Rosie Ruiz and the Marathon Women with Maggie Mertens

When I was young, I wanted to read about murder, and now I want to read about game show scandals.

Welcome to Your Wrong About.

I'm Sarah Marshall, and today we are talking with Maggie Mertens about women and the marathon.

One marathon in particular, one marathon scam in particular, and the bigger question beyond that of why women had to work so hard to be allowed to run long distances, and unpacking a little bit of the culture that meant we didn't have an Olympic marathon for women until 1984.

I really loved doing this episode with Maggie.

I love talking about how American culture grapples with the idea of women and strength and gender and performance and how all of this comes together in sporting events so much of the time.

That anytime we want something to just be about sports, we're really bringing all of the baggage we have as people into it, for better or for worse.

And

we learn so much about ourselves this way.

And also, it's a great story.

As always, we have bonus episodes for you on Patreon and Apple Plus subscriptions.

And the one we just put out most recently is very close to my heart because I got to talk with Sarah Archer at length about both Rosemary's Baby, a fantastic novel, and the sequel to Rosemary's Baby, Son of Rosemary.

And we had a wonderful time talking about it.

So if you want to learn more about

what happened to Rosemary in 1999, I know I did, then you can check that out there.

And of course, we have lots of past episodes, our Britney Spares Memoir Club with Eve Lindley, extended cuts of some past episodes, including our George Michael series, Flowers in the Attic.

We talked about that last summer.

A lot of stuff over there for you to look at.

Or you can spend your money on a whole lot of popsicles.

Thank you so much for listening.

Thank you for being here, struggling through August with us.

Here's your show.

Welcome to Your Wrong About, the podcast where we take you to the wide, wide world of sports and sometimes the scam, scam, scammy world of sports as well.

With me today is Maggie Mertens.

Maggie, hello.

Hello, Sarah.

Thank you for coming on.

Thanks for having me.

It's really nice to be able to bring you on for what I am thinking of as our Olympics episode because my feeling about the Olympics is that it like snuck up on me this year, like Michael Myers in Halloween.

Like you just, it seems like a normal day and you look over and there's the Olympics like three yards away.

It's especially weird because the 2020 Summer Olympics were delayed for a year.

And so it has only been three years since the last Summer Olympics.

So I think a lot of people are feeling that way.

Yeah, so it is kind of that feeling of like missing a stare.

Yes, exactly.

And you're like, whoa, I thought we had a little more time.

Yeah.

And what, so you just came out with a book called Better, Faster, Farther, which is about...

You know, I hate to even try and give it a one-line description because you've just been touring and I feel like you've been listening to people describe your book incorrectly for like two months or something.

So what is your book about in your opinion?

I mean, I like to say that the book is about women and running.

And then if people kind of seem at all interested, I'll say something else, which is that I actually think it's about gender and physical capability and how we define gender through these ideas of what men and women can and cannot do.

And yeah, so it's, it goes into a lot of different things, just how sport like influences society and society influences sport and how a lot of that is just really tied up in these gender inequality discussions as well.

And you talk about something that I find, you know, really interesting historically through my love of Tanya Harding, which is how we police gender through sport.

And especially looking at women's sports, there is this kind of incredible continual undercurrent of like, lift weights, but don't get bulky, basically.

Like, yes.

I thought a lot while reading your book about the way the press describes figure skaters and gymnasts, and I'm thinking especially of like Nadia Komenik, where sometimes there is an absolute fixation on talking about the tininess of the female athlete.

It's like the loneliness of the long-distance runner, the tininess of the female athlete.

And like, what's

that about, in your opinion?

I mean, I think that's 100%

about keeping this gender binary intact as we

allowed women to be take part in sports because there was like this idea that sports was for you know defining masculinity and for proving how big and fast and strong men were

and of course like when we define men we have to like define them in opposition and so as women were like

given opportunities to enter the sporting space, they had to like conform to this ideal that was like, okay, you can do this, but you have to keep looking super feminine.

And in so many cases, that became like, okay, the opposite of what we think of as masculine, which is small and frail and tiny.

And yeah, you see it and you still see it, you know, like these, it's amazing that she's so, so little.

Women are just Marcel Vichelle.

Yes, exactly.

It's like the ideal woman is like, do you know what I use for a beanbag share?

A raisin.

As small as possible, but also, you know, fast and unbelievable and worthy of our attention, you know.

Yeah.

And so we're going to talk today.

Your book is about kind of, I, you know, my, one of my descriptions of it would be the history of women in running and this idea of like women can't run.

And your chapters kind of are very cheekily.

Like, women can't run.

Well, they can run, but they can't run more than a few hundred yards.

Well, they can't run a mile.

Well, they can't, but only if they're white.

But, well, they can't run a marathon.

Well, but they have to be cisgender.

And it's like, okay.

Yes.

And in this, you know, that we're in this moment now of like suddenly people acting as if they care so much about women and sports because now we are defending gender by defending cis women because suddenly there's supposed to be money in sports for them.

That's the argument.

Yes, we must protect all of that money and attention that the female athletes are getting from all of these people who are scared that it's going away.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so where should we begin?

This happens in April 1980.

So we're at the Boston Marathon.

The Boston Marathon has about 5,500 people running it in 1980.

And around 500 of those are women.

So that's like a very tiny percentage.

But also, this is only like the third year at all that there are over a hundred women participating.

So, it's really kind of exponentially grown because the women's marathon in Boston wasn't sanctioned until 1972.

So, this is the eighth year that women are officially running the Boston Marathon, even though the Boston Marathon has been around since 1897.

Which is incredible.

I can't like that.

I was really shocked by that fact that it's been around since the newsies.

Yes, it's an extremely old thing but in those first years there were really it was very small like it was tiny numbers of people like less than a hundred in a lot of cases of these men who were kind of seen as freaks for like wanting to run 26 miles it just seemed like why would anyone do that were americans doing marathons before like our you know kind of the turn of the century the the the 19th century i should specify no no one was doing marathons they basically invented the marathon in 1896 when they revived the Olympic Games.

And this was sort of a nod to like the Greeks.

And

there's this Greek legend that a soldier ran from the Battle of Marathon back to Athens to tell everyone, you know, that they'd won the battle.

And in the legend, he drops dead after he has run this far.

And yeah, which, you know, the joke delivered to you on a silver platter by that is like, hmm,

not great advertisement for running a marathon.

Yes.

But what's funny is actually that never happened.

Like historians now are like, oh, these like stories kind of got confused.

And actually

this, you know, one runner actually did run, but he ran much farther.

He ran like hundreds of miles, not just 26.

Wow.

And after the marathon battle, actually, the whole army marched the 26 miles back to Athens.

So

there's a lot of like misinformation just from the beginning.

Which is a better story.

Yeah.

Like if your army has won, you can probably take your time.

Yes.

And it's pretty impressive to like march 26 miles.

I don't know.

Yeah.

And you feel like that would, that sounds like a lot more fun.

There probably would have been camaraderie.

It implies that they're not sprinting the whole time.

Yeah.

They're drinking wine out of their helmets.

There should be a movie about that.

It'll have Zach Efron in it.

Oh my gosh, if only.

So that's kind of also why it was really seen as, you know, not feminine.

You know, I write in the book a lot about how distance was a really big hurdle, so to speak, for women runners, because it just was seen as too hard.

You know, it was going to be too much on their bodies and their uteruses might fall out or they might not be able to have babies or they might just fall down and not look very good.

And we don't want to have to see that.

But it was really considered like a very debilitating thing to be a woman, to menstruate, to, of course, to be pregnant, all of those things.

And so that really kept men, you know, in this zone of believing that, like, well, we just don't want to mess with that.

And we don't want anything that would, that might come between like us having our wives have babies, you know?

And so

why would they, why would we allow them to do these other things that might hurt that?

Which I realize we're not in a logical area here, but it's like, it's hard to imagine that running 26 miles, which is like, is a lot of miles, but if you're conditioned for it is like a very thinkable amount

compared to, you know, carrying and feeding a living creature and eventually, you know, pushing an object the size of a Christmas ham through a hole the size of a tangerine.

I know.

You just have to keep doing something until it's over.

Yes, exactly.

And there's a lot of recovery time and a lot of pain.

So yeah, 1980, we're at the Boston Marathon.

So Boston kind of sees that it happens in the Olympics and they take it on as their own.

It's kind of one of those quirky Boston things.

Have you been to a marathon, Sarah?

Once when I was like 11, my mom and I I had to like walk through the current of the Honolulu Marathon route.

So I guess remember that moment.

It was very sweet.

And she was like, now we can say we've run in the Honolulu Marathon.

And I was like, wow, really?

Which actually probably fits with our theme quite well.

That's so amazing.

But no,

I haven't watched one.

I've spectated at a lot of dog sled races, which I imagine is similar, partly in the sense that you are at a fixed point and the athletes are going past you.

But, but yeah, but what are marathons like as a as a scene?

Because it takes place over such a long distance, right?

You can't see the whole thing.

You have to kind of choose where you want to stand, you know, what mile you want to be at.

And the thing about Boston is because it has such a like strong history, because like Bostonians feel very connected to it, like it's considered a holiday.

Like people don't work that day often.

and there's people lining the course the whole way.

But you know, for sure, there's all these different checkpoints where people are just like cheering and yelling and dancing the whole time.

And it's a very intense feeling.

I remember the first time I saw the New York City Marathon when I was living in New York, I like burst into tears because it's just like a very beautiful, supportive environment in general, right?

And you're just seeing all these people who are like doing something very, very hard, and all of these other people who are just there to like cheer them on and say good job.

And I think that's just a very nice part of humanity that we don't see a lot, you know, especially for people who aren't like professional athletes or something like that.

Like, it can really be anyone.

Yeah.

And in Boston, the thing, the other thing that makes Boston kind of special is you have to qualify for Boston.

So you have to actually be a pretty good runner to run in Boston.

They have a time cutoff.

This is actually kind of controversial these days, but they have this very kind of like elite sensibility.

And the people who run Boston, who are like, you know, in that elite category and are, you know, potential winners, are pretty well known.

Um, and even in 1980, this was pretty much the case.

So it's like Anchorage and the Iditarod, really.

It's, it's like, it's their thing.

Yes, yeah.

And so there's like, there are favorites, there are people that people get to know, you know, throughout the years if they've won before or if they're trying again

or things like that.

You know, thinking inevitably about the Boston Marathon bombing,

the way you're describing it, it feels like, of course, you would target a large event.

That's something that kind of makes sense in a general way.

But from what you're saying, it also feels like this is just a profound way of attacking the heart of a city as well.

Totally.

So this is the year, it's 1980.

And the

man who wins is named Bill Rogers.

He crosses the finish line in two hours and 12 minutes.

This was like a big deal because this was actually his fourth win of the Boston Marathon and his third win in a row.

Wow.

He's the Sonia Henney of the Boston Marathon.

Exactly.

He was like an Olympian.

He was, he looks exactly like you would think like a marathon running man would look in the the 1980, like very tall and thin and like kind of, you know, nerdy looking with floppy hair.

And so he had like this great, great finish.

And then there's maybe like 20 minutes go past and a woman crosses the finish line.

She's the first woman to cross.

Her name is Rosie Ruiz.

And she has dark brown hair, a pixie cut.

She has these like very beautiful shaped 80s eyebrows.

And at Boston, when you win, you get a laurel wreath put on your head because again, they love the Greeks.

Yeah, that's so adorable.

You know, and the medal.

And so she gets the laurel wreath on her head.

She gets the medal on.

And people are congratulating her, but people are also a little bit confused.

And I would love to ask you here, Sarah, what you know about Rosie Ruiz.

Well, so this was kind of the first I ever heard of the Boston Marathon was a story about her because I remember, I think my, yeah, my mom had friends who I remember they had like lived in Boston at one time.

And so they like told the legend of Rosie Ruiz to me when I was like 11 or something again about how basically the story goes that she had,

I like cheated, I want to say cheated by taking

maybe taking the tea to the finish line and getting there somehow and then just like running the last little bit and and then being like, hello, I won.

I think there is something that people generally, and Americans especially, find very

charming about extremely brazen attempts at cheating.

You know, we're like very angered by it, but we love it.

I remember, you know, when I would teach writing classes, like showing this clip that I found and I forget what excuse I had for showing it, but I was kind of talking about media and sort of the news and and et cetera.

News is a first draft.

And so she's being interviewed by a woman who's covering the marathon for some local news outlet who I think is also a runner herself and who's like, well, you've improved your time from the New York City marathon by 26 minutes.

How would you do that?

And you have the sense that she's like,

yeah, does not know what to say and is not improvising well at that point.

And then it's like, and I remember she was like, well, to improve your time by 26 minutes, you must have been doing a lot of interval training.

And she's like, what's interval training?

It's a powerful cringe clip, I guess, really.

And I think, yeah, it's, I find it fascinating to think about.

I think there are many possible motives for pretending to finish a marathon, let alone win a marathon that you aren't able to pretend to do something that you can't actually do.

I always find that interesting, I guess.

And I guess the rest of us do as well.

Yeah.

And what was the kind of tone?

I'm curious about like your, your mom's friends.

Like, what was the tone of the story?

I think, like, absolutely a comedy, which I think these, these stories, you normally learn them this way, that it's this great farce about this, like,

very brazen cheater who got away with it somehow, but not for very long.

So, yeah, so what happens is she crossed the line and she was, you know, in the middle of kind of being congratulated.

And, and sort of immediately, there's sort of like I want to say like a game of telephone going on because, again, the way that you tracked the marathon at that point, like they didn't have chip technology, which is what they use today, which is like everyone's number, like the bib that you pin to your shirt, everyone's number has like a tracking chip in it.

You can track them live, you know, you can like go on the internet and see where everyone is.

You never are like unsure of if somebody's about to come in on like the last mile or not.

But at this time, they didn't have that kind of technology.

And so, what they did was, you know, they had certain checkpoints throughout the race where race workers would

have like a clipboard and a pen and write down like the top three to five like men and women that they saw crossing the checkpoint so that they could kind of be prepared for, you know, who was going to win, but also like, you know, add to the race report report stories after everything's over and see, like, when did somebody get in the lead, all of that.

But one of the things about this being 1980 and, you know, only the eighth time that women were running the Boston Marathon is that the women's marathon was still sort of seen as a joke.

Like, it wasn't taken as seriously for sure.

It's like the implication is that it's like when you put like sunglasses on a golden retriever.

Yes.

Yes.

And so some of the criticism is that, you know, these checkpoints weren't really paying attention to the women.

Like, maybe they just missed her, you know?

And it's like, who cares?

They all look the same to me.

Yes.

All I see is tits on legs, Johnny.

And one of the people that actually is paying the closest attention is Catherine Switzer.

You might know that name because she was the woman in probably the most famous photograph of the Boston Boston Marathon, which is in 1967.

She ran the marathon as a registered entrant using her initials before women were allowed to run officially.

And one of the race directors,

Jock Semple, who is still a race director in the year 1980, he actually goes after her and tries to get the number off of her shirt.

And it looks very menacing.

And the photos are pretty shocking.

And I think a really great example of like the physical restraint that you know women were kind of under in terms of not being allowed into certain events.

It's so kind of classic Victorian in terms of like we have to protect femininity as a concept by attacking this woman personally.

But so what Catherine Switzer has done in the in the years since then is really become,

you know, she actually wasn't like the best runner.

She wasn't like going to be an elite marathoner, but what she did was become a huge advocate.

And in fact, you know, was one of those people that because of her notoriety, because of what she had done, she really used that to lift up other women marathoners and say, look, we're out here.

Why don't we have these opportunities?

And was one of the people who started a group that tried to get the Women's Olympic Marathon started.

And what she ended up doing, because the IOC and World Athletics were not super, they didn't really hear those requests and were just basically wrote them off as, you know, this isn't something people want to watch, or, you know, no one will be interested.

There aren't enough women in the world who are running marathons anyway.

We won't have the athletes.

And at this time, like, actually, the longest Olympic event for women runners was 1,500 meters, which is a mile.

So that was the extent that if you wanted to be an Olympian and you were a distance runner, like you had to run one mile, which is really not

very far for distance runners.

And so there was just a huge, a huge disparity there.

And so one of the things Catherine Switzer did was she started an entire group of women's races around the world.

She put on three different international marathons.

She put on all of these different road races to kind of introduce women's road racing to many different countries to prove that there would be women interested, to prove that we would be able to have athletes there, and just to kind of like,

I guess, improve access to women's running and women's racing for women all over the world.

Wow.

So she knew so many of these women and she knew who the favorites were.

And she was also tracking.

She was because she was there as an NBC correspondent and she was at the checkpoints and she was paying attention and she followed the top two runners the person who was in front was named Jaclyn Garot

she's Canadian French Canadian and this was kind of her it was going to be like kind of a big a big moment for her the the other woman was patty lyons who had been kind of like a mainstay in the boston marathon she was a local people really loved her and she was very good.

But Jacqueline was like way ahead.

I think she was like at least a mile ahead of Patty at certain points.

And Catherine, at various checkpoints, you know, like made eye contact with Jacqueline and like held up one finger, like, you're in first place.

So Catherine Switzer is actually the woman that you remember from the interview that you showed your students.

Oh my God.

Wow.

Because she's like, this seems super weird.

I don't know who this woman is.

She asks a

camera operator to come with her.

And I guess the camera operator was like, I really don't have much tape left.

Like, I don't have a lot of tape.

And she was like, do you have a little tape?

And he was like, yeah, I have a little tape.

And she's like, okay, come with me.

But she knows that something's fishy.

And so she starts asking those questions of Rosie Ruiz.

What was the time in your first ever marathon?

And where was it?

It was two hours and 56 minutes and 33 seconds in New York last year.

And so you improved from two hours and 56 minutes to two hours and 31 minutes.

What do you attribute that improvement in time to?

I don't know.

Have you been doing a lot of heavy intervals?

Someone else has been.

I'm not sure what intervals are.

What are they?

Intervals are track workouts that are designed to make your speed improve dramatically.

And if you went from a 256 to a 231, one would normally expect that you do a lot of speed work.

Is someone coaching you or advising you?

Uh, no, I advise myself.

Well, it was a fantastic performance, Rosie.

Congratulations, Rosie Ruiz, the Mystery Woman winner.

We missed her at all our checkpoints.

She came through at the finish in a fantastic 231.

We have to confirm that time at this point, but she was way ahead of a world-class field here today in the Boston Marathon.

Thank you, Rose.

Thank you.

Yes, what's an interval?

I just love that she asks it back.

Like, Yes.

It's like, just say yes.

Say, yeah, intervals.

Sure.

I was just going to say the other thing that happens in there is that Rosie starts sneezing.

Yeah.

The way Catherine Switzer writes about it later is like, she's just had these like nervous sneezes.

And I was like, is nervous sneezing a real thing?

Right?

Sometimes you're nervous and you've got flowers on your head, although I don't know if those are.

This reminds me of the, I watched, I got sick recently and found on YouTube YouTube the perfect documentary for being sick in bed, which is Major Fraud, which was a bashir-hosted special on this scandal on the British who wants to be a millionaire, where this guy cheated by having someone in the audience coughing to indicate the correct answer.

Oh, yes.

I feel like I remember that.

When I was young, I wanted to read about murder, and now I want to read about game show scandals.

Yes.

So, all of this is very, you know, suspicious, of course.

The other part that is very suspicious is that she has crossed the line in two hours and 31 minutes, which seems fast to me.

Extremely fast.

And, you know, sometimes women were like jumping into their second marathon and realizing, oh, I'm really good at this.

But often they were like, they were working with like a running club or a coach or

and Rosie Ruiz, like, if she had crossed into 31, that would have also been like the third fastest marathon ever run by a woman.

Yeah, the other person who really starts to question her is Bill Rogers, who was the male winner that year.

We got to start calling people male athletes more often.

I think that would really freak out men.

Be like, he's a male football player.

Bill Rogers is like, she didn't look like a runner.

She had too much fat on her legs.

A lot of marathoners are kind of on the thin side, but I found that like very shocking.

He says point blank, like she had too much body fat, but he also says she didn't appear as fatigued.

She wasn't, she didn't have like sweat stains on her face or anything, like no, like, you know, those like salty marks.

She didn't know what intervals were.

She didn't know what splits were.

And he was like, there's just no way.

And he knew the other women who were coming in, you know, in second and third.

And he was like, there's no way this girl did this and improved this much to beat these women who are like really world-class athletes.

Do you think that there's an element of like this people having this idea that marathon runners have a particular body type because that's who tries to run a marathon anyway?

I don't know.

I mean, your book gets into quite a lot about the fixation on how runners are supposed to look and how that

fixation on a certain body type like completely undermines women's ability to run a lot of the time.

Yeah, exactly.

Your body can have a lot of terrible medical and physical effects from not fueling enough, especially when you're someone like a long-distance runner who's expelling a lot of energy.

And that's still a thing is that we kind of look at people and assume that we know what they're good at.

It gets kind of repeated a lot that she's not,

she didn't look exactly like a runner and and it's like well sure but also she wasn't seen at any of the checkpoints and that's probably even more suspicious that's probably the suspicious part

and yeah the excuse too that that one of the things rosie says because they say oh we didn't we missed you you know you were like this mystery runner because we didn't see you at any of the checkpoints and her kind of immediate response is, oh, you probably didn't notice because I have short hair.

You probably thought I was a man.

You probably didn't see that I was a woman, right?

Good save, Rosie.

One of the articles that I read, you know, kind of mentioned this and they were like, well, she is 5'7, so maybe she was mistaken for a man.

I'm like,

ah, this guy in tuss striding through the streets makes sense.

Yes, with the with fat on her thighs.

You know, it's just like, right.

Like female runners are just supposed to like fall through the subway grate if they're not careful yes exactly exactly so also you know this weird thing but she's wearing this t-shirt and she's wearing a t-shirt that has the old adidas logo on it it also says the letters mti and it's this kind of like thick cotton t-shirt massachusetts institute of technology

it actually stands for metal traders institute which is where she worked.

It's the company she worked for, which is a metals trading company in New York.

They're on to you now.

Yeah.

But the thing about this shirt is it's like one of those like ringer tees.

It's like very like thick cotton.

And most people would not run a marathon in something like that,

especially like an elite runner.

And it's only wet kind of like down the very front.

You know, later someone will say, oh, she just like took a glass of water and dumped it on her head.

So she looked sweaty.

Oh, wow.

And the whole thing is like, if you've run a marathon, your whole body is going to be sweaty.

Like, you are going to be very sweaty.

It's 26 miles.

This is also springtime in Boston.

Right.

And one of the things that happens is the next day, the next morning, she goes on kind of like the local morning Boston news show with Bill Rogers.

And she does an interview.

They do the interview together.

And Rogers kind of like calls her out.

Oh, wow.

One of the interviewers is like, Rosie, like, this was such, again, like, such a huge improvement.

How did you make this improvement?

And she, you know, says, like, oh, I know that, like, some people are saying, like, I must not have really done it, but of course I did it.

And Rogers like cuts her off and is like, you know, it is a pretty remarkable improvement.

I think like Rosie's going to have to figure this one out for herself.

Like, gives her the like, okay, we don't believe you

to her face.

He gives her the shirt, Jan.

Yup.

But, Jan, you don't have any friends.

He starts telling the press, like, oh, I'm super skeptical.

I don't really believe she ran it.

She doesn't look like a runner.

She didn't look tired.

And the race directors, too, are saying, like, ah, this doesn't look great.

We're not sure what happened.

We're going to, we're going to mount an investigation.

Three days later, there's a press conference that she gives and she's just like sobbing.

And it feels very fake to me.

Like, it feels very like,

why are you just, why are you digging yourself this hole?

She says, I had no idea I was first.

I'm happy for myself.

This is a big accomplishment for me.

I'm sad such controversy is going on.

I really don't know why.

I ran the race.

I would not say anything different.

I'm upset.

I've been crying a lot, but it's not up to me to clear myself because I ran the race.

In spite of everything, I'm glad I came.

And she's like asked questions during this press conference, like, oh, what was like, what was your favorite part along the route?

And she's kind of like, oh, I saw a lot of buildings and churches.

Just really.

But the one thing that she does do that I think is really smart is she kind of of politicizes it.

And she says, I do not believe that there's enough coverage for women in any of the races.

I believe that maybe after this, whether you prove me guilty or not, which I am not, there will be more coverage of women crossing the finish line during 26 miles.

Well, that would be nice.

And then she's like, I'll take a lie detector test.

I'll submit to anything.

I'll run another marathon.

Funny.

Pump the brakes a little.

The press is insane for this story.

It's just good news, to quote Peep Show.

The Daily News, the New York Daily News, offered her $1,000 to run

a marathon distance.

Oh, wow.

And she said, I choose not to run.

Yes.

She said it was too, it was too close to when she had just run this other marathon.

She was too tired.

She needed some time to recover.

Oh, fair enough.

She is an elite athlete after all.

Yeah, yeah.

And so it's like the amount of journalists that you wish were covering like the 2025 project right now.

Oh, boy.

That amount of reporters are like unleashed on this story in a way that like they are tracking down her boss.

They are tracking down her family.

They are tracking down her roommates and her the security guards at her building.

Like every

possible source that might know something about Rosie Ruiz is being contacted by the press.

No, I don't, I think that that is, you know, like without a doubt, a traumatic experience.

Yes.

You know, exactly.

Aside from the reason why and everything else around it.

Yes.

She does talk for like the first week or so.

She's giving interviews.

She's answering questions.

And what she says is, she's like, I'm going to unpaint myself out of this corner.

I just know it.

And she tells everyone that her boss at the Metal Traders Incorporated, he offered to pay her way to Boston because she qualified for Boston from her New York City marathon time last fall.

And that's why she was wearing the MTI shirt.

This one dude named Steve Marek, who is

a president of a running club in Westchester, New York, kind of like comes to her aid.

And he's like also known as a kind of a big weirdo in the running world.

He got sort of famous because he started running marathons in a Superman costume.

Why not?

Why not?

So, a little bit eccentric.

Um, and he just kind of becomes her, like, kind of like press person, her supporter.

It's a really interesting relationship, and but he's also like, I've got witnesses, she was there, I can show, you know, like we know, we have evidence, Um, and it's really coming to her defense.

Release the emails.

They find Rosie's aunt, and her aunt is a professor at Wayne State College in Nebraska.

They interview her aunt.

Her aunt says, you know, I really hope that this controversy resolves and that she did win.

What she says is, you know, she's been a girl with a lot of problems in this country because of the separation from her father.

Rosie was born in Cuba, and this is during the Cuban Revolution.

And essentially in 1962, Rosie left Cuba, like many, many, many children left Cuba under Fidel Castro

because everyone was very scared.

There was this idea that like children weren't going to belong to their parents anymore.

There was actually a ton of unaccompanied minors who were sent to Miami.

And this is where Rosie grew up.

It's a little unclear whether her mom came at that that point or not, but her father definitely stayed in Cuba and she never saw him again because, you know, the borders were closed.

There was not any way to kind of maintain connection that way.

When after Rosie had graduated from high school, she actually went and lived with her aunt in Nebraska.

Her aunt got her into Wayne State College.

She took classes for

about

a year or two.

It's a little bit unclear.

But like she was like a music student.

She had like professor, former professors give interviews that like, oh, she was great.

She was going to be like a music teacher.

And we all really liked her.

And one of the things that like the press takes away from this is like, oh, she says she's a graduate of Wayne State, but she actually didn't even graduate.

Like she was like half a semester short.

I know.

And the other thing the aunt says is she actually returned.

The reason she didn't graduate is because she went back to Florida to take care of her mother who had cancer, which is also

not 100% sure if that's the case or not, but also like,

you know,

but she did end up, you know, in New York.

She was working as a secretary for this metal trading firm and you know, she was living in this big apartment building near Times Square and they're like trading metal.

So it's like a Wall Street kind of firm and like there's this whole culture there that I imagine is probably very masculine too.

And it kind of comes out later that the reason that she said, oh, my boss, you know, said he would pay for me to go to Boston is because he was a big runner and he actually like was encouraging a lot of his employees to run.

And so there's sort of this question of like, was she just getting into this all to like

be one of the boys to like, you know, prove she could to her boss.

People have done worse things to try and get random men to love them, you know?

Right.

And, you know, there's another article that said, oh, this, this building she lives in is actually supposed to be only for

members of like the actors union.

And she's not an actor, but maybe she like, so maybe this whole thing is a ploy that she's like, really just like an actress and this is a big sham.

And

wow.

Getting blown out of proportion, and it's like every little thing becomes a headline.

It comes out that she has written some bad checks.

She actually has a lawyer because she's she's written about 10 bad checks, and she's had to kind of like get them settled.

Can I also say, I know that, like, writing bad checks can like sometimes it's like intentional fraud, which obviously you shouldn't do if you can avoid it, you know, generally.

But also, like, I am always overdrawing

my account now that banking is easier and like in the past I would have also just had a bad memory and fucked up with greater consequences you know so it's like it's a very

as a criminal charge that one is very elastic in terms of just kind of you know using it to imply intent where there might not be but in this case you know I'm I'm not averse to believing she might have been doing something on purpose.

I mean, I agree, though.

I think it's kind of like, okay, it's not murder.

You know, right.

It's, it's, it's like, right.

Like, are we asking the right questions maybe?

Although those do, you know, support the idea of a pattern, but you know.

I think the other thing that happens is like this, this tone of jokiness.

And like, there's a newspaper that holds like a limerick contest for like people to send in their best Rosie Ruiz like limericks of how she really ran the marathon.

And of course, the New York Times editorial page page is like, Well, this is something that's actually entertaining that came from the world of running.

And

there's kind of like this undercurrent of like, running is so boring, at least something interesting happened,

which is very funny.

Jimmy Breslin, who's like, was an incredible journalist and columnist, and

just a he was like a Pulitzer winner.

He was livid.

He wrote this like column about how

she should be arrested and

all of this.

He's like, I'm like this liberal softy, but this really gets to me because I'm a runner.

And one of my greatest achievements is being seen as a runner and running a marathon.

And cheating at this just really pisses me off.

And it's like a very weird,

super angry

undercurrent to this whole thing.

And it does kind of start to remind me of the like save women sports people of today is like none of you people were paying attention before.

So like, why are you mad about this?

Why are you mad about something that you didn't ever think about until today?

Exactly.

The head of the New York Roadrunners, who is the group that runs the New York Marathon, is like a little bit concerned because the way that she qualified was at the New York Marathon.

Then because there's so much press coverage, this woman in New York comes forward with information about the New York Marathon.

Her name was Susan Morrow, and she was a photographer in New York, and she happened to have met Rosie on the subway during the New York City Marathon that fall.

And she was wearing the number, and she looked, you know, like a marathon runner.

And so they started talking.

And Rosie told Susan on the subway train that, oh, she had to drop out of the race after about 10 miles.

She had a twisted ankle.

She was like, she was taking the train to the finish line so she could go to the medical tent.

This is the subway story that people are often like, it gets a little confusing because there were two marathons, in fact.

Right.

We just mashed stuff together in memory.

And so she gets to the finish line at Central Park and this woman, Susan, kind of walks with her.

They actually like exchanged phone numbers and they were going like, this is how you met people, I guess, in 1980, but they like, they were gonna go have lunch together and like be friends.

The way that Susan remembers this is like she got to see actually like the women's winner of the New York Marathon that year, who was Greta Waits, who's like an incredible like historical figure in women's marathon running and held the world record at this time.

And Susan was like, it was actually like this extremely amazing moment in my life because I got to witness it like from a very up close.

Wow.

And the reason she was up close is because she was walking with Rosie, who kept telling the police and the barricades, like, oh, I'm a runner, I'm getting to the medical tent.

Like, let me buy.

Wow.

Later, some reporting will say

that

Rosie went to the medical tent and they kind of like took her

number down there and gave her a finish time.

Like, she told them basically, like, oh, yeah, I've finished.

Now I need some medical attention.

It's not totally clear how that happened, whether it was her trying to do it or whether it was a marathon, you know,

or whether she kind of lucked into it a little bit, potentially.

Exactly.

But what did happen

is she did the next day go to check her like official finish time.

So some people took that to mean like she knew that she was like tried to get the real finish time, even though she hadn't finished the New York Marathon.

And the New York Marathon officials actually ended up watching the finish line tape, and they did not see Rosie cross a finish line, so they invalidated her time on April 25th.

So, this was 96 hours after she had finished Boston.

She was still considered the winner at Boston, and New York said actually she never finished New York.

It's a very short-lived reign.

You know, Boston has been during this intervening time reviewing all of these photographs from the event.

They say that they looked over 10,000 photographs from the event, never saw Rosie.

God.

And eight days after the marathon has occurred, they officially take away her title.

And they ask if she would give the medal back.

And she says, no, I'm not giving the medal back.

If you're going to cheat, then like, just go all the way.

Be a handful.

Keep the medal.

They can make a new one.

They did.

They did.

They made a new one.

Nobody wants a used metal, you know?

She does give one more interview in the days after this.

And she's just 100% gung-ho.

Of course, I did it.

All of this is a sham.

And they just keep kind of like bringing up these inconsistencies.

And she just does what she did in that first interview, which is like, what?

What's that?

Oh, okay.

You know?

And the other thing that this article brings up is that they've found medical records of Rosie's, which show that she had a brain tumor removed in 1973

and another surgery in 1978 to have a plate put in.

The reason this is a little bit relevant is that she actually, in her application to the New York Marathon that fall of 79,

she was actually late registering, but she asked for a medical exemption because she said she was dying of brain cancer.

And

that's why she was allowed in, even though she was beyond the like the registration deadline.

And they actually have her medical records supposedly.

They show them to a neurosurgeon.

They have him kind of like assess.

And supposedly what they say is she had been in a car accident.

She had some like head trauma.

And because of that, they found like a

benign tumor in her brain that was like the size of a tangerine.

And that was 1973.

Yeah, a pretty large tumor.

So she did have that.

I can't believe I brought up tangerines earlier.

You just, you just had a feeling.

Gosh.

I mean, that's like a tangerine is, I mean, that's really,

that seems so big.

So in 1973, she had that removed.

In 1978, she had this plate put in.

This doctor who looks over these records for them says, really, this shouldn't.

have caused anything to happen to her.

Like, you know, she would have been fine.

She wouldn't have had brain damage.

She's not like, like, this shouldn't have caused anything.

But also, no, she never had cancer.

And whatever she wrote on that form was probably a lie.

So in this article, they literally diagnose her as a sociopath.

Great.

Great journalism.

Love it.

They like went to a psychologist at Oberlin and were like, what kind of person just tells lies like this?

Everyone.

Americans.

That's who.

It's very weird to read because then it like at the end of the article is like, this is what a sociopath is.

And they like

print the ways that you can like identify a sociopath.

Coming up next, Ronald Reagan.

Seems nice, seems great.

She also tells this

reporter at the time that she's on a paid leave from her job at the metal trading firm because

her boss told her that she he wanted her to rest

and get ready like for her next race.

And apparently, you know,

that is not what actually happened.

He was pretty concerned about her

lying and was basically like had to fire her after

a few weeks off.

Yeah.

She was also like signed up for another marathon in Vermont that was going to be kind of like under the radar.

We're not going to tell the press.

And then she pulled out of it right before because she said she had an injury.

And so she kind of disappears for a time after that.

Yeah, good for her, really.

So Switzer actually really took a great experience away from this, which, like, what she started telling everyone was: you know, really, you should all be running the women's race better than you have been.

Like, clearly, you're not running this race well enough.

At the checkpoints, people really need to be paying attention.

What happens with Garu, who is my little French-Canadian, like, love at this point?

They call her back to Boston and they give her her own medal.

They have a little banquet for her and they stage like a photo up of her crossing the finish line and they like put the tape back up and they bring in like people to stand and cheer.

And in every

interview, like she is so gracious, even today, like she is

in her 70s and she's just like, still,

this was probably worse for her than it was for me like she said like yes i wish she would have apologized at some point i wish she would have come clean but also i'm sure this was probably pretty bad for her

so i i wanted to like kind of take a break here from her story and just sort of pull back and look at

why this was so fascinating to the media for so long because Really, when we look at women's marathons at the time, any coverage of it might appear for like a day.

Like the Boston winner might get one little paragraph of the women's race in this, you know, in the coverage of who won.

Even today, you know, looking back at the people who did make big headlines, like Bobby Gibb, when she snuck into the marathon, or Catherine Switzer herself, you know, when she registered and was pushed out, like those stories didn't last that long.

You know, it was maybe a day or two of media attention.

And the other thing that I started to notice in these articles was these mentions that you know men cheated all the time at marathons men cheat no

I know

I found this entire article when they were like in the midst of like, did Rosie do it or not?

There was a whole separate article about some man named Michael Wheeler who would like serially do this.

He would like register to these like huge marathons and the way that he would get in is he would use a name of a different Michael who was like an elite runner or like a known runner.

That's brilliant because we all know there's like infinity Michaels out there.

And he did this for Boston.

He did this for New York.

He did this at the Orange Bowl Marathon.

Perhaps a Sarah could do the same, but you know, those glory days are over.

So You're on.

Everyone's micro except.

It's too hard.

Well, he would often not run them.

He would do the thing that Rosie did, which is jump in at a certain point.

And people started to like recognize him as the guy who jumped in.

And

it's just very funny to me that like, okay, that guy, nobody knows Michael's name, you know, but we all made Rosie Ruiz into this like decades-long joke.

Also, like, the race director of the New York Marathon is quoted in one of these stories saying, like, oh yeah, we had six people caught this year for cutting course, 18 for wearing another runner's number, 12 for giving their numbers to somebody else, two using false names.

And

it's just like, okay, this is just a thing that has happened in these races that are so huge and, you know, kind of on a mass scale of every man humanity, you know.

What do you think motivates people to cheat in marathons?

And I mean, I realize there's like a lot of different potential motivation, but like, what, what occurs to you when you think about it?

Or, you you know, to cheat, to cheat more broadly, but like marathons in particular seem like an interesting thing to cheat at because people are so impressed by it.

You know, it's such a kind of status symbol, it would seem to me.

Exactly.

I think for sure it's probably, there's probably for a lot of people a status thing involved.

For Rosie, too, it was like being able to go back to work the next day and say like, you know, I ran the Boston Marathon was probably what she was looking for, you know, and it is often what a lot of other people are trying to to say that they did something that was, especially at this time, still not done by very many people.

There was, it was a pretty kind of like a superhuman feat you could feel like you, you accomplished and you would probably get a little bit of social

social boost from that.

But I don't know.

I mean, it does feel like if you're gonna do it, why not just try to do it in some ways?

But also, like, yeah, if it's open to like anyone that signs up and you can

get away with it, like, maybe some people like trying to figure out how to get away with things too.

I think that might be part of it.

Yeah, something I've been trying to live by more lately is the idea that like small, finite accomplishments make humans really happy.

You know, like I grew some potatoes this year,

some tiny little potatoes,

and it like brought me a lot of joy to eat my tiny potatoes, literally small potatoes.

Oh my God.

And

so like, if she was actually to like start running, then she would probably end up like doing a little like 5K or something.

And I would hope that like.

that would actually be fulfilling in a way that like because i think people who like embark on these cons when like it's not for gain it's for prestige like i think it's something that you can probably

need to keep escalating because you're never actually fulfilled by it because it's not yours, and you know, it isn't.

You know, and also, I do want to point out, like, she's she's a woman who got away with a con.

And I think people typically are more fascinated in women doing things like this.

On a broader, sort of male-driven cultural level, I think, in a way, like, women pulling cons is appealing the same way women running is, where it's like, well, golly, I can't believe she, the little lady pulled that off.

And also to point out, like, she was Cuban.

She, and this is a very, like, Boston is a very, like, like, even today, people talk about how it's not very diverse.

It's like, um, you know, has this very kind of New Englandy, waspy vibe.

To be fair, like the, the road race is very white, but you know, potato potata, really.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

You know, and she had, she was an immigrant, she had a bit of an accent.

It also turns out that she's queer, like that's confirmed later in life.

But, you know, I think there's kind of this maybe outsider-ness to her that does make, you know, the media, but society at large, white men lie and pull fraud all the time and get away with it.

Right.

And we just kind of let it happen.

Yes, it's called Wall Street.

And so I thought I'd get back to Rosie here and sort of what happens in these post-marathon years because

she continues to receive so much scrutiny and there there is some crazy shit that happens in her life.

I bet.

You know, this doesn't exactly help a person's employment prospects, I don't think.

Well, speaking of which, her old boss gets interviewed years later and kind of tells the whole story.

And, you know, earlier there had been reports that he offered to pay for her to go to Boston when he found out she qualified.

And this was kind of, you know, all her trying to impress him.

And he gives this pretty extensive interview 12 years later,

or no, 16 years later, and says that, you know, actually, the office was like so excited when she won.

She came back wearing like the laurel crown into the office.

Everyone was so thrilled for her.

He hadn't paid for her to go, but he had like said, you know, please wear the t-shirt.

He kind of described the vibe of the office that year as like we were all kind of like young and fun and runners.

And this was kind of like something we all talked about.

It was like our running,

and that she was like a girl trying to break through.

And so that makes me think like, okay, she was probably in a fairly male office, especially thinking it's finance.

What was she doing?

You know, what was her motivation for saying she was doing this stuff?

And apparently when she got back, and then you know, these questions start coming out about what she had done.

He actually offers her,

he

says, I will give you paid leave to go train for a marathon and just finish it.

I don't care what your time is, just finish it.

It's a very Jimmy Carter thing to do, honestly.

Right.

Yes.

Yeah.

And then she kind of comes back a couple weeks later and is like, oh, I've got a bad ankle.

I got an injury.

I can't run anymore.

And he's like, oh, well, where were you?

Where were you training?

She says, I was training in Montauk.

Well, that's where he lives.

And he runs.

And he's like, well, I never saw you out there.

And she just kind of does the thing, like, what's an interval sort of responses.

And

like, catch me if you can.

No, really.

Please catch me.

I'm jogging very slowly.

So she gets fired.

He says, it's not because of Boston.

It's because you're lying to me and I can't really trust you.

And I need to trust you because we're a financial firm.

I mean, kind of a novel concept in finance, but yeah, I appreciate it generally.

He should be like, we are promoting you.

You are fantastic.

So two years later, she's working for a real estate firm in New York and she actually gets caught stealing $60,000 in cash and checks from the firm and ends up in jail for a week.

And she gets sentenced to five years of probation.

The next year, she moves back to Florida.

She is arrested at an airport hotel with two other women for trying to sell two kilos of cocaine to undercover agents.

And a couple years later, she actually gets married to a Colombian man, which lasts for about a year and a half.

She told someone later that they divorced because she was too liberal for him, which I think is a funny quote.

But one thing she got out of the marriage was that she changed her name.

So she changed it to Rosie Vivas.

She took his name.

Love it.

And ended up being, moving to South Florida.

She says to be closer to her mother, who had Alzheimer's and was living in a nursing home.

In 1996, the Boston Globe did this huge investigation on her and this like giant feature story, which is a little weird, right?

16 years after this had happened.

I was wondering if you wanted to read a bit of the article.

Okay.

Of course, I would.

Ruiz makes choose never to speak again publicly, although her story, Rick Fodder for the TV tabloids, could bring the video cams and strobe lights to her apartment door now that her whereabouts had been printed here.

Her roommate clearly was distressed at being found.

How did you know my name?

She said when she came to the gate of the courtyard that leads to the apartment store.

You've talked with her brother?

Did her brother tell you where she lived?

Isn't that sound like threatening and scary?

There's a sort of changing ethic and journalism that I find very interesting about like what, how much of a right does the press have to bother people?

And that's like a very interesting conversation to be have.

But I do think that like it's hard to see an argument where like in 1996 it's worth

hunting someone like a fox in the forest.

The other person who kind of changes their story is Steve Merrick, who was the Superman guy who was kind of defending Rosie against the press at the time.

And he actually tells the Globe in 96 that she actually admitted to him that she didn't run the race a few months afterwards.

And this is the only time anyone ever says that she had admitted it.

What's interesting, though, is he says, I would still defend her, you know, if it was all the same, because she just needed someone like on her side, and he could tell that she needed someone on her side.

Yeah, guilty people need a defense.

And I do think that, like, you know, in terms of becoming a tabloid, sort of just the person of the moment, and I think the medium has changed, but the mechanism is still basically the same today, except that we go through more people faster,

is that like the, I think the punishment basically never fits the crime because people achieve this kind of notoriety by doing something that is like maybe, maybe, you know, and I'm talking about not serious crimes, but like frauds and like cheating scandals and like someone, someone doing something that like really is mostly just like epically a bad idea where you're like, what were they thinking?

And it's like, well,

they probably weren't thinking that well about any of it for whatever reason.

And so in that case, it's like us treating them like a war criminal in terms of the way we talk about them isn't, isn't going to help.

You know, like you don't have to think that they didn't do it or that what they did was like not a terrible idea to think that it makes sense to treat them this way.

Yeah, exactly.

And he also says, you know, which I think is a really like

human way of framing her, which she didn't really receive a lot of, is he's like, I think she just kind of made a mistake.

Like she didn't mean to win it.

She was obviously very surprised when she, you know, went across first and they and they crowned her and everything.

He's like, she just timed it wrong and she probably just wanted to put up a pretty good time and go back to her office and yeah and like have the glory of that of finishing the boston marathon um with her office mates who all apparently were obsessed with running at the time it makes a million times more sense in my opinion or at least the way my brain works to like not do something so incredibly conspicuous that you're going to end up with like, yeah, a record time for the marathon.

I mean, I guess really she should have learned more about marathons and how not to be too impressive.

Yes, right.

She's like, I just got to be done with this thing.

And so, what's interesting is she had listed the Globe had found two addresses associated with her during this story.

The first is where they

met the woman who they refer to as her roommate.

Yeah, like she was, you know, I think they say, at the very least, a very caring roommate, you know, something like that.

All right, Boston Globe.

Exactly.

What's kind of funny is she was actually living at the other address with another woman, her actual partner at the time and their family.

They actually, her partner had a few small children and they were.

a family together and at the very end of the of the piece they they kind of relate this moment of the reporter confronting her, like essentially like staking out the house and like

confronting her when she like gets out of the car.

The only thing that I will say about that is that there is another reference to like her legs being quote-unquote thick.

If you must stake out someone's house, you don't have to comment about their body as well.

You know, that's a thought.

No.

So the last thing that we hear from Rosie Ruiz is about two years later in 1998, she does give an interview to the Palm Beach Post.

She's apparently like

doing fine.

She has a job at Lab Corp.

She's like a customer representative or something.

And her coworkers were all,

they described her as, quote, extremely friendly and quote, extremely sweet.

And they said that over the years, they'd asked her many times if she was the Rosie Ruiz from the marathon.

And she would say, Nope, you're confusing me with someone else.

Love it.

And then, when she found out that this reporter was talking to her colleagues, she called her boss and said, Yes, it was me.

I ran it and I won it.

And nobody was expecting me to win.

I was young, and they expected someone else to win, and it was political.

Okay,

what do you think about that?

Um,

it makes me think that, like, like you must be also trying to convince yourself of of something, right?

Yeah.

There is this other thing that continues to come up, you know, which is like her trauma of leaving Cuba and leaving her family when she's a child.

And

she says, she tells this reporter during this interview, she ran to escape the pressures of moving to Florida and there was nothing for me to do but run.

It was an escape for me.

And so even if that isn't true,

I feel like there's like a narrative in her head that she could convince herself it is.

And wouldn't it be a great story?

You know, she did become this great runner and she did this very American thing of turning adversity into excellence, which we love so much.

Exactly.

And like, if it was political, like, Cuba was extremely political in 1980.

Like, it was, you know, there was a lot of

international politics going on there and between the U.S.

and Cuba.

And, you know, that could also be an explanation for like her being doubted.

But, you know, we also know that it almost certainly did not happen.

But two days after she finishes like the phone interview, she apparently sends a letter to this reporter and continuing to say that not only did she run the Boston marathon in 1980, she is going to run another marathon in 2000.

Better start doing some intervals, you know?

Yes.

So she says, what I can promise myself and the American public who believes in me is to run again.

I may not win this time, but I will be there and I'll run again the entire course just as before, except this time I'll be more prepared.

I'll look just like any other runner.

I'm sure they won't mistake me this time.

You know what?

I love her.

I know.

Who among us has not lied about winning the Boston Marathon and then convinced ourselves it really happened for the rest of our lives?

That's what I would like to put to the people.

Exactly.

This is not the most compelling argument I've ever made.

But, you know, yeah, I guess, I guess, I feel like if you become a figure of like this much entertainment for the American people, then like you deserve leniency.

You've already kind of done your time for whatever you did and more.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And she has literally done her time for what she had.

That's true.

Yeah.

The other crime.

So we're coming to the end, which is Rosie Ruiz died in 2019.

She was 66.

And her death was like kind of shrouded in mystery, too, because

she had withdrawn so much from public life for obvious reasons.

The way that the press kind of found out about her death was her family had posted an obituary, you know, on one of those like memorial sites.

And

they used her name, Rosie Vivas, and they don't refer to the marathon.

I mean, obviously.

Fair enough.

Yeah.

And so all there's again another kind of little media frenzy just to send Rosie off to the other side, which is like, is she really dead?

Is this the actual Rosie Rubies?

Wow.

Nice.

And it is, of course.

She died as she lived, creating a disturbance.

Yes, exactly.

But I do, I wondered if you wanted to read just like a tiny bit of the obituary because I think it's actually very lovely.

I would love that.

Aw, thank you for letting me do that.

Okay.

Rosie was always full of life and love.

One of her biggest accomplishments was when she met the love of her life in 1988 at a friend's party.

They started off as friends first and eventually it turned into a partnership that lasted 26 years.

One would say that destiny brought them together.

Not only did she gain a partner, she gained an entire family.

She played a huge part in helping raise their three wonderful boys.

Sharing her love was such a blessing to the family.

You know, the big question that is always implicit to me when we talk about somebody who we have this flashfold memory of because everybody paid attention to them for a couple weeks and then moved on is like, not necessarily like, you know, what did they do?

What are they telling the truth about this or that?

But like, well, what kind of life did they have?

You know, and this feels like if we believe this obituary, because why not?

She didn't write it, that she had a really great life.

Apart from the whole, you know, being followed by the press periodically the whole time thing.

I don't like that part, but the rest of it.

You know, Catherine Switzer was kind of asked about her a lot because, you know, she was this huge advocate for the women's marathon.

And, and people would often say, you know, oh, this is going to just set us back, isn't it?

Like having this cheater in the race.

And, you know, it's just, it's just made the women's race a joke.

And Switzer was always kind of like actually

this was really good for us

this brought us so much attention it made the race officials really mad so it made them actually have to care about the race and like making it more professional we gotta pay attention to the female runners because they might cheat exactly

um the next year 1981 is when you know the ioc finally accepted the women's marathon into the olympics and it was kind of on this this bigger stage all of a sudden.

And I think it's one of those things where maybe hearing about the women's marathon again and again and again in the press for a year, like maybe that put the idea in people's minds that, like, oh yeah, there's a women's marathon.

Well, yeah, and this is like incredible free press for the existence of women who run marathons, right?

So, like, how many people did first think about long distance running because they heard about a cheating scandal and they were like,

I could try that.

Not the cheating, but the running.

Exactly.

You know, I did want to give kind of like the last bit to Jacqueline Garot, who is the real winner of the 1980 Boston Marathon.

Yeah.

You know, like Switzerland, she was just extremely gracious about Rosie Ruiz.

She actually did end up getting to run in the 1984 Olympic Marathon.

She was a national record holder in Canada.

She still runs.

She actually looks like an extremely lovely, like old hippie lady.

She's like a massage therapist.

In every interview, she's, of course, asked about Rosie Ruiz.

And every single time, she is so gracious.

And I was wondering if you wanted to read the very last thing, which is what she posted on Facebook when Rosie died.

Yeah, thank you.

I love the readings that we're doing in this one.

Okay, wow.

She said, Let's remember Rosie is a great woman who cared for her family and was a very loving person and, like all of us, made some mistakes.

R.A.P.

Rosie Ruiz.

We do all make mistakes.

We do all lie sometimes.

And, you know, some of us have more reason to than others as well.

Yeah.

Sometimes you make a mistake when you're making a mistake and you meant to make a small mistake, but it's a big mistake.

It's a really big mistake.

And then you're staying on TV and you're kind of stuck.

and you've got a laurel wreath on your head.

Oh my God.

I really love that.

You know, I'm sure that like different people feel differently and like would feel differently if they also were the person who actually won that year and who, you know, was not remembered to the same extent as the person who pretended to win.

You know, the idea of like, well, if you cheat, the victims are the people who actually ran it.

And it's like, well, in a way, but also like you, you can't take anything away from them because they actually did run that race.

Nobody can take that away, really.

Yeah.

Maggie, this is so lovely.

And where can people find you and a little more of your work?

Where can they catch you if they can?

I lost track of that.

People can totally find my book, hopefully in any bookstore that is close to them that they love and it's called better faster farther how running changed everything we know about women and you can also find me on Instagram or substack you can just look me up Maggie Mertens I have a newsletter that I send out ostensibly once a week but

not so much lately about feminism and and kind of our daily lives.

But you know, who wants a newsletter once a week?

That's essentially someone saying to you, here, you delete this.

Exactly.

I want a newsletter to come sporadically when I least expect it.

That's ideal.

Well, then you're the perfect reader for me, Sarah.

And you're the perfect newsletterer for me.

And that was our episode.

Thank you so much for listening.

Thank you again for being with us.

You can find Maggie's book, Better, Faster, Farther, How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women.

Anywhere you like to find books, you will probably find it there.

Thank you again to Maggie for being our guest.

Thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing this episode.

Thank you to you.

We'll see you in two weeks.