At the time, in her mid-20s, Eleanor Thomas was a long-time smoker, going through more than a pack a day, a habit she picked up as a teenager.
Then, Thomas took up running, explaining that she felt like a “slug” due to years of smoking. “I thought it [running] was a good motivator,” she says some 40 years later. “Running and feeling healthy felt so positive.” It was a fresh start in the sport as Thomas never ran at a young age. “I never dreamed of running when I was in high school,” she says.
A few years after Thomas started running, she and others heard that a marathon was coming to town for the first time.
Little did Thomas know that she would be the city’s marathon champion in the event’s inaugural edition.
In 1975, at what was then the National Capital Marathon, now officially the Scotiabank Ottawa Marathon, the largest marathon in the country, Thomas was the first woman, of three, to cross the finish line. Recall that the Boston Marathon, the most famous road race in the world, allowed women to race for the first time in 1972, three years before the inaugural Ottawa Marathon.
Thomas, wearing leather shoes that she says weighed “a couple of pounds” each, a cotton T-shirt, and ran 3:27:28 for 69th overall, according to the race certificate Thomas provided. “People didn’t know what a marathon was,” she says of the overall perception of a women, let alone anyone, running 42.2K.
To train for the 1975 National Capital Marathon, Thomas “just ran.” No special programs, no hills, no coach and certainly no gadgets. “Didn’t know how to train, we didn’t have a clue and just went out and ran. Still, Thomas was able to build up her mileage to approximately 112K (70 miles). “All I knew [about the training] was that you had to run a lot,” she says reminiscing in the early-year marathons.
During the race itself, as the marathon distance was relatively unknown still, Thomas didn’t take in any water.
History then repeated itself.
The next year, in 1976, she didn’t take in any water on course either let alone gels or electrolytes. Thomas won the Ottawa Marathon in 1976 (pictured below) in 3:09:27, according to the Association of Road Racing Statisticians (ARRS).
In regards to winning itself in 1975, Thomas says that being the first woman never really crossed her mind until the other two women in the race fell back from her pace. “It was a question of doing it [the marathon] and finishing it [the race] in good shape,” she says.
She says her best time came in 1976 at the Skylon International Marathon (now the Niagara Falls International Marathon) when she finished second in 3:02:18, according to the ARRS.
“It was tougher to quit smoking than to finish a marathon,” she admits describing the life milestones.
Thomas went on to run approximately 13 marathons in the proceeding years before a serious injury derailed her time as a competitive runner. The Ottawa Marathon women’s running pioneer still runs and most recently finished the marathon in the nation’s capital in 2014, with one minute to spare in breaking the five-hour mark.
“There’s just something really meditative about it [running],” she says.
