"Once you leave this tunnel, your life will be changed forever." That sounds like a metaphor for any of us going through a difficult time, but it's actually the thought that was in Joan Benoit's mind as she entered the tunnel into the Olympic stadium 30 years ago this Aug. 5, ahead of Grete Waitz and Rosa Mota and dozens of others in the first Women's Olympic Marathon.

Benoit had been running for well over two hours already that morning, covering all but the last few yards of a 26.2-mile race--a distance she and other women like her had to fight to earn the right to run.

Today, the only way into one women's marathon is literally to win a lottery, and there probably isn't a high school in the country that lacks a girls' track team, as my own high school did in the 1970s. There are marathons open only to women runners, and at least one at which finishers receive a silver Tiffany necklace in lieu of the typical hunk of cast medal not even a he-man could wear. Women run together in groups all over the country, often in training programs that double as fundraisers for causes like leukemia and breast cancer research. But it wasn't always so.


In 1967, Kathy Switzer, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon, registered as "K. Switzer" to fudge the issue of her gender and finished the race only because men running with her physically blocked officials from dragging her off the course. The marathon was considered an unsafe distance for women to run, lest we hurt ourselves.

Even when women got started running, it wasn't smooth sailing. At the world's first road race exclusively for women, the six-mile Crazylegs Mini-Marathon (mini, after the mini skirt), Playboy bunnies posed at the starting line for publicity, the winning prize was a recycled bowling trophy and the race co-founders were asked to hike their dresses over their knees for the press. Fortunately for all of us who want to be taken seriously in whatever we do, they refused.

Back then, less than 300,000 high school girls participated in interscholastic sports, and there were more cheerleaders, pom-pom girls and swim timers than there were members of girls' sports teams at many schools. Now more than 3 million high school girls participate in interscholastic sports --a tenfold increase--and at most road races, the number of women runners exceeds the number of men. Times have changed, and a look at the popularity of women's running is a testament to just how much.

As for Joan Benoit (now Joan Benoit Samuelson), six years ago she again qualified for the Olympic trials, where she placed 90th out of 124 finishers, failing to qualify for the Olympics but setting an American record for women 50 to 54.

As she emerged from that Olympic tunnel 30 years ago, Benoit thought: "You're not finished. Get around this track and nail this thing down."

Again, a rather nice metaphor, this one for where women remain today in so many areas where we've made some progress: in Congress, in corporate America, in sports, in ... well, just about everywhere.

Joanie did indeed nail that thing down, of course, finishing the race in 2:24:52, a time that would have won more than half of the previous 25 men's Olympic races at this distance that people claimed women couldn't run.

Meg Waite Clayton of Palo Alto is a New York Times bestselling author of five novels, including the forthcoming The Race for Paris. She wrote this for this newspaper.