HAL: Interview with the Legendary Kathrine (K.V.) Switzer (Part One)

Posted July 23, 2007 at 12:10 PM by Bridget Sullivan

Section: Her Fitness, Her Health, Her Motivation, Special Features, Interviews

Forty years ago, Boston Marathon official Jock Semple jumped off a press truck four miles into the 1967 Boston Marathon and yelled “get out of my race” as he tried to rip the #261 off of K.V. Switzer. Pictures of the confrontation ran in newspapers around the world, essentially changing women’s running forever.

“K.V.” Swizter was 20-year-old Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to break the gender barrier and officially enter and complete the Boston Marathon. Called the “Susan B. Anthony of running” by fellow running great Joan Benoit Samuelson, Kathrine went on to win the 1974 NYC marathon, and she was influential in the creation of the first Avon International Marathon in Atlanta in 1978, which featured 20 of the world’s top female distance runners.

In addition, she was a driving force and prime lobbyist behind the official inclusion of a women’s marathon in the 1984 Olympics.  Kathrine has received an Emmy for her work as a sports broadcaster and she remains one of the most courageous and inspiring runners in history.  Runner’s World recently named her one of the 40 most influential people and moments of the past 4 decades.

And 4 decades later, the Boston incident still continues to capture the public imagination and is, in part, the reason Switzer has dedicated her career to creating equal opportunities for women.

To date, she has helped implement programs in 27 countries for over 1 million women.  Her personal dedication and energy have helped change the face of sports, health and opportunities for women around the world.

Her Active Life (HAL): I have to start this interview right away with a passage from your most recent memoir, Marathon Woman:  you have this moment, before your pioneering Boston Marathon run, where you think to yourself:

“I knew if I quit, nobody would ever believe that women had the capability to run the marathon distance.  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 . . .” and then you turn to your coach, Arnie Briggs, and you say, “no matter what, I have to finish this race.  Even if you can’t, I have to, even on my hands and knees.  If I don’t finish it, people will say women can’t do it, and they will say I was just doing this for the publicity or something.  So you need to do whatever you want to do, but I’m finishing.”

If you could just take us back to that moment and describe what it must have felt like to carry that burden for women’s sports.  What was racing through your mind at that moment?

Kathrine Switzer (KS): I felt really quite sad at that moment because I had entered the race – and really, I was just one of these kids who wanted to run her first marathon – and I knew I was going to be noticed, but I was very proud of the moment, proud of myself , proud of being a woman, and proud of being able to do the distance.  All the men I knew had been so encouraging.  Arnie, my coach, had been so encouraging.  I wasn’t doing it [the marathon] as a big feminist act, and suddenly, when Jock Semple tackled me and the press was all over me, it all changed.  It all then became a feminist act, and then it became something I had to do. 

I was terribly unprepared because anything can happen in a marathon and that is one reason why we run them – I could get diarrhea or blisters or hit the wall – and those are are all normal and fair enough reasons to drop out, but now I couldn’t.  I couldn’t have anything happen to me, or if anything did, I had to finish on my hands and knees. I just had to do it, and the burden of expectation was very, very great.  So I felt saddened because I knew that the thing I loved the most – running – was no longer pure. At that moment it became a whole different motive. 

So the good thing is that you can’t run and stay mad, you can’t run and stay angry – you can’t run and carry the entire burden of the female sex on your shoulders.  But, in time, as I ran, the race got easier and easier and I got lighter and lighter.  But at that moment, I felt really tired and like it was quite unfair that that had happened. 

HAL: It’s such a powerful moment, and I think a lot of runners today – especially younger women – don’t realize that the marathon for women was not an official Olympic event until 1984.  You talk about this in your book, but what were some of the prevailing myths about women runners in the 1960s and 1970s? KS: It was really hilarious in many ways, but it was also very tragic in many ways.  And today, in many countries around the world, these myths still live on. I joke and say it started 3000 years ago with Aristotle who said that women were inherently weak. The problem is that these myths have stood up all these years.  Of course, we went through the Victorian era where women were protected and taken care of so they could be ladies.  So even in the 50s and 60s, it was accepted that women would only do separate things and that they wouldn’t do things in the masculine world, which included sports. 

Women who arduously took part in sports were considered marginal .  . . people said that they would turn into men (that was a big thing), or that they were lesbians, they were never going to have babies, their uterus’ would fall out, they’d get big legs, they’d get a mustache – in general, all of these horrible things.  Women were frightened of arduous activity because they were afraid they would turn into all of these things.

Also, sports were not just dumbed down for women, but they were also eased up – made easier for women so that we wouldn’t hurt ourselves.  In the Olympic games, women had the 400 meters when I was a kid.  And then finally in the 1960s, it was the 800, but boy after that, you were risking life and limb. 

So the idea of running a marathon was totally beyond anybody’s comprehension for a woman. But I come from a strong family of women and I thought women could do everything.  I was very, very lucky.

HAL:  You seem to be one of the first athletes that put “feminine” and “athlete” together, and you have this great scene that you describe in your book where you are wearing lipstick at the start of the Boston Marathon and someone said that you had to take it off.  But that seemed to be a real statement at the time that women could be athletes and still be feminine.

KS: Of course! First of all, I wouldn’t go anywhere without makeup on anyway – in those days, I wouldn’t go anywhere without my heavy eyeliner and lipstick [laughs]. 

It was my boyfriend, actually, (that was one those things he was picking on me about) who said to take off the lipstick.  But I was so very proud of being a female and I wanted to put those two things together to show that a woman could be very feminine.

I was very upset that I had to wear this grey warm-up suit [during the 1967 Boston Marathon] because it was so cruddy looking and I was going to have to wear it most of the race because it was so cold.  But I had on really cute shorts and a top underneath that I wanted to show that off. 

Now what’s great is that women don’t have to prove anything.  You can go out and you can be anything, and you can look like anything, and nobody judges you, which is really wonderful.  And that was very freeing for me –just put my hair up in my cap, pull on an old t-shirt, and go outside and run, and nobody honks their horn at you.  It’s great! 

But the point is this, now a woman can do anything, which is really great, and not be judged - whereas in those days you were judged a lot by your appearance, and that’s another big burden that women had to live with. 

HAL: What do you think is the biggest challenge facing female athletes today?  Is there still a ways to go, or have we made it? 

KS: That question should be answered in two ways.  First of all, let’s take the United States.  Women have total opportunities in this country, and most young women growing up today have tremendous role models – whether its in soccer or volleyball or basketball; they realize they can go to the top.  But we are still lacking, in general, because there are a tremendous number of girls and women who still have tremendous problems with self-esteem issues and empowerment issues and they don’t believe they can do something and therefore, they never try.  Somehow we need to continue motivating them into the opportunity of doing something. 

The marathon has been one thing that has phenomenally changed women’s view of themselves.  And charities, Team in Training, and Jeff Galloway - and all these people who often get criticized for dumbing down the marathon - I don’t criticize them.  They’ve made the marathon accessible to everybody, and suddenly, to do a 5-hour marathon is no longer a laugh – it’s considered a heroic and wonderful thing to do and that’s really great.  A lot of women didn’t get into sports and they still don’t now because they think you have to be good or you have to be competitive, and you don’t.  It’s all about participation and getting out there and once you do that, you get that self-esteem.

Having said that, basically, in the United States we live in a dream world in terms of the luxury of opportunities and money and equipment.  The bigger issue, I think, is where we have to go in terms of global opportunities, particularly in third world countries, to help women use the forces around them to elevate themselves.

I think the Kenyan women are fabulous examples of being in a very second-class society situation, but the women who are the runners and who can excel and earn money – they go back with that money to their villages and they change the whole economic status of the village and their own stature because they can; they provide clean water and build schools.  They’re breaking the yoke of second-class citizenship and that’s very, very important. 

And certainly, the status of women in Japan has been changed through sports – they’ve become the great sports heroes in running.  In Russia and Eastern Europe, where women had a very difficult time earning any kind of money, they come back with a different kind of luster and opportunity and that kind of success changes their social status.  All of that is what sports can do, and I’d like to see more global opportunities for women.  The Olympics are trying to require countries to have more female participation, even in traditional places.  That’s really important.

HAL: You’ve done a lot of work on a global scale for women’s rights and brining road races to women around the world.  Can you talk a little about that?

KS: It’s actually what was phenomenal for me - that was my career when I organized the Avon International running circuit.  We took the first women’s races to places like Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Italy, Germany, Japan, Philippines, Australia . . . it’s amazing that we had the first ever women’s only races in those countries.  And from country to country, I had to go and teach them how to organize a race, and how to time and measure the course.  In every place it was successful.  I remember one of our first races in Brazil had 10,000 women. 

The races totally changed their [women’s] minds; some of these women were desperately poor – they had no shoes, and I am not talking just running shoes; they literally had no shoes – so when a desperately poor woman comes and does something and somebody rewards her for it by giving her a t-shirt and medal and tells her that she IS somebody, hey, guess what, she gets some self-esteem from that.  It is absolutely phenomenal. 

In Japan we had a very hard time organizing our race because the Japan Amateur Athletic Federation just didn’t want a women’s only race.  But we did a women’s only race and it was hugely successful, with huge publicity, and then they decided that they would start doing them themselves as well.  And now we all know that the Japanese women are dominating the women’s marathon.  Now they close the streets, they televise the race for 3 hours live TV, and those women are rock stars in Japan.  It’s unbelievable – they make more money than Michael Jordan [laughs]. 

It’s wonderful to see that happen – to see the social change.  Of my whole career, I think I’m proudest of these moments – of giving women an opportunity.

Having said that, there’s still an awful lot to do, and there’s tremendous opportunities for anybody reading this to get out there and do some global work.