Breaking Through Barriers

Back in 1959, Kathrine was 12 years old when running burst into her life. She came home from school one day and told her father that she wanted to be a cheerleader when she went to high school. He replied: “No, you don’t. You want people to cheer for you. Cheerleaders cheer for other people.” The game is on the field, he told her. He said that her high school was introducing something new the following year, called a ‘field hockey team’ and that if she ran a mile a day until then, she’d be the best player on the team. So together they measured out the yard, marked it into laps and off she went.

“People think the Boston Marathon changed my life, but actually it was all the years in the lead up to that event; the one mile a day I was running as a kid,” said Kathrine, “When I went to high school and was surrounded by big kids, the daily run put a victory under my belt that they did not have. In one class, there was an 18-year-old who was set to graduate and get married the next year, and there I was still playing with dolls. But I wasn’t that intimidated because I was empowered by running.”

Eventually, Arnie agreed that if Kathrine could prove she could run the distance in practice she could enter the race. So they trained the distance – and it was tough. There was one time, at 30K, when Kathrine was so tired she sat down and slept on the side of the road. But she proved her mettle by not only making the 26-mile marker but doing another five miles on top. From then on, Arnie was right behind her. They were filling in the entry form when Kathrine realised there was no mention of gender. “Arnie said, of course not, because nobody in the Boston Athletic Association or the whole world would believe a woman could run a marathon.” They checked the rulebook but there was no mention of women there so she went ahead and signed the form as she always did – K V Switzer – and sent it in.

Kathrine remembers feeling nervous when the bib was handed to her – number 261 in big numbers front and back. “I realised I’d really be noticed wearing that big number. Arnie said, ‘I know and I’m proud of you.’ Isn’t that great? Here’s a 50-year-old guy who’d run the Boston Marathon 15 times – he’d finished in the top 10 a couple of times – and he was putting his reputation on the line for a 20-year-old girl.”

But Semple was not done. He got up and went to the officials’ office, called the federation and had Kathrine disqualified from the race and expelled from the athletic federation on multiple grounds: that she’d run more than a mile and a half and that’s all women were allowed to run; that she’d fraudulently entered the race by signing her initials; that she’d run with men; and that she’d run the Boston Marathon without a chaperone.

She remembers the long run and the emotions she went through. “I did get angry at women for a few miles; furious that they weren’t there running with me. And then I realised I was being stupid. I’d had all this reinforcement from parents who motivated me, Arnie who took me under his wing, the guys on the team who were great… Most girls at that time got to age 13 or 14 and were told to no longer climb trees, not to take part in sports, to just look good because their destiny was to get married.” It was this moment when she decided to train hard to become a better athlete and work to create more opportunities for women. And she did. Kathrine, in her own words, “trained her brains out.” In 1975, she ran Boston in 2:51, having won the fight for women to enter officially in 1972 (and won New York Marathon in 1974 with a time of 3:07:29).

“Arnie would say they were jealous of me. ‘You’re running, she’s not running, you’re powerful, she’s not powerful’. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t just put their trainers on too and Arnie reasoned, ‘You know that, I know that, but they don’t know that yet.’ And he was right. “So many women have contacted me over the years and told me they thought I was the craziest person when they were younger. They say they started running when they were 35, 40 or 50 and it changed their lives.”

Kathrine has worked for the last 50 years for women’s empowerment in sport, from challenging herself to get the women’s marathon into the Olympic Games to setting up her own worldwide women’s running community.

The races attracted growing media attention around the world and then in 1981 she met with the IOC in Los Angeles. “Just imagine how nervous I was when they made the decision to open the doors and let me in along with the media. The announcement was made by Madame Monique Berlioux who was the Executive Director of the IOS. I was so happy that she made the announcement because I knew it was significant for her; I couldn’t imagine how tough her job was as a woman leading the male dominated IOC back then.” So, 1984 was the first Olympics Games to hold a women’s marathon, thanks in large measure to Kathrine.

Kathrine always kept her Boston 261 bib – with the torn-off corner from the fracas with Semple – and the number has now become a talisman for women’s sport worldwide thanks to the non-profit she set up called 261 Fearless: “The non-profit aims to take women by the hand and say: ‘Come and join us. Just walk with us or run with us, we’re not going to judge you. You’re not too old or too fat or too slow, we don’t care.” 261 Fearless is now established in 11 countries and five continents – a network of run clubs for women along with an educational programme to empower them to run.