Doris Brown Heritage

(This piece is for my latest book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from July 1990.)

FIRST LADY OF RUNNING. Doris Heritage lives out the adage that what you once did counts less than what you keep doing. Heritage once won a wider variety of races than any woman of her era. She still serves running in more ways than almost anyone of either gender.

Thirty years ago Doris was a distance runner caught in a sport that wouldn’t yet let women run far enough. “Things were much different then,” she says with considerable understatement.

“One reason I became a runner was that there weren’t really any organized sports for women in the late 1950s. It’s easier to run by yourself than play soccer by yourself.”

When she began racing, the distances didn’t suit her. “In the Olympics, 200 meters was the longest race, and I was training five or 10 miles.”

As Doris Brown she qualified for the longest Olympic races then available: 800 meters in 1968 (she placed fifth at Mexico City) and the first 1500 for women in 1972 (an injury kept her from competing at Munich). Her best track racing would have come between 3000 and 10,000 meters, but women wouldn’t run this far at world meets until the 1980s.

Cross-country, even at distances much shorter than the current 6K, suited Doris best. Between 1967 and ’71 she won five straight World Championships – a feat unmatched by any woman or man.

Doris, now 47, still runs. “I still enjoy it,” she says, “and always want to run for the same reasons I started.”

One of those reasons is the chance to race. “Things happen to you in a race that never happen anyplace else. When you put yourself on the line and expose yourself to the unknown, you learn things about yourself that are very exciting. There’s no better way to learn them than by racing.”

Injuries and other commitments now limit her to sporadic racing. But the talent is still there.

Doris holds the world masters mile record of 4:54.69, set in 1983. Two years ago she won her age group at the National Masters cross-country meet.

Yet her own running now stands low on her priority ladder. She said near the end of her international racing career, “I definitely feel that those of us who’ve had the opportunities and experiences should pass this on, not only through coaching but by working within the governing structure.

“We shouldn’t just stand around and gripe. We should get in there and contribute from what we’ve learned. Though it might be easier to remove myself from the sport, I really feel that if there’s something I can do I should do it.”

Doris went to work coaching the women’s track and cross-country teams at Seattle Pacific University, and remains there while also teaching beginning-running classes. She worked within the structure of the sport’s national governing bodies. She became the first woman member of the IAAF cross-country and road running committee.

She campaigned for longer women’s races internationally. As an assistant Olympic coach in 1984 she took charge of the first U.S. women’s marathon team.

She says that her mission as a coach and official is “to give women more choices than I had at the start. I want them to have the opportunity to pursue goals that were not available to me at first.”

For all that Doris Heritage did as a runner and keeps doing for running, she recently was voted into the U.S. Track and Field Hall of Fame. She’s the first woman distance runner chosen, and the best possible first choice.

UPDATE. Doris continued running until having hip-replacement surgery in her 60s. She coached runners at her alma mater, Seattle Pacific, for four decades.  

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. Latest released was Going Far. Other titles: Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Memory Laps, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]