Part of that was that I wanted to be a sportswriter, and all of the cool writers I read and loved such as J.D. It wasn’t a deception but was how I was used to writing my name, ever since I was 12, and when I used to write for my high school paper, it was as K.V. When it came to signing up, I had my physical done prior to the race and submitted it, and I signed up as K.V. Even though it had been a men-only race for 70 years, it said nothing about gender in the (rules of the) Boston Marathon, and nothing about gender on the signup forms. You have to register the right way.” He checked the rule book and I checked the rule book.

When my coach agreed to join me in the race and support me, he said, “No way can you just jump in. Switzer: The thing about it was, that it was the bib that incited the officials. courtesy / Boston Athletic AssociationĪF: But how was it not detected that you had 'officially' entered the race? 261 was retired by the Boston Marathon after the 2017 race. If you show me you can run 26 miles, I’d be the first one to take you to Boston.” He didn’t believe it, and Arnie and I argued some more.Įventually, he said, “Look, if any woman could do it, you could, but you’d have to prove it to me. I’d also told Arnie during our run and argument, that that year (1966) Roberta Gibb had done it when she jumped in from the bushes and ran the entire thing with the men.

They said women couldn’t do something that arduous, that it might turn a woman's features into that of a man, and a doctor had told me straight away that my uterus would fall out. One day it was just Arnie and me running during a blizzard, and while he told another story, I said, “let’s stop talking about it and run it.” During that snowy run, he said that women couldn't run a marathon, I said that that was ridiculous.Īt the time the prevailing mindset and myth were that women were not physiologically able to run 26.2 miles. When I trained with the Syracuse men's team, he told these inspirational stories about what he saw and experienced running Boston.

I wanted to run a marathon, and I wanted to run Boston because my coach, Arnie Briggs, had run it 15 times. Kathrine Switzer: I think it’s really important for me to say that when I ran that race I wasn’t trying to prove anything.

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