04/20/2026
We are still fighting all the Jock Semples of the world.
She could quit. Nobody would blame her. A race official has just attacked her -- screaming, grabbing at her bib number, trying to drag her off the course. Her coach has been swatted aside. Reporters are shouting: "Are you a suffragette? Are you a crusader?"
She could step off the road right now and no one would be surprised. Women aren't supposed to be here anyway. The Amateur Athletic Union won't let them compete in races longer than a mile and a half. Doctors warn that distance running will damage their reproductive organs -- that their uteruses might fall out.
But Kathrine Switzer knows exactly what will happen if she stops.
"I knew if I quit, nobody would ever believe that women had the capability to run 26-plus miles. If I quit, everybody would say it was a publicity stunt. If I quit, it would set women's sports back, way back, instead of forward. If I quit, Jock Semple and all those like him would win."
It is April 19, 1967. She keeps running.
Kathrine Switzer was born in 1947. When she was twelve, her father told her to run a mile every day to prepare for field hockey tryouts. "Life is to participate," he said, "not to spectate." She ran that mile. Then she ran it the next day, and the next. She never stopped.
At Syracuse University, there was no women's running team -- so she asked to train with the men. That's where she met Arnie Briggs, a fifty-year-old mailman who volunteered as a coach with the cross-country team. He had run fifteen Boston Marathons, and he told her stories about the race until she decided she wanted to run it herself.
"No woman can run the Boston Marathon," Briggs told her.
She told him to prove it. They trained together through a brutal Syracuse winter. Three weeks before the race, they ran twenty-six miles -- and she felt so good she suggested they run five more, just to be sure. At thirty-one miles, Arnie was turning grey. When they finished, she gave him a huge hug. He passed out cold.
The next day, he told her he'd take her to Boston.
The rulebook said nothing about gender. She signed up as K.V. Switzer -- the way she always signed her name -- paid the entry fee, and got her number: 261. On April 19, 1967, she lined up with over seven hundred runners in the cold and the snow. The men around her were friendly, supportive. She felt welcome.
Then, a few miles in, the press truck passed. A reporter spotted her and shouted to race co-director Jock Semple: "Hey Jock, there's a broad in your race!"
Semple jumped off the bus and ran after her.
"Get the hell out of my race," he screamed, "and give me those numbers!"
He grabbed her, clawed at her bib. When her coach tried to push him away, Semple swatted him aside. Then her boyfriend -- a 235-pound former football player -- hit Semple with a cross-body block and sent him flying.
"Run like hell!" Arnie shouted.
She ran. Four hours and twenty minutes later, she crossed the finish line -- the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon as an official entrant. Reporters surrounded her, demanding to know what she was trying to prove.
"I felt I'd stepped into a different life," she later wrote. "I knew it was a lot more than a race. A lot more."
In response to her run, the AAU banned women from competing in races against men. But Switzer kept fighting. She campaigned for years until women were officially allowed to run Boston in 1972. She won the New York City Marathon in 1974 and ran her personal best at Boston in 1975 -- 2:51, then the sixth-fastest time in the world.
She founded the Avon International Running Circuit, a global series of women's races that reached over a million runners in twenty-seven countries. Her work was instrumental in getting the women's marathon added to the Olympic Games in 1984. She provided commentary for that first Olympic race and went on to win an Emmy for her sports broadcasting.
In 2015, she co-founded 261 Fearless -- named after her bib number -- a nonprofit that uses running to empower women around the world. In 2017, at age seventy, she ran the Boston Marathon again on the fiftieth anniversary of her historic run.
She wore bib 261 one more time and finished in 4:44 -- only twenty-four minutes slower than when she was twenty. This time, she wasn't alone. Over 13,700 women ran beside her -- almost half the field. The Boston Athletic Association retired bib 261 in her honor.
Jock Semple, the man who attacked her, eventually became one of her closest friends. They did interviews together. She visited him before he died. She has said that she thanks him almost every day -- because his attack gave her the spark that changed millions of lives.
"It was the worst thing in my life at the time," she said. "It became the best thing in my life."
----
To share this inspiring story with children, there's a fantastic picture book "Her Fearless Run: Kathrine Switzer's Historic Boston Marathon" for ages 6 to 10 at https://www.amightygirl.com/her-fearless-run
For adults who would like to read more about Kathrine Switzer's inspiring story, we recommend her autobiography, "Marathon Woman: Running the Race to Revolutionize Women's Sports," at https://www.amightygirl.com/marathon-woman
Girls and women fought for decades for access to sports programs and won a huge victory in 1972 with the passage of Title IX which prohibited s*x discrimination in school sports or other educations programs receiving federal support. To introduce kids to this landmark civil rights legislation and the fierce fight necessary to win this victory for girls and women, we recommend the new picture book "An Equal Shot: How the Law Title IX Changed America" for ages 4 to 8 (https://www.amightygirl.com/an-equal-shot) and "Let Me Play: The Story of Title IX" for ages 9 and up (https://www.amightygirl.com/let-me-play)
For an picture book about women breaking athletic records throughout history, we also recommend "Girls With Guts!" for ages 6 to 9 at https://www.amightygirl.com/girls-with-guts
And for a fantastic t-shirt that speaks to the fact that strength has nothing to do with gender, check out the “I'm not strong for a girl. I'm just strong.” t-shirt for both kids and adults at https://www.amightygirl.com/strong-t-shirt
Photo Credit: Harry Trask, Boston Herald via Kathrine Switzer
