VANESSA FRASER STOOD alone on the starting line at San Francisco State's Cox Stadium. Wearing her redand-black Bowerman Track Club colors and her long, blond hair in a low ponytail, she gazed out at the eucalyptus grove flanking the first turn of the outdoor track. On her bib was the number 701.
Several racers milled about nearby-but they weren't her usual elite competitors. One had white hair and wore a vintage red-and-blue tracksuit. Another had braces on her teeth and was there with her mother. Small children toddled beside some of the other women.
Usually dormant on early Sunday mornings, the stadium buzzed with energy for San Francisco's fourth attempt at a world record in the women's 100xl-mile relay-an event in which 100 competitors each run a mile in an effort to set the fastest total time.
Fraser told me that when she learned of the world record attempt, she was drawn to the idea of a collective mission, a rare thing in the world of professional running. It reminded her of what she loved about running in the first place: a tight-knit community of women.
And on this June day last year, I joined Fraser and women from all walks of life who had come together to rejoice in the spirit of the collective. I would even make a teammate out of an old competitor, Gillian Meeks, a PhD student at UC Davis. Meeks had deep San Francisco roots-her grandmother walked across the Golden Gate Bridge the day it opened in 1937.
I had run against Meeks in college-she wore Harvard's crimson, while I represented the Georgetown blue and gray. Competing in college seemed like a natural step for me; it wasn't until later that I realized I had taken it for granted. When I first joined the Impala Racing Team in San Francisco, one woman told me that the club gave her the collegiate team experience that hadn't been available to her in the pre-Title IX days.
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