Wednesday 17 September 2014

Kathrine Switzer: Marathon Woman

Born in 1946, still running
17 September 2014
Day 159

Swim day (32 lengths in a 25m pool, still struggling to do more than half a length in front crawl)
Inspired by all-women Marathon she instigated last April, I bought Kathrine Switzer’s memoir. Aptly enough, reading it has followed my own marathon running pattern. I started a little too fast, forgiving the sometimes clunky narrative in my enthusiasm. Reading along in leaps and bounds, so fascinated by this woman’s transformation from a jogger with a point to prove into sixth best female marathon runner in the world, I hit the wall when her career blossomed from pioneering athlete to sharp-elbowed promoter of international women’s sports.  
Switzer’s detailing of the freezing cold, dark, rainy runs she endured in the lead up to the famous 1967 Boston Breakthrough however, is perfect inspiration for an obsessive like me, who records her obsession on a blog like this. I love that she registered as KW Switzer and barged into the men-only race, finishing way ahead of her self-important boyfriend and started a revolution in her pyjama like tracksuit, wearing gardening gloves against the cold. Despite the punch up at the beginning, and her fear about what would happen at the end, she ran the race in 4:20 and was asked as she finished ‘are you a suffragette?’
The race proved a springboard for a career spent proving that women could run further than 10km without their wombs falling out. Her running, as a young woman, improved to give her a Boston Marathon pb of 2:52 in 1975.
Quite rightly, she dismisses that first 4:30 run as ‘a jogger’s time’, so I read on, with a sinking heart, to discover that the eight years to the PB were spent following a punishing running programme, often going over 100m per week. Also, she was 29.
It seems as if she stopped competing and donned a business suit thereafter, because the book morphs from a story of a determined runner into one about successful career in racing PR for womankind. Naturally, it’s this bigger picture that we should all be grateful for, but I’m ashamed to admit, that’s when I started skim reading. I suppose what I really want to know is how hard she trained when she was 51, and whether she ran the distance then, and whether she thinks I can work hard enough to turn my 3:57 PB into a 3:45, for London 2015, after my Year of Training Seriously.
So it would have been better if she’d written a book aimed specifically at delusional middle-aged women with too many demands on their time.

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