April 19, 1967. The Toronto Maple Leafs were in the early stages of their march to their most recent Stanley Cup championship. Expo 67 was preparing to open its doors in Montreal to what would turn out to be 50 million visitors celebrating Canada's centennial. And south of the border, a 20-year-old college student was lining up with the men, preparing to do the unheard of — to become the first woman to officially run the Boston Marathon.

Kathrine Switzer

They said it couldn't be done, that women weren't built to go the distance. The rules of the marathon didn't expressly forbid women from entering — but there were no races longer than 1½ miles (2.4 kilometres) that were open to women. A year earlier, Roberta Gibb hid in the bushes near the start line and ran the race as a bandit. But in 1967, K.V. Switzer trained hard and signed up for the Boston Marathon. Kathrine Switzer followed the rules and earned a bib number.

When race director Jock Semple realized that K.V. wasn't just another guy, he was infuriated and tried to forcibly remove her from the race. He made the mistake of attacking Switzer in front of the media bus and the moment was caught on film.

Switzer finished the race and became a focal point in the movement to open up sports to women. Her autobiography, Marathon Woman, was released this month.

CBC News Online recently talked with Switzer about that day in 1967 and where women's sports is headed.

Did you ever think, what's a girl like me doing in a place like this?

No, I always thought it was absolutely thrilling. Once I decided that I really wanted to do the Boston Marathon and I'd convinced my coach in practice, then we were totally focused on doing it. You have to understand that when I ran, men had always really welcomed me. I mean, the runners. Not necessarily the spectators or certainly not officials. But certainly the runners were always very new-age guys. When I got to Boston, all the guys were running around and warming up. They came over to me and said "Hey, it's great you're here." "I wish my wife would run." "I wish my girlfriend would run." "Can you give me some tips?" "We're with you all the way." So I never felt like "What am I doing here?" I felt like I was home, it was a place I was meant to be.

Why was there such a difference in attitude between the runners and the people putting on the races?

It's quite a complex story. Jock Semple was the guy who attacked me and he was actually a very, very angry guy. He had come from a tough background and running and the marathon and Boston, in particular, had saved him from despair and poverty and the depression. He came to be in charge of the Boston Marathon and he came to be very protective of it. He regarded me as the lunatic fringe, somebody who was making a joke of his race. A lot of clowns used to do that in the Boston Marathon and it used to make him very angry. He was a feisty guy, so he would punch them. And so, just because I was a girl, he was going to punch me, too. He insisted that the AAU [Amateur Athletic Union] rules forbid women from running any distance of over a mile and a half and also of running with men. The marathon rules never said anything about gender and certainly on the entrance form it never said anything about gender. We went through all this, we checked all the rules, we did all our paperwork. Afterwards, he had me expelled from the Amateur Athletic Union for running without a chaperone, running with men and running more than a mile and a half.

Did he ever change his mind about women and the marathon?

Jock was angry for five years, but finally we made up and actually became best friends. The reason is, he kept seeing us — not just me but other women — coming to Boston and running very well, down to the point that we were down around three hours and we were finishing very strongly. So he realized we were very sincere and loved this race like he did. In 1973 he came up to me and gave me a big kiss and said, "C'mon lass, let's get a bit of notoriety." And that made the New York Times and everybody said it was the end of an era. Probably any other official would have tried to be more polite and say, "Come on, get off the course." But Jock had to go and attack me and, of course, he changed women's history because he did it in front of the stupid press truck! The picture of the whole incident was flashed around the world before I even finished the race and it became a watershed photo in women's sport.

What were some of the excuses they would make for not allowing women to take part?

If a woman ran more than a mile and a half, she's going to get big hairy legs, her uterus is going to fall out, she's going to grow a mustache and turn into a guy and never have children. Or we're simply too fragile and something might happen to us — in the long term. That really was a bad one. It was inappropriate to run with men — that's so stupid. People had bought into the three thousand years of myth about women's passivity and weakness. I thought that was a whole lot of garbage because I came from pioneering stock, you know. My family came to the U.S. in 1737, so we were real tough stuff. The women in our family, certainly they were feminine and they were womanly, but they were no chickens.

At any point during the race were you worried that you might do badly and let women down?

Yeah, but I had decided that after the attack, that no matter what was going to happen next, that I was going to finish, even if I had to finish on my hands and knees. So if I got diarrhea or my knees gave out or I got sick or whatever, I was going to finish. I was going to crawl across the finish line because I wanted to prove that — and I had to prove — that women could do it. Because if I didn't, then people would say, "See, it was just a prank," and I knew that would set women's running back. It was an awful lot of pressure to put on a 20-year-old kid.

Why Boston?

You have to understand that when I first went to run the Boston Marathon, I was just doing it because I wanted to run this wonderful race and do my first marathon. I knew I wasn't going to be the first woman, because Roberta Gibb had run the race the year before, but without a number. That's what I said to my coach: "Why do I need a number? She ran without a number." And he got really angry and said, "Listen, this is a serious race. You've qualified, you trained for it and you just don't run races without a number — you can get into big trouble with the AAU." So the irony of this is that I was trying not to get into trouble with the AAU by doing everything right and I got expelled anyway!

You wrote in your book, Marathon Woman, "to the guys it was a one-off event, but I knew it was a lot more than that. A lot more." How much more was it?

It was everything. It changed my whole life and as a consequence, it changed the lives of millions of other women. And it changed women's history. It was a terrible thing, it was a wonderful thing. Because it gave me the inspiration — it was negative inspiration but it became positive because it gave me a life focus. I was absolutely determined to create opportunities for other women in sport, because I knew that if they had the opportunity that they would be there. You know, at first, [when] I started running Boston, I felt really smug. I said, "I get it, and other women are not getting it. I get it, I'm so smart." And then at about 22 miles — you know how your mind goes when you run, you can't run and stay mad, you start working out the problem — and I was suddenly realizing, "Hey, you're not so special, you're just lucky that you got here in the first place. Other women would be here if they had an Arnie [her coach, Arnie Briggs] or parents like I had." So when I finished the race, I felt great. I came out with a life plan. And every year, the plan grew and so, pretty soon, it became getting us into Boston and then it became creating events to get us into the Olympics. The closing chapter in my book is Joan Benoit coming into the Olympic stadium in 1984. Not just because it was wonderful and dramatic, but because it was televised to 2.2 billion people around the world and from traditional households in India and Afghanistan, people realized that women could run 42.2 kilometres. And everyone knows that's far! So, suddenly — oh my goodness — women can do anything. Like no kidding, that's what we've been telling you. But seeing women doing the race dramatically on TV, that's what changes history.

What was your biggest influence? Your parents? The women's movement?

No, it wasn't the women's movement at the time that influenced me. In fact, I got very angry in the late '60s when the women's movement tried to appropriate the Boston Marathon for themselves, which is a bit unfair. At the time, I didn't understand what being a feminist was and, of course, I was one. It was my parents, because they said I could do anything — and that it was nuts that I would lose my femininity. My dad was the one who encouraged me to run a mile a day when I was 12 years old — and you know, little girls at 12 just adore their dads. So if my dad said to do it, I could do it. He didn't realize it, but he had given me — all through my teen years — this enormous sense of self-esteem and accomplishment that this skinny little frizzle-haired bespectacled little girl otherwise wouldn't have had. By the time I got to 19, I didn't buy into any of those myths that I was being handed, because I was disproving them every day running. By the time I was 19, I was running three miles a day. And then I found out about this thing called the Boston Marathon and I was at Syracuse University and that's when my coach — Arnie Briggs — sort of adopted me. He was scared witless running with me — I was the best running buddy that he ever had. He was afraid that he might be injuring me somehow. But every day I seemed to be in great shape and having a good time and so it couldn't be all that bad. When I wanted to run the marathon, we fought over it. It was like we were sailing on a flat earth. Arnie was afraid we were going to fall off, and I felt like we were Magellan. Every day we were discovering a whole new world. When I ran the marathon distance in training and he collapsed that's when he said, "My God, women have hidden potential and endurance." So we had discovered some amazing things. So the two of them were profoundly influential to me.

How would you describe the state of women's running today?

Wonderful! And it's only the tip of the iceberg. In the United States there are more women registered in races than men. We're at 51 per cent now. So that's the average of all races.

Would it surprise you if I told you that in Boston this year, in the 25 to 29 age group, there are 1,162 men registered and 1,632 women?

And 45 per cent of the entire field at Boston is women. Those are women who, of course, had to qualify. What's going to happen in the next 40 years is really scarily wonderful. We're just discovering what women can do with endurance and stamina. And we're going to see sports that you and I can't even imagine right now, proliferating. Already things like the Grand Traverse have to have half women and half men. To go the distance, they really need the women. Some women in the United States are winning outright 100-mile races over the men. The state of running is really going to be quite amazing, particularly in the distance events. It's hard to imagine this, but maybe the ultra-marathons are going to start becoming very popular and publicized, just like the marathons became popular so much in the '70s and the '80s, those boom years.

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