The 50th-anniversary race of the Dallas Marathon is set to hold this Sunday. Among the runners will be a 74-year-old North Texas woman who is preparing for the Dallas Half Marathon this weekend. Annabelle Corboy, a resident of Fort Worth, ran and won the first Dallas Marathon fifty years ago in 1971.
According to a news report by CBS 11 News, Corboy developed an interest in running in the late 1960s, as she said that was a period people were trying to be more active in a bid to increase the quality of their lives. She started with jogging, and when she attended a graduate school with a program for training runners, she went fully into the sport.
According to the report, Corboy said when she ran the first White Rock marathon, now known as the Dallas Marathon, she was the only woman finisher.
She further revealed that she went on a 16-mile run a few weeks before the marathon on a nudge by the coach of the Dallas Cross County Club at the time, the group that planned the event. According to her, it was the farthest distance she had run up till then.
After Corboy’s first marathon, she ran 23 more over the years. Per the report, she ran her last 26.2 miles at the Boston Marathon in 2005.   Â
As Corboy ages, she mostly runs half marathons, and that is what she plans to run on Sunday too.
Corboy is hoping for support from the crowd at Sunday’s marathon. “I, of course, fade off into thinking about how much further I have to go and so forth,” she said. “But I try to bring myself back to paying more attention to the moment and how lucky I am to be there.”
