50 years later and still running

As she found her bib number under her name, K.V. Switzer, and pinned 261 on her sweatshirt, Kathrine Switzer had no idea that she would later turn into an iconic athlete and feminist.

On the cold and dreary day, April 19th 1967, exactly 50 years ago, Switzer, a 20 year old Syracuse student, was ready to run the Boston Marathon and prove wrong anyone who had tried to argue that no women was strong enough to run a marathon. As she reached the second mile of the race in her gray sweatshirt and pants, alongside her boyfriend and coach, Switzer was taken a hold of by Jock Semple, one of the two race directors at the time.

“He grabbed me and screamed at me ‘get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers’ and then he started clawing at me and trying to rip my numbers off. He had the fiercest face of any guy I had ever seen and I was terrified,” Switzer said in an interview for Makers: Women Who Make America, a documentary series.

Switzer was able to continue running after her boyfriend, ‘Big Tom’, an ex-All American football player, gave the official a massive body block and sent him flying out of the race. This was the moment when Switzer realized that she, even more than before, had to finish the race, even if she had to do it on her hands and knees.

“I knew if I quit, nobody would ever believe that women had the capability to run 26-plus miles. If I quit, everybody would say it was a publicity stunt. If I quit, it would set women’s sports back, way back, instead of forward. If I quit, I’d never run Boston. If I quit, Jock Semple and all those like him would win. My fear and humiliation turned to anger,” Switzer said in her book Marathon Woman.

The Boston Marathon was founded in 1897 and while nowhere in the rules did it state a gender restriction, almost all sports at the time were for men. In consequence most women themselves were not interested in running for the same reason with the belief that difficult sports made women masculine.

“The idea of running long distance was always very questionable for women because an arduous activity would mean that you were going to get big legs, grow mustache and hair on your chest and your uterus was going to fall out,” Switzer said, who ran the marathon looking as feminine as she did during her daily life, wearing lipstick and gold earrings.

Although no woman had officially ran the race before Switzer, in 1966 Bobbi Gibb ran the Boston Marathon unregistered after her application had been rejected by Will Cloney, the race director, informing her that ‘women were not physiologically capable of running marathon distances’. Having heard of Gibb, Switzer’s own desire to run the marathon developed, with no established purpose of making a statement other than that women could participate as well.

“I was just a kid who wanted to run, and was there as a reward from my coach who didn’t believe that a woman could run the distance. I had heard that other women had run marathon distances and that one woman in 1966 ran the Boston Marathon but without a bib number, so I wasn’t trying to break any barrier,” Switzer said, who finished the race in four hours and twenty minutes. “It wasn’t until Semple attacked me during the run did I become determined to finish and speak out on behalf of all women.”

After her marathon feat, Switzer was determined to advocate women equality in athletics, especially in running. It was not until 1972 that women were officially allowed to enter the Boston Marathon. Switzer later became a major part of getting the women’s marathon accepted officially into the Olympic Games in 1984.

“I was inspired to both become a better athlete myself and create opportunities for other women in running. All this led to several interesting careers, almost all of which I designed for myself and are connected to running and social change,” Switzer said. “For many years, I created and organized a global series of races, called the Avon International Running Circuit—400 races in 27 countries for over a million women— that demonstrated women’s capability and also had enough international representation to convince the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that the women’s marathon should be included in the Olympics. In some countries, these races were often the first sports events of any kind for women.”

After 39 marathons, Switzer, now 70, will run the 121st Boston Marathon alongside women and men in celebration of her 50th anniversary, wearing her famous 261 bib.

“It feels fabulous to run alongside of other women but it also always felt good to run alongside men, too, because these guys who ran were always wonderful to us women,” Switzer said. “It was only men who didn’t run or who were officials who tried to stop us that day. You have to run to understand.”