This domain had a life before this site. Here is what we can document, and what we cannot.
This is an independent guide to walking marathons, published at an address that was previously used by a different organisation. We are not that organisation, not its successor, and not connected to the people who ran it. Nothing here is endorsed by them.
Women Walk the Marathon was a walking-coaching programme based in Portland, Oregon, founded by Ellie Hodder. Two United States trademarks connected to it — WOMEN WALK THE MARATHON and I AM AN ATHLETE — were registered in 2002 and have since lapsed; that is why this site uses the name without any registered-mark symbol. The programme itself appears to have run for a long period ending in the 2010s, and its site was archived repeatedly in the early 2000s.
The detail of the programme's history — its founding date, how many people it trained, its relationship to the Portland Marathon, and the press coverage it claimed — comes from sources we have not yet checked against primary records. It is deliberately not written up here. Publishing an unverified biography of a real, living person on a site whose entire argument is careful sourcing would be a poor way to start.
This page will be expanded when it can be sourced to the same standard as a race record: primary documents, linked, with the date each was checked.
Because the problem has not changed. The original programme existed to get ordinary people, mostly women, to the finish line of a marathon on foot. The modern version of that problem is finding a race that will still be open when you get there. That is what this site is for.