Jacqueline Gareau

(This piece is for my latest book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from November 1996.)

REAL WINNER. You might think that with all my travels through the sport for all these years, I would have bumped into most of running’s big names. Not so. I’ve missed more of these athletes than I have met.

One who got away until this fall was Jacqueline Gareau. We finally talked at the Royal Victoria Marathon, where she was a featured speaker and the honored guest at the pre-race dinner.

She was once the most immediate victim of the sport’s most notorious cheater. But she rose far above Rosie.

It was Jacqueline who crossed the Boston Marathon finish line in 1980 behind the woman whose name we still can’t utter without gagging. Jacqueline was honored belatedly as the first, and still only, Canadian woman to win at Boston.

She comes from Quebec, taught herself English as an adult and now speaks the second language fluently, but still is shy about going public in it. She came to her Victoria talk armed with a thick stack of index cards, carefully printed and color-coded so the words would come out right.

She then talked easily about her running life, seldom glancing at the cue cards. She told of starting to running for exercise (at age 24) and making a marathon her first race (finishing in about 3:40). She would improve by more than an hour.

Jacqueline ran in the first World Championships Marathon for women, placing fifth. But her three Olympic attempts brought frustration and then joy.

She dropped out with an injury at the Los Angeles Games. Three Canadian women ran faster in 1988 and bumped her off the Seoul team. She was training for a final Olympic attempt in 1992 when she learned she was pregnant for the first time at age 39. She says of her now four-year-old son, “He is my gold medal.”

Jacqueline Gareau is the Joan Benoit Samuelson of Canada. The country’s most successful woman marathoner, yes, but also a ground-breaker.

Today’s U.S. women marathoners honor Samuelson for making this road easier for them to take. At the Victoria dinner honoring Gareau, a speaker asked “all you Canadian women who are running the marathon tomorrow, please stand and applaud this woman who made it easier for you to be here.”

About 100 of them stood and cheered. Jacqueline responded, “My heart fills with love for you all.”

UPDATE. I saw Jacqueline Gareau one other time, again at the Victoria Marathon. By then she was competing as a triathlete, working as a massage therapist and coaching distance runners in Quebec. Her website address is jacquelinegareau.com.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. Latest released was Miles to Go. Other titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Memory Laps, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]