Kathrine Switzer

(This piece is for my book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from September 1998.)

AVON CALLING. The director of an Avon women’s race called to ask if I would speak at the event in Portland, Oregon. I agreed but with an unspoken question: Why?

The mostly-female audience at my talk might also have wondered: Why a male speaker? This time I answered without being asked.

I said it was because my memory was longer than almost everyone here this day. I remembered when women didn’t – and weren’t even allowed to – run the 10K distance of this weekend’s race or anything longer.

Then I recalled running the 1967 Boston Marathon with Kathrine Switzer. We’ve become friends since, and Kathrine was now in this room. But at the time I’d never heard of her  (or she of me) and didn’t know until afterward that she had run.

That Boston was my first marathon, but it would change only my life. Kathrine’s wearing of an official number, her run-in with Jock Semple and the resulting media flurry would change the running world.

The incident activated Kathrine’s political and promotional instincts. She worked toward acceptance of women at Boston, which came in 1972, and approval of a national championship marathon for women, in 1974. Later she organized the first Avon running circuit, a big reason why the women’s marathon won a place into the 1983 World Championships and then the 1984 Olympic Games.

Kathrine revived the Avon circuit this year. I said in Portland, “She’s the reason you’re all here today, both because of what she does now and did a long time ago.”

The first Avon series showed the world how well women could run if given the chance. The second series celebrates how far women have come.

I added at the talk, “Another reason for my being here is that I’m a father. My two daughters now have full opportunity to run, and both have taken it. My mother and sisters never had the chance at the same age.”

I’ve supported women runners since the 1960s without really thinking of it as a women’s-rights issue. It was a growth-of-running issue. Running couldn’t grow up to full potential as long as the national and international rules arbitrarily and unfairly excluded half the population.

Kathrine Switzer wasn’t the first woman to run a marathon in the United States, but she was among the first half-dozen. She remembers knowing the name of every female marathoner in the world. They seldom topped one percent of any field when she ran.

Today women are marching toward majority status. Twice this year in North America they’ve accounted for more than half the field at marathons – with 53 percent at the Okanagan International in British Columbia, then 55 percent (or some 10,000 women) at Rock ‘n’ Roll.

The good health of running today is largely the women’s doing. The healthiest trend is the feminizing of the sport, and Kathrine Switzer and Avon can take some credit for nursing this growth.

UPDATE. Kathrine Switzer is gone from Avon, and Avon from running. Since leaving that company, she has written the memoir Marathon Woman.

Kathrine never stopped running but took a long hiatus from the marathon. She’s back up to that distance and in 2017 plans to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of her auspicious debut.

[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, 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.]