Allison Roe

Allison Roe won the 1981 Boston and New York City marathons so spectacularly that she was suddenly one of the most admired sportswomen in the world. At home, she won the Halberg New Zealand Sportsperson of the Year award and is still the only female runner to attain that distinction. Her recognition overseas included the award of Year’s Best Amateur Sportswoman by the American Press Association.

Roe’s extraordinary impact on a public far beyond regular athletics fans came from five things – the superlative quality of her performances, her striking combination of power and grace in appearance, the growth of the exciting new sport of mass road running, the upsurge especially in women’s running and the arrival of live television coverage. Roe’s 1981 New York Marathon was the first big city race to be televised from start to finish, with the broadcast distributed worldwide. She literally became a world star in two hours and 25 minutes. In New Zealand, it happened on Labour Day Monday morning and, with no work to hurry to, the viewing audience rocketed up as Roe’s victory progressed.

It’s no exaggeration to say that those screen images of Roe in such commanding motion gave her a lasting place in the national consciousness. Nor is it fanciful to say that she was at the forefront of a new definition of femininity. After she won New York, a mid-race picture of her in full flight featured on page three of the Auckland Sunday News, displacing the customary static topless image. The editor (a woman) later described it as “a blow for New Zealand feminism”.     

“The sight of Allison Roe at full power commands respect. Her long, purposeful stride makes her racing look effortless,” carefully wrote Tim Chamberlain, editor of New Zealand Runner. In America, she is still remembered for that serene power, as well as for her break-through records, personal warmth and lack of pretension.     

Roe’s 1981 year of miracles also included a world best at 20km and wins in two of the world’s biggest and most prestigious road races, Sydney’s City to Surf and Atlanta’s Peachtree, against strong elite fields at the height of the running boom. Her Boston and New York victories were both by big margins and in course records, and her New York time (2:25:29) was a world record. That was later qualified when the course was found to be 150 metres short, but the previous three world records had been set on the same course, and Roe’s time was four and a half minutes faster than the best on any other course to that date. Hers was irrefutably the best marathon ever run by a woman, so it seems unjust to omit her from the world record progression.

Born Allison Deed in Auckland on 30 May 1956, she inherited a commitment to holistic health and a clean environment from her parents. Her father Allan Deed was a highly respected GP in Milford, on the North Shore. Roe was early in showing all-round sporting ability, including swimming, and especially tennis, and she won junior and intermediate high jump titles in the North Island secondary schools championships. But her temperament was never fiercely competitive.

She began to focus on running when the former British Olympic medallist Gordon Pirie, then resident in Auckland, offered to coach her. She found the intense Pirie ‘motivating but eccentric’ and moved to Max Golder as coach, and in her peak years to Gary Elliott, who won such respect that she named her son Elliott after him.

On the track, she had “lots of seconds and thirds” at national levels, and represented New Zealand in early 1975 at the New Zealand Games in Christchurch, and in Australia for the World Cup Trials, where she won the 3000m. But women’s track distances at that time were short, and her more significant performance came when she defeated Lorraine Moller to win the National Cross Country Championships on a hilly 4km course in 1974. At 18, she is still the youngest woman ever to claim that title. That earned her a place in the New Zealand team at the 1975 World Cross Country in Morocco, where she was 29^th, fourth scorer in the second-placed team that went close to emulating the New Zealand’s men’s historic victory on the same day.

At this time, she was offered a sports scholarship at the University of California, Los Angeles but opted to stay in New Zealand. Her track career was hindered by frequent injuries but she managed to place third in the muddy 1976 Cross Country Nationals at Invercargill, and fourth in the Road Championship at Feilding, a double that again earned selection to the World Cross Country. Plantar fasciitis kept her outside the scoring four in Düsseldorf.  Between injuries, she ran some decent track races, on one occasion in 1979 finishing a Mount Smart 3,000m well behind visiting Norwegian star Grete Waitz. They would meet again.

Later in 1979 she placed fourth in deep slush in the Cross Country Nationals at Wingatui and second in another epic duel with Moller in the Road Championships at Whangarei. She was running well on different surfaces but had not yet found her real event. The crucial moment came in February 1980. Finding that her track season was not going well, she made an impulsive decision to enter the Choysa Marathon on the Auckland waterfront. 

“It was quite by accident that I ever ran it. I didn’t train. My longest ever run had been 18 miles. I thought that after 12 or 15 miles that would be it, and that I’d give it away. And I actually tried to at one stage, when I walked a bit, but the crowd was too persuasive,” she told Tim Chamberlain for a New Zealand Runner interview. She ran 2:51:45, overshadowed by American Joan Benoit’s second-fastest-in-history 2:31:23. More importantly, Roe was first New Zealand woman, and that brought an expenses-paid trip to the Nike Oregon Track Club Marathon seven months later.

“Had the trip not been the prize, I’m not sure that I would ever have run another marathon,” she said.

Now, as she turned 24, her life changed in important ways. She married chiropractor Richard Roe, she built up her training to about 110km a week, doubling her previous level, she included 30-40km ‘Waiatarua’ Sunday runs with men in the Waitakeres, and went to Gary Elliott as coach. 

“Gary and I really worked on the mental side of training. It wasn’t until I learned self-hypnosis that I was able to overcome my string of seconds and thirds,” Roe recalled in 2020.

She sharpened for Oregon with winter cross country, winning the Auckland title, and placing third in Nationals. With the weekly ‘Waiataruas’ building the distance base, she then added sessions of 20 x 200m. The Nike Oregon Marathon at Eugene on 7 September 1980, gave New Zealand’s runners some consolation for the disappointment of the US-led boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games the previous month. Dick Quax won the Oregon men’s race faster than the Olympic winning time and Lorraine Moller took the women’s, with Roe third, all three in world-class personal best times. Roe’s 2:34:29 made her the eighth-fastest woman in history.

Now Roe was riding the surging wave of the road running boom. She was invited to an all-women’s marathon in Tokyo in November 1980, where, she said in 2020: “I was on 2:26 pace until new shoes caused blisters that visibly bled on to the road. I had to walk and then muster courage to run into the stadium in fourth, when I kind of knew I was going to win. Great lesson. The only time I cried at a race.” She ran 2:42:24. In the ten weeks between those two overseas marathons, Roe had also won the Auckland Road Championships and placed second in the National Road Championships, behind Mary O’Connor. 

“Some people say you can’t do everything but I really do enjoy it,” she told New Zealand Runner. The Tokyo experience taught her to become more focused, at least by skipping the 1981 track season. Not selected for the World Cross Country, she won a low-key City of Auckland Marathon on 2 February, now finding 2:36 undemanding, and popped over to Japan to break the world best for 20km in Miyazaki, with 68:22. She now had sponsorship from the Japanese Asics shoe company. She also won three late-summer 10km road races in Auckland, each in 33-34mins. Again, she described the decision to go to Boston as last-minute. 

“I decided to run only two weeks before, after a good Sunday 20-miler in the Waitakeres, when I felt so strong and everybody started talking me into going,” she wrote, in a first-person account for New Zealand Runner of her now-legendary Boston run.   

The hot favourite was local Patti Catalano, who had twice been second, but the field also included the two previous winners, Joan Benoit and Jacqueline Gareau. Roe was “a little nervous, but I felt in good shape and quite confident. I liked the look of the course, too.  I remember thinking on the start line, ‘I’d like to win this’,” she wrote. She wore all black, with a silver fern prominent, and white gloves. She aimed for sub-2:30, but in those days splits at Boston were called only at arcane local landmarks. Roe “forgot all about time, and decided instead to stick with the top guns”. Near half-way, Catalano got away by about 20 seconds, and Roe felt her concentration slipped. But the feared Newton Hills were to come.

That’s where the only other New Zealander to win Boston at that date, Dave McKenzie in 1967, had called up his West Coast ruggedness and broken away.  Roe closed to ten seconds behind Catalano on Heartbreak, the last and most notoriously killing of the hills, which she had the effrontery to describe as “actually over-estimated”. Perhaps so, to someone hardened to hills on the Waiatarua and by winning the Nike Roller-Coaster in Auckland six weeks earlier.

Roe felt confident enough to lurk ten seconds back from Catalano and choose her moment. “I wanted to let her feel the pressure of me behind her. That way I thought I was relaxing and having a holiday.” She made “one decisive move at 23 miles [37km]. Patti was wobbling and she didn’t respond at all”. Boston runner-writer Tom Derderian was running alongside, and described the moment in his classic history, Boston Marathon: “Roe’s face looked peaceful, in control. She looked like an actress coming onstage to take the leading role. Catalano’s face was frozen. She could not respond to Roe’s challenge. Roe took a downward, backward glance at Catalano, then looked forward and smiled.”   

Roe smiled again as she crossed the finish. As she approached, she saw 2:26 on the clock, and thought “Impossible! Must have been a power cut”. But it was true, Roe had won the Boston Marathon against top competition in 2:26:46. It was the world’s second-fastest time, and broke the Boston record by 7min 42seconds, a huge margin that is unlikely to be repeated. Poor Catalano, second again, 1min 5sec behind, had the consolation of breaking the American record.  

America was where most of the action was in that era’s running boom. Her next major race landed Roe in more action than she wanted. At the Cascade Run Off 15km in Portland, Oregon in June, she was second to Anne Audain, with Lorraine Moller third, a New Zealand sweep. More portentously, they received direct prize money of $10,000, $5000 and $2000 respectively, the first time cash had been openly awarded in athletics or running, a defiance of international rules by a race that was backed by the rising shoe company Nike.

The story is too complex to tell fully here, but NZAAA (now Athletics New Zealand) had in March passed a motion “to inform the IAAF (now World Athletics) that we are in favour of liberalising the amateur rules.” Negotiations were in process when the Cascade rebellion happened. The three rebels were each interviewed by NZAAA and Roe opted to take a less-than-confrontational stance.

In July, NZAAA stated, “What we would like to see is for the payments to be made direct to the athletes”. A transitional “trust fund” arrangement was being negotiated, and on 18 August, the ban was lifted by NZAAA, after two weeks in effect. The American federation was less forward-looking, and Roe was not cleared to run the New York Marathon until 8 October, the day before she flew to America.

The controversy was stressful but Roe was not inactive. After Cascade, she emphatically turned the tables on Audain by winning the prestigious Peachtree 10km in a course record 32:38.5. Back in New Zealand, she had to steer through two injuries as well as the controversy but with Elliott’s guidance she continued to improve. In a New Zealand Runner feature, Elliott noted that she had logged her best Waiatarua, best 10 miles, best interval sessions, a “run-through” win in the Auckland road champs, and a 33 minute 10k at Warkworth.

She flew out early for New York, stopping first in Boston, where she ran the Bonne Bell 10km in a personal best 32:22, second to Jan Merrill’s American record. She stayed on in Boston for two weeks, making many friends, despite the fact that, as she later remarked, “I had no trouble keeping up with the male athletes on training runs”.

An ankle injury was becoming troublesome but, in the New York City Marathon sports medicine centre, she encountered the then triple champion, Grete Waitz, which was encouraging.

“Grete made that race what it is – the queen of New York. But when I saw her getting treatment, I suspected she had a problem.”  Roe was so nervous in New York that she had nightmares about dodging bullets while racing and, on the day, she forgot her bib number. Race officials had to cut down a spare F2000-something number to make her a tatty F2.

“Julie Brown took off fast and went miles up the road, but I hung around with Grete, and quite a bunch, including Ingrid Kristiansen and Julie Shea. It was my first tour of New York, and I found it a great trip, trundling along with Grete and taking in the neighbourhoods,” Roe told Roger Robinson for Running Times in 2011. Yes, she did say “trundling.”

Waitz dropped out at 17 miles, and from then on it was all Roe, majestic in her sky-blue outfit with the silver fern of New Zealand, and shining white gloves. She was still enjoying the tour.

“Harlem was great. They shouted ‘Hey, sister, go!’ Really neat.” Overtaking male runners by the handful, Roe turned the jets full on through Central Park’s hills.

“I’d done a lot of reading about how to apportion speed. My last three miles were the fastest – 5:12, 5:14, 5:12,” she said, revealing a thoughtful student of the sport within that warrior goddess exterior. She was going so fast she missed seeing the finish marshals.

“I ran under the wrong banner, with the men. Fred Lebow was running around like a chook with its head cut off. It took a while for it to sink in that I’d broken the world record.” 

Back home that 1981-82 summer, big, sponsored road races were booming, prize money was permitted (via the “Trust Fund”) and in March Roe won the Christchurch final of the national ‘Big M 10km’ series. She then flew to the Seoul Marathon, where stifling humidity and pollution slowed her victory to 2:43:12.

Now Roe was something never before heard of, the favourite for the Olympic women’s marathon. In early 1981, while Roe was training for Boston, the International Olympic Committee had made the momentous decision to add the women’s marathon to the Olympic programme. Roe was the long-range co-favourite, with Waitz, for the inaugural 1984 Olympic race. The prospects were mouth-watering.

Then it all ended.

Stumbling and falling downstairs during house renovations, Roe chipped a bone, inflicted a major haematoma, and tore her upper hamstring. She never ran at world level again. She was 26.

Fortunately, she is a positive personality, with a resilient commitment to physical fitness and health, and many varied talents. She attended the Los Angeles Olympics as a corporate host for the American journal Sports Illustrated.  She did some television commentary in America and New Zealand, and established her own television production and sports promotion company in Auckland. She became a proficient race director, mostly of women’s road races. She became a competitive triathlete and cyclist, winning New Zealand titles. She continues to kayak, swim and run, she goes to the gym, and she gets injured kick-boxing. She also won an age-group gold medal for mountain biking in the World Masters Games in Auckland in 2017.

Looking to make a contribution in areas that matter most, she produced and promoted health products, including a Roe baby-jogger, and established the Allison Roe Trust, which supports women’s health. She instigated the series of Run2Heal Fun Runs in three cities nationwide to raise funds for women’s health projects. She is a judge for the New Zealander of the Year – Community award. 

In 2013, she won election to the Waitemata Health Board, advocating preventative health policies, and at the same time entered the Devonport Takapuna Local Board. She retained her seat in the 2016 election, although she now lives at Matakana, and describes herself as “out of politics, and passionate as founding chair of the developing Matakana Coast Trail Trust, which ticks all the boxes – health, recreation, environment, economy, etc. It’s a legacy project”. She traces her philanthropic drive back to witnessing extreme poverty during her trip to Morocco at age 18, as well as some firm guidance from her mother.

The marriage with Richard Roe ended after 18 years, with two children, and Roe is now married to Alan Barwick, with two step-children. After many years in Takapuna, they moved in 2016 to Point Wells, Matakana.

Roe’s many awards include MBE, induction into the New Zealand Sports Hall of Fame, and in 2018, induction into the New York City Marathon Hall of Fame. As Solian D. Lede (anagram of Allison Deed, a version of her is the main character in American novel The Purple Runner (1983) by Paul Christman.

Written by Roger Robinson