#Quote
More Quotes by Kathrine Switzer
Five years after Boston 1967, I went to the Munich Olympics. I realized that major sponsorship could help me create the opportunity. I wrote a big proposal to Avon cosmetics on how creating a global series of women's races could lead to getting women in the Olympic marathon. People thought I was smoking poppy at the time. The longest event in the Olympic Games was 800m.
All you need is the courage to believe in yourself and put one foot in front of the other.
Talent is everywhere, it only needs the opportunity.
There is an expression among even the most advanced runners that getting your shoes on is the hardest part of any workout
I could feel my anger dissipating as the miles went by--you can't run and stay mad!
If you feel positive, you have a sense of hope. If you have hope, you can have courage.
When I was first running marathons, we were sailing on a flat earth. We were afraid we'd get big legs, grow mustaches, not get boyfriends, not be able to have babies. Women thought that something would happen to them, that they'd break down or turn into men, something shadowy, when they were only limited by their own society's sense of limitations.
When I forgave Jock Semple on Heartbreak Hill, I also got really cross with women. I couldn't understand why they didn't get it, why they didn't know that running was so cool and why they weren't in the race as well. Then I thought to myself "How stupid can you be? You've had so much encouragement and motivation and these women haven't."
A picture, of Jock Semple kissed me,appeared in The New York Times the next day after Boston Marathon in 1973, and the caption was "The end of an era.
Women is out because she's getting in her daily dose of empowerment, freedom and fearlessness. She has put on her freedom wings for 20 minutes or two hours. That's going to make her whole day right and her whole future hold up and seem entirely possible. The sense of her not having any limits, or any restrictions, to me, is so liberating. She doesn't have to prove anything.
