Miki Gorman

(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 April 2001.)

MARVELOUS MIKI. Precious few runners can win without the special dispensation of age-group racing. For a year or two after turning 40, a very few can still run with the best of any younger age.

This happened a few times before anyone thought to call these runners “masters” or (internationally) “veterans.” Jack Holden of England was 43 when he won the European Championships and Empire Games Marathons in 1950. American Clarence DeMar won his final Boston, in 1930, at age 41. Johnny Kelley made the 1948 U.S. Olympic team at 40.

More recently 41-year-old New Zealander Jack Foster ran to a marathon silver medal at the 1974 Commonwealth Games while setting a long-standing masters record of 2:11:19. Priscilla Welch, 42, of Britain won the overall women’s title at New York City in 1987.

For all Priscilla did as a master in open competition, she wasn’t the first woman to win this way – or the most decorated. That honor goes to Miki Gorman, who did her best racing in the 1970s.

The Road Runners Club of America has elected Miki to its Hall of Fame, class of 2001. She is the first woman selected to this Hall since 1997, and as the country’s most successful master ever at beating the youngsters she’s overdue for induction.

Miki won twice at the New York City Marathon (1976 and 1977) and once at Boston (1977) after turning 40. She PRed shortly after her 41^st birthday with 2:39:11 at New York City. That time stood for 15 years as an American masters record.

Like Priscilla Welch, Miki Gorman was a latecomer to the sport. Both adopted it in their mid-30s after leading interesting but unathletic lives until then.

Priscilla had served in the British Navy. Michiko Suwa was born in China of Japanese parents, then emigrated to the U.S. as an adult, took the nickname Miki and married an American.

Miki came at marathoning from the wrong direction, or at least the non-traditional one. Instead of starting in short races and working up, she began with ultras and came down.

After finishing her Los Angeles club’s 100-mile run – on an indoor track – she began training with coach Laszlo Tabori’s group that included future world record-holder Jacqueline Hansen. Miki set that record first, running 2:46:36 in 1973.

The following spring she won Boston at age 38. Then she took time out to have her only child before returning to do more winning as a master.

Now 65, she is single again and lives with her daughter Danielle in Los Angeles. Miki has returned to running after taking more than a decade off.

“My last marathon was in Japan in 1982,” she tells Jim Oaks of the RRCA. “I didn’t run too much after that until about five years ago when I started back – this time to lose weight. Even though I ate mostly rice and vegetables, I was still eating a lot of junk food.”

Her Hall of Fame selection lets a new generation of runners get to know her. Miki Gorman is now in the company of other women’s running pioneers – Roberta Gibb, Kathrine Switzer, Nina Kuscsik, Jacqueline Hansen – where she has long belonged.

UPDATE. Miki Gorman died in 2015 at age 80. She remains the only American, woman or man, ever to win both the Boston Marathon and New York City as a master.

[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 Miles to Go. Other titles: Going Far, 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.]