the sport.
Ullyot was a member of the Advisory Board for the Melpomene Institute, an organization focused research projects on behalf of female athletes, and served on the International Runners Committee, seeking parity for women distance runners in the Olympic Games and all international competition.
These are the words I wrote for her RRCA Hall of Fame induction in 2018. Today, years of memories wash over me in mixed emotions, from revered to irreverent. Joan left big footsteps in her wake, and she has brought lots of smiles and laughter. She is legendary.
The world of running owes a debt of gratitude for Joan’s contribution to our history.
It’s difficult to pinpoint the moment we met, and while I feel sure it must have been prior to 1974, my most vivid memories emanate from the first Women’s International Marathon Championships in Waldniel, West Germany in the Fall of 1974 (yes, when there was a West Germany). Joan had earned her berth on the USA team from her participation in the first USA National Championships earlier that year. Beyond her role as a runner, Joan served as the team’s translator, being fluent in German, and our goodwill ambassador. The race sponsor was the world renowned sports medicine doctor, Dr. Ernest van Aaken. There was solid mutual admiration between them from the moment they met. This relationship continued for years, including book tours across the US by the German doctor, with Joan as translator and author.
In the book, First Ladies of Running, author Amby Burfoot writes about how Joan was inspired and mentored by Dr. van Aaken. He coached her to faster marathon times, and mentored her to take a leadership role in explaining the growth of the women’s running movement.
Joan wrote her own books, and scores of articles plus book chapters, for Runners’ World magazine. Any road running athlete of the early decades will tell you the magazine and related books were our bible of the sport. All these decades later, I still encounter women who attribute their start to running to the inspiration of Joan’s books.
I cannot emphasize enough the importance of Dr. Joan Ullyot’s role in advocating for our rights in the sport.
I appreciate this opportunity to point out the importance of the International Runners’ Committee work, and how Joan’s role was a critical factor to our success. There were 13 members of the IRC, who I call the “movers and shakers” in our sport. In brief, the IRC mission was to seek the inclusion of women’s distance running events on the Olympic Games program. It’s a long history since the creation of the men’s “modern Olympic Games” were formed without women’s events and it’s been an uphill battle ever since to add women’s events.
Even as late as the mid-70s, when Joan and I were at our prime, the longest event on the program was the 1500-meter race (the metric mile). That event was only added in 1972. The IRC sought the inclusion of the 5,000m, 10,000m and Marathon into the Games. It took until 1984 to add the marathon, and until 2008 to see all distance events included (5,000m, 10,000m and steeplechase). There’s a lot of history in those years, but suffice to say that without Joan’s professional testimony to women’s ability to endure distance events, we would not be where we are today. I know it is difficult to comprehend how and why the officials of our governing federations ever denied women the right to run, but this was the state of the sport up to and including most of Joan’s and my running careers.
Rest in peace, Joan. Your friends, colleagues, and indeed, the running community worldwide, honor you and your contributions.