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When I finished the Boston race in 1967, there were two things I wanted to do. I wanted to become a better athlete because my first marathon was 4:20. In those days, that was considered a jogging time and I knew people were going to tease me. But I was more fascinated with what women could do if they only had the chance.
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More Quotes by Kathrine Switzer
Life is for participating, not for spectating.
When I go to the Boston Marathon now, I have wet shoulders—women fall into my arms crying. They're weeping for joy because running has changed their lives. They feel they can do anything.
Women is out because she's getting in her daily dose of empowerment, freedom and fearlessness. She has put on her freedom wings for 20 minutes or two hours. That's going to make her whole day right and her whole future hold up and seem entirely possible. The sense of her not having any limits, or any restrictions, to me, is so liberating. She doesn't have to prove anything.
1967 race in Boston changed not just my life, but millions of women's lives. There are also things that, when you get older, resonate more.
All you need is the courage to believe in yourself and put one foot in front of the other.
I could feel my anger dissipating as the miles went by--you can't run and stay mad!
If you feel positive, you have a sense of hope. If you have hope, you can have courage.
When I forgave Jock Semple on Heartbreak Hill, I also got really cross with women. I couldn't understand why they didn't get it, why they didn't know that running was so cool and why they weren't in the race as well. Then I thought to myself "How stupid can you be? You've had so much encouragement and motivation and these women haven't."
Five years after Boston 1967, I went to the Munich Olympics. I realized that major sponsorship could help me create the opportunity. I wrote a big proposal to Avon cosmetics on how creating a global series of women's races could lead to getting women in the Olympic marathon. People thought I was smoking poppy at the time. The longest event in the Olympic Games was 800m.
A picture, of Jock Semple kissed me,appeared in The New York Times the next day after Boston Marathon in 1973, and the caption was "The end of an era.
