{"id":1507,"date":"2013-07-24T14:55:03","date_gmt":"2013-07-24T14:55:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tidesmartradio.com\/?p=1507"},"modified":"2013-07-25T14:56:10","modified_gmt":"2013-07-25T14:56:10","slug":"joan-benoit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tidesmartradio.com\/joan-benoit\/","title":{"rendered":"Show 71: First-ever women’s Olympic marathon champion & Founder of the TD Beach to Beacon 10K Road Race Joan Benoit"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Show Information<\/h5>\n

Show:<\/strong>\u00a071
\nAir date:<\/strong> Saturday,\u00a0July 20
\nGuest:<\/strong>\u00a0Joan Benoit
\nHost:<\/strong> Steve Woods (Stevoe)
\nStudio Contributor<\/strong> Debi Davis
\nExecutive Producer:<\/strong> Mark Gould (Sharky)
\nAssistant Producer:<\/strong> Shannon Maguire<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Joan Benoit Samuelson<\/a> was born in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.\u00a0 Benoit grew up with the dream of becoming an Olympic ski racer, but a broken leg in high school led to her discovery that she loved to run.\u00a0 She attended Bowdoin College, where she excelled in athletics and earned one of the first Title IX scholarships in track and field to North Carolina State,\u00a0which Benoit calls her “junior year abroad”.\u00a0 After a year, she returned to Bowdoin to graduate with a double major in history and environmental studies. In 1979, as a relative unknown in the running world, Benoit ran in the Boston Marathon for the first time and won the race.\u00a0 Benoit recalled for Stevoe\u00a0the story of her first marathon and arriving late, not looking at the course before running it and during the race asking a runner next to her “where the\u00a0Heartbreak Hills were”, to which he replied “lady, you just did them”.\u00a0 Again in 1983, she won the Boston Marathon and set a World Record with a race time of 2:22:43.<\/p>\n

\"Benoit\"

TideSmart Talk with Stevoe host Steve Woods (left) welcomed the first-ever women’s Olympic marathon champion and founder of the TD Beach to Beacon 10K Road Race Joan Benoit (right)\u00a0into the studio.<\/p><\/div>\n

Benoit met Jeff Johnson (Nike\u2019s first employee and then a high school coach) at the Nike research and development center in Exeter, NH.\u00a0\u00a0Benoit would eventually become an employee of the Exeter Sports Lab. She was placed on the Nike Athletes Assistance Program and then on the Nike Athletics West team. She would go on to win an American record at the Nike-OTC Marathon in 1982.<\/p>\n

In the 1984 Olympics, held in Los Angeles, Benoit (26 years old) won the gold in the first-ever women\u2019s marathon. \u00a0Benoit still holds the fastest times for an American woman in the Olympic Marathon and in the Chicago Marathon, which she won in 1985.\u00a0 She has been inducted into the National Runner\u2019s Hall of Fame, the Maine Sports Hall of Fame and the Olympic Hall of Fame.<\/p>\n

In 2006, Benoit helped pace cycling champion Lance Armstrong in the New York City Marathon.\u00a0 She ran in the 2008 U.S. Olympic Team trials, at the age of 50, and finished in 2:49:08, setting a new U.S. 50+ record and beating her own personal goal of a mid-2:50:00s retirement marathon.<\/p>\n

Benoit has become an advocate for environmental and healthcare issues.\u00a0 She sees herself as a \u201chuman barometer for climate change\u201d and has a commitment to making the \u201cplanet sustainable and as environmentally sound as it possibly can be for the next generations\u201d.\u00a0 Benoit uses running as a platform to tie the sustainability of health and wellness to the sustainability of natural resources.\u00a0 Benoit is hopeful that through her training and mentoring programs she will help quell obesity through the sport of running.<\/p>\n

Benoit has written books including an autobiography \u201cRunning Tide\u201d and a training guide called, \u201cRunning for Women\u201d.\u00a0 \u00a0Benoit told Stevoe about how while she was running in the Olympics, she had made a promise to herself to give back to the state that had given so much to her.\u00a0\u00a0This led Benoit\u00a0to\u00a0founding\u00a0the TD Beach to Beacon 10K Road Race<\/a> in 1998.\u00a0 She also sits on the Bowdoin College Board of Trustees and the Friends of Casco Bay board, and is a strong supporter of health, wellness, and conservation efforts in Maine. \u00a0Benoit is a Master Gardener and lives in Freeport with her husband Scott Samuelson, and their two children Abby and Anders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steve Woods, host of TideSmart Talk with Stevoe, welcomed the first-ever women’s Olympic marathon champion and founder of the TD Beach to Beacon 10K Road Race Joan Benoit into the studio. The two discussed how Benoit first became interested in running, what the passing of Title IX meant for her, and her journey to the 1984 Olympics. They also talked about the tragic bombings at this years Boston Marathon and what these events have done to the running community. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tidesmartradio.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1507"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tidesmartradio.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tidesmartradio.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tidesmartradio.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tidesmartradio.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tidesmartradio.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1507\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tidesmartradio.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tidesmartradio.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tidesmartradio.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}