Kathrine Switzer prepares to run New York Marathon to cap off historic year in women’s running
Kathrine Switzer is making 2017 a year to talk about. When fall rolls around, she'll line up at the start line of the New York City Marathon.
Kathrine Switzer knows how to make a 50-year anniversary count. The marathon running legend has just added another marathon to her calendar.
The pioneer of women’s running made her mark in history books in 1967 when she became the first woman to run the Boston Marathon with an official race bib. Women weren’t allowed to run the course from Hopkinton to downtown Boston and when race director Jock Semple found out that a woman was in the midst of the mass of participants, he tried to pull her out. She refused to leave and finished the marathon making herself an icon for women in the sport. 50 years later, she’s adding a few lengthy footnotes to this story.
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Now in her seventh decade, Switzer took to the streets of Boston to honour her 50th anniversary. She showed up to the famous Massachusetts race and ran as the lead of 261 Fearless– named after her original race bib and the organization which she spearheads. That was in April.
In her training block before that race when she was in the midst of ramping up her training, she told us that she was hitting times that she hadn’t seen on her runs in over ten years. As well, she noted, her weight was the lowest it had been in a decade.
Now, she has announced her next goal: she’s heading to the Big Apple in November to race the TCS New York City Marathon.
According to Competitor, Switzer said that having worked up to running the Boston Marathon, she didn’t want to let her fitness go. That’s why she decided to take part in another of the World Marathon Majors seven months out from North America’s most prestigious road race. The TCS New York City Marathon will take marathon runners on a tour of the five boroughs on November 5, 2017. There, Switzer will wrap up what has been yet another historic year for women’s running.
See the video below to watch Switzer post-race in Boston this past April.
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