At the finish, Gibb was escorted to a brief but raucous news conference. The news media tried to goad her into saying she was a man-hater, but she refused to take the bait. “I said simply that I loved running, loved men, and believed in men and women doing things together,” she said.

Gibb returned to Boston the next two Aprils, and was the first female finisher both years. Boston didn’t allow women to run officially until 1972, when Long Island’s Nina Kuscsik became the first official women’s champion. It was in 1967 that the marathon’s race director, Jock Semple, body-blocked Kathrine Switzer while the cameras clicked, producing one of running’s most famous, and harrowing, photo sequences.

For the last three years, I have been researching and writing about the pioneers of women’s running, profiling 22 women from the late 1950s to the early ’90s. I call them the first ladies of running. The situations they faced — often laughable, sometimes infuriating, always daunting — today seem hard to believe.

A good example: In the mid-1960s, the Indianapolis board of education ruled that a high school student, Cheryl Pedlow, shouldn’t run anywhere within sight of the boys and their teams. She might prove too great a “distraction” to them.

Fortunately, Pedlow stuck with it, and in 1971 she set a marathon world record — 2:49:40. In mid-February, her daughter Shalane Flanagan qualified for her fourth consecutive United States Olympic team. Shalane’s mother never had a shot at the Olympics; she was too far ahead of her time, as there were no Olympic distance events for women.

Among the 22 first women in my book, Grace Butcher, the only one I haven’t met, may be my favorite. A farm girl and poet from Chardon, Ohio, Butcher won the national championship for 880 yards in 1958. In 1976, just past her 40th birthday, she made a solo 2,500-mile motorcycle trip through New England, and wrote a feature article for Sports Illustrated. In it she noted, “What life is for, if it is for anything, is to find out what you do well, and then do it, for heaven’s sake, before it’s too late.”

Like Butcher, other first ladies of running did many things well. Gibb is an accomplished painter and sculptor who also worked in the lab of the famed M.I.T. neuroscientist Jerome Lettvin. Julia Chase, the first woman to run a road race in the United States, in 1961, received a Ph.D. in zoology, studying bats and chimpanzees in the field. A quarter-century later, she earned a medical degree at 53 and switched to psychiatry.