70-year old Kathrine Switzer ran and completed the Boston Marathon yesterday. Nowadays it is not unusual for women and older people to achieve such things but this is significant because 50 years ago, Switzer became the first woman to run in this race and what happened when she did so makes for an astonishing story that I wrote about two years ago and you can listen to her tell her story now in this video clip.
It is incredible how determined some men were to keep women from competing in such events. Interestingly, Switzer became friends later with Jock Semple, the official who tried to push her out of the race.
It looks like men are finishing about 10-15 minutes faster than women. Perhaps the reason men didn’t want women racing against them is because, clearly, the better women are going to beat the lower-upper tier men. That’s inconceivable!
What is really inconceivable is I was (and still am) watching Princess Bride while reading Marcus’s comment. 😮
Yay! Katherine!
also Kathrine
Minor niggle: she was not the first woman to run the Boston Marathon. That was Roberta Bingay Gibb, who ran it the year before. What was unique about Switzer was that she was the first to have officially entered (getting a bib number) and completed it. See this CNN story:
http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/17/us/boston-marathon-kathrine-switzer-trnd/index.html
ahcuah, I don’t consider that to be a minor quibble. Gibb was a better runner than KS and as far as I can determine, never tried to benefit materially from what she did. IMO, KS turned her signature into a second career. Gibb won Boston three times in a row, beating KS by nearly an hour in the ’67 race. Another name we don’t often hear is Nina Kusick.