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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.
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More Quotes by Kathrine Switzer
A lack of forgiveness is a waste of time and it's very enriching to forgive and move on but those are things that come with time.
At the finish line of the 1967 Boston Marathon, one crabby journalist said it was just a one-off deal and women weren't going to run. Only a 20-year-old who had just run a marathon and was shot full of endorphin would say this but I said that there's going to come a day in our lives when women's running is as popular and as men's.
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.
I do forgive people when they get it right, even people who in the past I thought were unforgivable.
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.
Talent is everywhere, it only needs the opportunity.
Triumph over adversity that's what the marathon is all about. Nothing in life can't triumph after that
I said that there's going to come a day in our lives when women's running is as popular and as men's. Looking back, I obviously had a great sense of vision. And I was right.
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 were afraid and they would never even imagine running a marathon in 1967.
