Aransas: Welcome to the Uplifters Podcast. I'm your host, Aransas Savvas. And today I have the great joy and privilege to talk to [00:01:00] Katherine Switzer.
If you are a runner, you already know this name and this story. But in case Anyone out there doesn't know this story. I'll start with just a little intro to the moment when Kathrine Switzer rose to fame. In 1967, Kathrine Switzer became the first woman to officially enter the Boston Marathon. Now women weren't technically barred from competing and had run the race before without bibs.
They weren't allowed to compete because the organizers believed that our womanly bodies weren't capable of running the marathon distance. But since she signed up with her initials and her coach picked up her bib, the officials didn't register that she was a woman and let her in the race. Shortly after the race began and she took off her sweatshirt, one of the race officials, Jock Semple, realized that she was a woman and in his effort to do what he saw as protecting the race, [00:02:00] he lunged at Kathrine, he tried to rip her bib off, but only managed to get one of her gloves.
Her coach then, who was running alongside her, tried to defend Jock off, but was knocked to the ground. And then her boyfriend, who was this bulky hammer thrower, who was running with her, Pushed Semple to the ground, allowing Katherine to keep running and finish the race bib intact. Since that dramatic moment, Katherine has been absolutely instrumental in making running accessible and inviting for women and for helping to bring the joy and empowerment of running to millions worldwide.
Katherine, As a woman who has run 21 marathons and as the granddaughter of a 94 year old woman who still runs her 5ks regularly, as the mother of two daughters who have never run, hopefully someday will, but who have never doubted that they belong in every room, I owe you a [00:03:00] huge debt of gratitude and I'm just incredibly excited to be here with you today.
Well, thank you.
Kathrine: Thank you so much for having me. What a wonderful story you have. I'd like to hear about your 94 year old. She's pretty amazing, I have to say. We're really proud of her. I must say, she must have been running in my era when she first began.
Aransas: You know, she really didn't start running incredibly until her 60s, when I started running.
Until then, she had been a yogi and a gardener. And so she was always very physically active and very flexible, and then she got the urge to compete. And of course, when you start out at that age on fresh legs. And some of the competition has died down. She got the thrill of winning age group and got really sucked into it.
And so, yeah, for the last 35 years now, she's competed and had so many amazing moments where we've gotten to compete together and win age awards. And it's been really fun. such a gift to [00:04:00] experience that together?
Kathrine: Well, you know, I have a similar story actually. About 1996, my mother had had some heart issues and the doctor had told her that she needed to walk.
And also, I was over visiting her in Washington. She's reading the Washington Post and she threw the paper down and said, these people are telling us older women that we should always be out walking, but nobody's telling us how. I said, mother, you've seen me for 30 years putting on my shoes and going out the door and running.
And she said, well, what does running have to do with walking? And I said, well, what? And I said, what'd you do? Put your sneakers on and go out there. And she said, what kind of sneakers? Yeah. And all of a sudden my brain clicked. And I said. If my own mother doesn't know this, I've got to write about it. I wrote my first book, Running and Walking for Women, over 40.
And she was my inspiration, and I got her out walking, and by golly, you know, it was [00:05:00] just out to the mailbox, and then it was at the end of the block, and then it was around the block. she was hooked. She just had to be out there every day, and she got all bitchy with my father because he wouldn't come with her.
And he got all jealous because she was enjoying the neighborhood and he wasn't it was hilarious really but honestly I really learned so much from that moment that if my own mother didn't understand How was the world supposed to get it? So that became a huge part of my crusade and you're right women can start people can start at any age the body never lies And if it feels good, you do it.
Your body is constantly regenerating. So, it recovers better when it's stressed a little, and then it comes back stronger.,. So, it's never too late to start. That old body is out there trying to, uh, [00:06:00] regenerate stronger every time.
Aransas: What a beautiful way of looking at it as something that our bodies crave and need in the same way that they need fruits and vegetables.
Kathrine: Yeah, they do. I don't know if you can tell, but I'm quite congested. I got off a long haul flight. but I said, I've got to go out and I got to get my run in.
because the body needs all those things and nature provides. Aransas: Yes. And isn't that beautiful to have something so therapeutic, so accessible. And free. And free. Yes. I mean, once you get the, the shoes and the sports bra, that's really the essential.
Kathrine: Absolutely. For better or worse, the sports bra, and whoever perfects it is going to make a trillion dollars from engineering people. But the point is, even it, with its imperfectness, it has still, you transform the lives of millions of women. So, bravo to you, the women [00:07:00] at Jogbra who founded it in the first place.
Aransas: So true. So true. I hope it keeps getting better. I'm not 100 percent satisfied on that one. But I think this idea of accessibility, actually, it's so true to even the start of your journey. And I want to go back there a little bit before we go into all of the work you have done. Over the last more than 50 years for women, one of the things I can't get a full picture of is the context of that moment.
What were the headlines saying at the time? Was the world on your side in this moment that you broke through?
Kathrine: It was totally polarizing. You know, I mean, they're either they love me or they hated me. And it was always interesting what the media take is on this. When the picture of the attack went on the newspapers and it was on the front page of it.
Just about every newspaper in the world because it was so dramatic. And it was a three part picture taken by a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer named Harry Trask. So there was three frames of a girl, a [00:08:00] running girl, being attacked by a fish, a girl being saved by her burly boyfriend. The headlines were, Chivalry is not dead.
So my boyfriend is the hero of the story, not me, okay? And there's polarizing also from the way things were reported, depending on the newspapers. I deserved what I got, or we should take another look at this. Or why don't just women deserve to be on the public street like anybody else? And then the mail that arrived was also extremely polarizing.
You're going to fry in hell. God is going to punish you. This is a terrible thing you have done for women and men and our children. Oh my gosh, it was just poisonous stuff., it was so funny. I ripped it up and threw it away. And my roommates, we, there were bags of mail.
and somebody would hoot and said, listen to this one, but then other ones were wonderful. Like, we were [00:09:00] thrilled to see you do this and we're sorry that this incident happened, but we're putting your picture on our mantelpiece.
they inspired me to realize that while I consider that most of the world is reasonable, I'm an optimist. My father said, it's sort of a joke, but you take a kid into a room full of horseshit and you can tell whether they're an optimist or a pessimist and the pessimist goes, get me out of here.
And the optimist said, there's got My father would always say, that's my daughter,. I used it for inspiration and I used it for the fact that if all these people are so against this, but the women for the most part were so for it. We've got to create.
Something for them. And frankly, there were three women who are really, really important in making the breakthrough with getting women official. One of them is Sarah Mae Berman, who lived in the Boston area. She knew the [00:10:00] Boston officials. She was well respected by them. So she kept her head down low and worked with them.
And then Nina Cusick in New York in Long Island was really good at working with the Athletic Federation and going to all the tedious and boring meetings of rule change and motions. And just, it was so tedious. And I was really good at organizing events and marketing. And therefore you will build the numbers and people will realize how stupid it is not to let women run. I took the idea further. And you might recall this in history that in 1972, we organized the first ever women's only road race.
It was in central park. It was called the mini marathon [00:11:00] because the mini skirt was in fashion. Is that why? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was called the mini marathon. The sponsor had wanted a. marathon for women. And we said, look, there are only eight of us who could do it at that point, and it's not going to be a big promotional success.
So why don't we have a shorter race? And Fred Lebow came up with the idea of making it a mini marathon and one loop around Central Park, which was totally manageable and interesting as 72 women showed up. It was amazing. It was amazing because I mean, 70 women then is like 70, 000 now or 7, 000 anyway. It was a big success.
Yes. But I realized if you create the opportunity, people will take that opportunity. An opportunity to me is everything. Really, it's just, every kid deserves an opportunity. I just look back on my childhood and my father, you know, saying, you know, you should go out and run a mile a day and you'd be the best player on your field hockey team and [00:12:00] that kind of stuff.
And he gave me that opportunity. And Arnie Briggs, my first coach at Syracuse University, gave me that opportunity by encouraging me to run distance and telling me about the marathon.
Aransas: We need somebody to say, I believe in you. You can do this. This is possible.
Kathrine: When I was training for that first Boston Marathon, my coach didn't want me to do it because he didn't believe a woman could do it. Even though he believed in me,he said, no Dame ever ran no marathon. I tried to tell him that Roberta Gibb had run the Boston Marathon the year before.
He just couldn't. Get his head around it. But he said, if any woman could, you could. And he said, I'll tell you what he said. I'd be the first person to take you to Boston. If you did the distance in practice. I trained up, okay. It came time, the day we were going to run 26 miles. When we were [00:13:00] finishing, he said, you look really good. I just can't believe it. I think it doesn't feel like any 26 miles to me. And I said, let's run another five mile loop.
And then we know we've got it in the bag. And he said, can you run another five miles? And I said, sure. Can you, I feel great. And he goes, anyway, the last mile he was gone. Eyes were crossed weaving all over the road. And when we finished, I flung my arms around him. I said, we did it. We did it. We're going to Boston. what was going through your mind when Jock lunged at you?
Kathrine: Oh, I was terrified. See, I didn't know he was [00:15:00] coming. And I didn't see him because he came from behind. So what I did is I heard his shoes on the pavement. Because in a marathon you hear bump, bump, bump, bump, everybody's got rubber sole shoes.
And when you're out training. You can hear a dog behind you sometimes before he lunges, right? You hear the claws on the pavement. Yeah. And you turn. And that's exactly what I heard. I said, this, you know, it's like such a foreign sound. I quickly turned. And there he was. And then he's, uh, this looming monster.
And I looked right in his face. And he just screamed at me. He said, get the hell out of my race. And give me those numbers. I was just terrified, really, because he grabbed me and he kept trying to rip my numbers off of me. I didn't want what's going on. So the first reaction was quite terrifying. And then it was trying to get away from him.
And then he had me by the sweatshirt and was pulling me. And my coach was screaming, leave her alone. She's okay. I've trained her. And then Tom, my boyfriend came and Took him out with the most astonishing. I've never been close to [00:16:00] violence before. And you could hear the crunch when he hit him. And Jock went flying.
And I thought, Oh my God, we're going to be in really big trouble because Tom is a hotheaded guy and we've killed this guy. We're going to go to jail. So immediately now I'm feeling sorry for him. My coach Arnie was aghast as well and he just screamed run like hell. And then we just took off down the street, flying past the press truck who were trying to, you know, get alongside of us and berate me and what are you trying to prove and when are you going to quit?
I said I'm not going to quit. And finally when they left us alone, I said to my coach, I said I'm going to finish this race on my hands and my knees if I have to. Because if I quit, everybody expects me to quit, everybody wants me to quit, and that's what they're going to say all women do. I'm not going to quit, Arnie was really great. He said, okay, we're going to just slow down. We're not going to worry about time. That's all we're going to think about. Just finish. So he was really good. But if he couldn't have gone on, I would have gone on. I would have left him. And of [00:17:00] course, Tom, of course, we left in the dust at about 10 miles.
Aransas: Poor Tom.
Kathrine: He said, I'm going to run the Boston Marathon, too. And I said, Tom, you know, you weigh 235 pounds, you're a really good athlete. But I said, you've done no training. And he said, if a girl can do it, I can do it.
Aransas: Is that so, Tom?
Kathrine: Well, he came in handy, Aransas: Yes, quite literally. So, what was going through your head now as you got further into the race? I've heard you say that you started to make peace with Jock and see him as a spark that lit a fire in you.
Kathrine: Yes. I was angry with him up until about 21 miles.
At 21 miles in a marathon, your emotions kind of go, and anger certainly goes. And I realized it wasn't his fault. He's a product of his time. It's going to have to be women like me who changed his mind. The best way of doing that I felt is [00:18:00] to become a better athlete because he did not consider me an athlete.
And when I finished in four hours and 20 minutes, he indeed, the next day at a press conference said, Four hours, 20 minutes. I could have walked it that fast. Well, all that did was increase my resolve to become a better athlete. I improved to two hours and 51 minutes, and it was so exciting to me. It took me quite a long time, what, three years.
It was so exciting for me to see my body, which I always felt was kind of an average athlete body, not a good athlete, become a good athlete, get a world ranking. It was such a thrill. And I'm constantly, constantly amazed by the capacity of human achievement. We got together, us women, to organize both legislation and create events.
And then I went on, actually, after that, to take my idea of women's only races and went to Avon [00:19:00] Cosmetics, which was the biggest cosmetics company in the world at the time. And I wrote this incredible business proposal for them, saying that they, as a company that had Avon representatives who were participants, not spectators, They weren't about putting on lipsticks as much as selling the lipstick.
So therefore gave women an opportunity to earn an income when at the time of the, when it was founded at the turn of the century, women were not allowed jobs. They weren't allowed to go out and get a wage, but they could sell the little cosmetics to their friends, right.. So I put all these ideas together And I took it to them as an experiment in marketing, you know, saying that if they organized a bunch of races with me, helping them with this plan around the world, cause they're a big multinational company, 125 countries, they could increase the international participation.
And with that international participation, we can get the women's [00:20:00] marathon into the Olympic games. People thought I was smoking poppy when I said I want to get the women's marathon in the Olympic Games. They said, you've got to be crazy. The longest event in the Olympic Games is just 1500 meters, less than a mile.
And the marathon, no way. It's going to take you till 2012 to make that happen. Avon loved the proposal and they hired me. Now, I only really did it as an experiment. I had no idea that they would offer me a job.
So once I got in the door, I'm a real, give me this much and I'll kick it open. I just hammered them on this race. I said, let me do just one race. Let me just do one race. I'll show you what kind of publicity we can get.
It'll be great. It'll be great. They'll come from everywhere. Well, finally, we did. Oh, my God. We were on every network that night. We were on the front page of the New York Times. We had a layout in Sports Illustrated. [00:21:00] The company had never gotten publicity like that before. It was magic. And then they said, let's get out that proposal and create a global program.
We eventually put on races in 27 countries, 400 races for over a million women. And we had the data to show the International Olympic Committee that women not only had the performances, but they had the ability, the international representation to warrant inclusion in the Olympic Games.
they said 24 countries and three continents. We had 27 countries and five continents. In 1984, When that event was included in the Olympic games for the first time, it was the event of the games. It was watched around the world by 2. 2 billion people. And I often say it wasn't the 90, 000 people in the stadium that were cheering for Joan Benoit Samuelson It was the 2. 2 billion people who are watching it on television. Because everybody knows how far [00:22:00] 42. 2 kilometers or 26. 2 miles is and they know it's far. And here were women running it. And to me that was as important as giving women the right to vote. To me it was the physical equivalent of the 1920 vote of women's social and intellectual.
This was the physical equivalent. Aransas: That's incredible. And it all started because of this really harrowing moment. Absolutely. you had all these people yelling at you. They said, don't start.
And then they said, stop. And you said, I'm going to keep going. And I think so often in life, we can hear those voices that say stop or don't start. And one of two things happens. We either say, I'm going to keep going and I'm going to use your resistance as my fuel or we say, you're right, I'm going to stop.
And I think as much as women are trained for endurance, we're [00:23:00] also trained through the centuries to demur and to fall back and to support others. And so it is remarkable to me to imagine what can happen when women keep standing up and powering through the resistance.
Kathrine: My bib number, 261, from the Boston Marathon.
Suddenly, people began writing to me and saying, that number, 261, makes me feel fearless. And they were putting it on their back in their first marathon, sometimes they would ink it on their wrist, and they'd say, it gives me courage. And I was saying, what does this mean?
People were tattooing themselves with 261 Fearless. So I was at a press [00:24:00] conference in Austria and I happened to mention what was happening in my life at that point. I was there with a bunch of really elite women athletes. I told the 261 story and I said I don't know what i'm going to do with it But I think it's pretty powerful Anyway, a woman came up to meand she said you have no idea What this means is this incredibly powerful.
And I said, yeah, but I said, I'm not going to reach the women I want to reach And she said, well, what women you talk about? I said, Mideast, We're not going to reach them. She said, you're absolutely wrong. She said, Those women would rally for this. And I said, they can't, they're not even going to hear about it.
And she said, of course I'll hear about it. I said, they won't hear about it. She said, they're [00:25:00] on their cell phones. I said, they're poor women. They don't have cell phones. And she said, I want to tell you something. She said, as poor as any group of 10 women is one of them will have an internet connection.
She and I became very good friends. She said, look, what we do is we form a nonprofit. And we'll do a series of groups in a safe space, nonjudgmental, nothing to do with competition, but let's get women out the door. You go, you take them by the hand, and you say, come on, just go out and walk with me.
And I said, okay, I said, but I'm too old for another revolution. Yes, I was 62 at the time, right? I'm 77 now. So yeah, I look back on it, I was a pup. We're now in 14 countries. We train women to become a [00:26:00] coach. Then they go to their community and get women to come out and run. It will be huge. This may not be really huge until after I'm dead. And this is the first time I've ever embarked on something that I may not actually see the end result.
I'm working on being philosophical about it, about handing it off to this next generation.
Aransas: And I will challenge your belief there a bit to say, of course, first of all, I hope you have many, many, many more years of life and that this grows exponentially and. We haven't even seen the end of what you did getting us into Boston.
We haven't seen the end of the power of the Avon races, right?. There is no end. And that is the other really striking thing about your story, Kathrine. To me, it is the exponential effect. and this reminder that every one of us [00:27:00] has the freedom and the potential to make brave choices.
I love that you call your organization 261 Fearless because to me it is an acknowledgement not that we are doing this without fear. Exactly. But that we're doing it in spite of fear. Exactly. what are some of the doors maybe that we're not seeing that we need to poke our little toes in like you did and then kick them the heck open?
Kathrine: I worry about the politics, okay? So you know, there are pictures of women in Afghanistan in, when? The early 80s? They're out shopping. Okay. They haven't been completely shuttered and closeted and restricted.
So there's been this total reversion of what I am [00:28:00] dumbfounded, bewildered, and very, very nervous about the fact that suddenly all the things we fought for in the sixties and seventies have been already reversed in the United States. And I don't know why women aren't paying more attention. I'm always astonished that there's a movement like there is now of women who say, I just want to be a housewife and I should be allowed to be a housewife.
Okay. That's okay with me. You go be a housewife. But don't criticize those of us who really want to get our daughters into grad school and to get a job and to be able to succeed and to be a CEO. I find the capacity for human achievement so amazing that anyone wouldn't want to go and grab it, you know? Yeah.
Aransas: So we've talked a lot about you as a runner, you were known as a runner, and yet my suspicion is This fearlessness is core to who you are.
So what impact has fearlessness had on who Kathrine is [00:30:00] as a woman outside of runner and activist?
Kathrine: there's so many ways when I find myself totally incapable, for instance, cleaning up my mess. You should see the books that are downstairs and covered with dust and still in boxes and the memorabilia and the notes and the historical documents that got to be annotated.
Syracuse University wants my papers, but they want them annotated and it's fair enough too. But I totally am incapable of doing that because that's something in the past So that makes me fearful. I fall in bed at night and I'm thinking, Oh, You know what, you know, if I don't clean that stuff up and get it annotated, you know, somebody's going to come in here and dump it in a dumpster.
I doubt that. Would you like to
Aransas: come up and help me? Yes, I would. Sign me up. Kathrine: I
Aransas: have a lot of volunteers and I can't quite organize them enough to do that. No surprise, given all the other important work that you're doing. [00:31:00]
Kathrine: I just have this kind of fear, okay, if I have a fear, I'm kind of running out of time.
Okay. In the last three years, I've had some physical setbacks, which were mostly my fault, I must say. But the fact is, is that I'm no longer bulletproof. Aransas: What is that teaching you?
Kathrine: Well, it's teaching me, first of all, to quit being so ridiculously optimistic and adventuresome.
You know, this series of catastrophes happened when I was doing a fundraiser. My girlfriend of mine said that she was going to swim across a frozen lake, break the ice and swim across it on New Year's Day if she could raise 1, 000 for 261 Fearless. I said, that's not enough money for doing that. You could get really frostbitten or whatever.
She said, no, no, no, I'll be fine. And I said, well, I've got to match you. I'm going to match you. I'm going to say go 3, 000. It was my 74th birthday. So I said, I'm going to [00:32:00] jump off the high board. And that morning, my husband said, don't you think, you know, maybe we ought to get somebody there to pull you out of the water.
If something happens. And I said, what could happen? And just, just jump off the board. I go in the water. Well, I jumped off the board. And in fact, the tide was out. There was plenty of water. There was plenty of water, but it made it like a four story building rather than the three story building. And I went into the water and landed on my back, broke my back in two places, broke four ribs and broke my sternum.
And so I was laid up for like three months. It was a mess. I was a mess. My life really passed before my eyes. It was a stupid prank that I hadn't obviously thought through. I guess the worst thing is, is how stupid I felt. Aransas:Well, I guess it's a lesson in here that our superpowers are also going to turn into weaknesses sometimes. Yeah. Right? So if you were an over [00:33:00] thinker, you would not have run that race. Right. I will think of you this year at the mini 10k.
Kathrine: I'll see you there. I'm delighted to say that my last mini 10k, which was last year. I ran, what, 67 minutes. I was so excited, but now I'm down to 57 minutes. Amazing! So, I've gotten my mojo back, I'll look forward to seeing you.
Aransas: I will look forward to it as well. I am dedicating this conversation to a dear friend of mine in Uplifter who we lost prematurely last year. One of my running buddies, an amazingly talented runner, young woman, early forties, legendary podcaster, but loved that race. more than anyone I know and we all think of that as her race and so a bunch of us have signed up this year to run [00:34:00] it in her honor.
So it's even more special that I get to talk to you and see you there. Uplifters, thank you for listening. I'll see all of you on May 17 at Caveat for Uplifters Live. Kathrine, thank you for being here. Thank you for all you've done for the running community and for women in general. Thank you for listening to the Uplifters podcast.