Silvia Ruegger may be stripped of her long-standing Canadian women’s marathon record because there are those who believe it was testosterone enhanced.

There’s no question about the farm girl from Newtonville, Ont., being clean when she set the record of two hours, 28 minutes and 36 seconds in winning the Houston Marathon in 1985.

It’s just that under a new rule established in late August by track and field’s world governing body (the IAAF), a world record in women’s road racing only counts if it is set against an all-female field. This was done to eliminate any benefits of pace-setting by faster male runners.

It’s expected the national federations will fall into step in altering their record books, though Athletics Canada says they have not had time to study the matter yet.

Ruegger finds it ludicrous her record could be erased.

“They will do like they will do, just like they kept women out of participating for how many years,” said Ruegger. “Now, they’re trying to discredit the performance again. They did it for years before they opened the door and let us run. Now, they can’t even leave that open. They have to try to discredit the effort and say it was assisted.

“Go after the dopers. There’s assisted, right. We did it clean. We did it on hard work and sacrifice. If one of those guys wants to come and look at all my journals of what I did, the price I paid to run that time, it was not because there was a guy running in the race, it was because I ran 200 kilometres a week and gave up everything else.

“I ran 26.2 miles in 2:28 and I hurt doing it. And I didn’t do it because I was ‘helped’ by anyone. Like c’mon. There was no guy around me. Take a look at the footage. Even if there are guys around you, you still have to take every step on your own. You have to pull on that personal resolve, that mental strength, that fortitude, all of those hours you put in training.”

Ruegger laughs heartily as she says a lot of this. She certainly isn’t bitter.

The 50-year-old is in a very good place, doing work she loves as executive director of Start2Finish, a charity with a holistic approach that uses running and reading to try to break the cycle of child poverty.

The prospect of losing a 26-year-old record doesn’t hurt her ego.

“The performance is the performance,” said Ruegger, who was eighth when the women’s marathon made its Olympic debut in 1984 in Los Angeles. “I didn’t do a Rosie Ruiz. Rosie Ruiz is a different story. Rosie was aided by the subway.”

Ruiz is the infamous cheater who took the subway and was declared the winner of the 1980 Boston Marathon only to be exposed later. Canada’s Jacqueline Gareau, a contemporary of Ruegger, was the real winner.

John Craig, managing director of Athletics Ontario and a former marathoner, said he also doesn’t understand the logic of the new rule.

“It seems like more IAAF foolishness to me,” he said. “To me, the sex of the pacesetter is irrelevant. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s not a male or female thing. It’s a pacesetter thing. You either allow pacesetters or you don’t.”

Ruegger remembers signing petitions that would allow women to run further than 1,500 metres and not being permitted to run farther than 800 metres in high school. What concerns the Olympian is the message being sent by the new rule and its potential effect on the legacy of women’s distance running.

“What are you saying to the next generation about what women are capable of doing?” said Ruegger. “It’s just sending yet another negative message. For me, that’s what I focus on … that legacy.

“I think all of us as women, we did it because we had a passion to do it in spite of all the odds, in spite of all the obstacles and people saying you shouldn’t do it and why are you doing it and all of that. But part of it was about leaving a legacy and being role models and examples and showing young girls what was possible.

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“I know what I did to get that time. Don’t take it away. Don’t take it away.”

What was understood to be the women’s world marathon record — the 2:15:25 that Paula Radcliffe of England ran at the 2003 London Marathon, in a mixed race with male pacesetters for elite women — is now out of consideration, the New York Times reports. So is the 2:17:18 she ran at the Chicago Marathon, another mixed race, in 2002.

What is now the record — yet only the third-fastest race that Radcliffe has run — is the 2:17:42 that she ran in London in 2005. In that race, elite women started 45 minutes ahead of the men’s field, racing and finishing separately, now a common practice in major marathons.