The “loneliness of the long-distance runner” is a phenomenon of the past. A sport earlier in the century associated in many people’s minds with alienation and escape has become in the new century a pastime marked by conformity and fashion. By 1998 an estimated 32 million Americans engaged in running, and, instead of finding deserted paths to run down, they did so down busy thoroughfares and on health-club treadmills dressed in the trendiest sports outfits. In George Sheehan’s Running and Being (1978) the sport found its answer to existentialism; in Jimmy Carter it found its own president.

The running craze took off in the 1970s, following the publication of works like Kenneth Cooper’s Aerobics (1968), which highlighted the relationship between exercise and the prevention of heart disease. During the 1970s several runners brought attention to the sport. Frank Shorter won the gold medal at the 1972 Olympics, while Bill Rodgers was a four-time Boston and New York marathon winner between 1975 and 1980. In 1977 Jim Fixx published his bestselling Complete Book of Running, though his death from a heart attack seven years later led many to question the sport’s curative qualities.

The sport also attracted women in great numbers, whether for purposes of competition, training, overall physical fitness, or losing weight. The Olympics originally had no track and field for women. In 1928 women were allowed to compete only in races shorter than 800 meters. By the late 1960s many women wanted to begin competing in road races. A showdown occurred in 1967 at the Boston Marathon, where Katherine Switzer, using just her first initial and last name to register, received a number and finished the race. Within two years women could officially enter into both the Boston and New York marathons, and, in 1970, fifty-five women finished in the New York Marathon. Longer races were gradually added to the Olympic Games after 1972. Currently 32 percent of finishers in road races are women, about 50 percent in 5K races, and about 28 percent in marathons.

Joan Benoit was the winner of the first women’s marathon at the 1984 Olympics bringing the same attention to women’s running that Shorter had brought to the sport in the 1970s.