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| Born in 1946, still running |
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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