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Jun 23, 2016

"Life is all about breaking those mental barriers: leaping across and clean over those little invisible fences." --Prakash Iyer

50 Years Ago She Did Something No Woman Ever Had

Fifty years ago, Bobbi Gibb applied to run the Boston Marathon and was informed that, "Women are not physiologically able to run a marathon." So she decided to enter anonymously and ended up being the first woman to finish it. "In those days, if you were a woman and you were lucky enough to go to college [Gibb attended Tufts University School of Special Studies], you were expected to get engaged your senior year and then get married. There was no way for women to support themselves economically. Women couldn't own a house; they couldn't get a mortgage; they couldn't get a credit card... I wanted to be married and have children -- but that's not all. I wanted to use my mind and my body. Part of what I was doing with running was getting away from all of that, finding a kind of freedom I didn't have in society. I knew I wasn't going to change, so the world had to change."