Who Was Kathrine Switzer and Why Her Run Can Inspire Children
On 19 April 1967, at the two-mile mark of the Boston Marathon, a man in a dark jacket lunged through the crowd of runners to tear a number off a young woman's chest. The number was 261. The woman was Kathrine Switzer, and she was twenty years old.
On 19 April 1967, at the two-mile mark of the Boston Marathon, a man in a dark jacket lunged through the crowd of runners to tear a number off a young woman's chest. The number was 261. The woman was Kathrine Switzer, and she was twenty years old.
Kathrine Virginia Switzer was born on 5 January 1947 in Amberg, Germany, where her father was serving as a major in the American army. The family returned to the United States when she was small, and she grew up in Virginia, raised on her father's belief that it was better to be the doer of things than a spectator watching from the sidelines. That advice shaped her love of sport, first field hockey, then running, which she trained every day alongside Arnie Briggs, a postman and marathon runner who became her coach at Syracuse University.
At the time, women were not officially permitted to enter marathons: it was widely believed, without any scientific basis, that a woman's body simply wasn't built for such long distances. Switzer entered anyway, signing her name as K.V. Switzer, and none of the race organisers noticed a woman behind those initials. On race day she ran alongside Briggs and her boyfriend Tom Miller, a hammer thrower on the athletics team.
That was when the marathon's co-director, Jock Semple, spotted her running and lunged at her, shouting for her to hand over her number and get out of his race. Briggs tried to shield her and was knocked to the ground, but Miller managed to shove Semple aside, and Switzer kept running all the way to the finish line, completing the marathon in roughly four hours and twenty minutes. A photograph of that moment, taken by a journalist along the route, travelled around the world and showed millions of people just how hard a woman had to fight for the simple right to run.
Five years later, in 1972, the Boston Marathon finally opened official entry to women. Switzer didn't stop running: in 1974 she won the New York City Marathon, and in 1975 she crossed the Boston finish line in second place, setting a personal best of 2 hours, 51 minutes and 37 seconds, among the world's fastest women that year.
And her work went well beyond the racetrack. Switzer created the Avon Running Global Women's Circuit, a series of women's races held in twenty-seven countries, which helped persuade the Olympic committee to include the women's marathon in the 1984 Los Angeles Games. She also became a sports journalist and television commentator, telling the story of the sport that had made her famous from a new vantage point.
In 2015 she founded 261 Fearless, an international non-profit that uses running to help women of every age and background overcome fears and limits too often placed on them by others. The name comes straight from the number Jock Semple once tried to tear from her chest. Two years later, in 2017, exactly fifty years after that run, Switzer returned to Boston and ran again wearing bib 261: the marathon retired the number for good, and no athlete will ever wear it again. As for Semple, the two of them became friends in later years, a small detail that shows how even the harshest stories can change.
A child can be told Kathrine Switzer's story starting from a simple question: what would you do if someone tried to stop you doing the thing you love most? Gipi Visconti dedicated one of the books in The Great Heroes collection to her, telling the story of that run and the number that still carries her name today.