This week, through publicist Laura Beachy, Switzer recalled how she’d “wanted to run Boston ever since I first heard of it.” Briggs, she says, embraced that potential. Switzer made her epic run in the company of Briggs, a letter carrier and a World War II veteran who for years was a kind of running institution at the University.
She made people realize she had a mind, and she could run, and she could be free.” “She had to become something many people couldn’t possibly see. “Kathrine had to invent the role she played,” Tucker says. “She has no idea how important she really was,” says Lennie Tucker, a friend of Switzer’s, a longtime runner and track official in Central New York-and a woman who recalls a time, not so long ago, when she rarely saw other female distance runners training on country roads. Monday, she will be among tens of thousands of runners who go to the starting line in Boston.įifty years after she shattered a ban on women runners by entering that famous marathon-and then finishing, even after race manager Jock Semple tried to drag her from the course-she will be a center of attention for world media, thanks to all she proved as a 20-year-old student at Syracuse. Switzer, now 70, became an elite marathon runner and an inductee into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls.
The other number belonged to John Kelley, who ran Boston 61 times. This week, a half-century later, officials in Boston announced they’ll retire Switzer’s bib number from the 1967 race, making her only the second person in the history of the event to earn that honor. Kathrine Switzer running with her coach Arnie Briggs, far right, in 1972.
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