Kathrine Switzer on Waverly Avenue, in February snow. Credit: Sean Kirst | Central Current

Kathrine Switzer is breaking her own bemused promise. She loves Syracuse. The connections she made in this city changed her life. She does not, however, love being in Central New York during our fierce winters, which is why she vowed long ago to visit only in spring, summer or fall — but never in these months of ice and snow.

Saturday, as it has been for months, it was snowing. Temperatures hung right around zero. Across the city, tires spun and cars slid backwards while drivers tried to navigate steep hills.

Yet in weather she tries so hard to avoid, Switzer is here. She flew in from New Zealand, her home for much of the year, where temperatures are up in the 60s. Switzer was invited back by Syracuse University. School officials asked her to return for a reason that overwhelms any reluctance to show up in the snow.

At halftime of today’s noon Syracuse women’s basketball game against Louisville in the JMA Wireless Dome, in the same week as National Girls & Women in Sports Day, SU officials will lift up a running bib in Switzer’s honor carrying the number 261 — the number she wore in 1967 when she entered the Boston Marathon.

While that bib will join the names and jerseys of other great Syracuse athletes and coaches, hanging in the dome, Switzer’s recognition is unique. She was not a member of any SU sports team when she had a moment the National Women’s Hall of Fame describes as paving “the way for women in running.”

In 1967, women were not allowed to compete in the Boston Marathon, during an era when monumental barriers still separated women and girls from competing in any meaningful way in most traditionally male sports.

Switzer used only her initials in signing up for the marathon. It infuriated her that women were not considered physically strong enough to handle the full distance. Early in the race, an angry marathon official tried to physically remove Switzer from the course.

With help from some friends, she broke free. Switzer finished the 26.2 mile course. Photos of the drama showed up in newspapers across the nation. The incident — coupled with the growing strength of the movement for women’s rights — ignited something deep in women who loved to run.

Filmmaker Ed Richardson interviews Kathrine Switzer on Saturday, at Newhouse 3. That’s cinematographer Harold Sellers in background. Credit: Sean Kirst | Central Current

In 2025, more than 13,500 women entered the Boston Marathon.

As Switzer told Ed Richardson, a filmmaker in Syracuse as part of a “Marathon Woman” documentary that Richardson’s company — Chastain Film Capital — is making about her life, philosophy and impact:

“If you want to lift a woman up, show her how to run.”

For her courage at Boston — and for a lifetime of transformative outreach, especially to women runners — Switzer’s bib is going up in the dome.

“Amazing,” she said. To see that happen, even in the fiercest winter in years in the nation’s snowiest large city, she came back.

As Lennie Tucker — a friend of Switzer’s, a longtime track and field official and a devoted Syracuse runner who will be in the dome today — told me long ago:

“Kathrine had to invent the role she played. She had to become something many
people couldn’t possibly see. She made people realize she had a mind, and she could run, and
she could be free.”

Switzer, who turned 79 last month, remains young. She still runs five times a week. She figures she could go out right now and do a 10k. She is board chair of 261 Fearless, “a global women’s running network” that Switzer said seeks to helps every woman — of every age, in every condition — realize the strength that comes with support, at a simple moment of decision:

You choose to keep going, whatever obstacle you face.

Her own “fearless moment” happened in Boston. But if you want her “hot damn moment,” as Switzer loves to call it, that happened in December 1966 in Syracuse, when she was a teenage SU student on a long run with a U.S. Postal Service letter carrier named Arnie Briggs.

Briggs died in 2000, but Switzer said she still talks to him. He will be with her today, in the dome. She said anyone who’s trained with someone else on long runs knows how that presence gets into your soul — memories of thoughts shared in jagged words, between rhythmic breaths — and you can be out alone on a run years later and somehow feel them there.

Switzer, at 19, decided she wanted to run distance. Briggs — who had entered Boston many times — was a coach of the SU men’s cross-country team. There was no similar option for women. When Switzer asked to train with the men, Briggs said OK.

Soon, admiring Switzer’s spirit, he began joining her on long runs. They would meet after Briggs finished delivering mail, often running deep into the night. On one late December run in a blinding snowstorm, Briggs began talking about Boston. Switzer told him she wanted to sign up.

He responded that women were too fragile for a marathon. Stunned and furious — and noting with exasperation how they were together at that moment on a long run, in heavy snow — Switzer promised to prove to Briggs that she could do it.

If so, Briggs said: “I’ll take you to Boston.”

Saturday, as she watched it snow in Syracuse, Switzer said: “It was like this.”

She began going for long training runs at such favorite spots as Peck Hill Road. As promised, she soon finished off a 26-mile run with Briggs. Just to add to the point, she remembers, she kept going. That did it. When Briggs sent entries for himself and some of his runners to the nation’s most famous marathon, one application was for a “K.V. Switzer.”

Credit: Courtesy Kathrine Switzer; image shows her running with Arnie Briggs (right).

Of Briggs, Spitzer says now: “Thank God I had him.”

She was among 741 runners to enter the 1967 Boston Marathon. Everything went fine until mile four, when an angry Jock Semple — the race manager — tried to grab at Switzer’s number and drag her from the course.

Her boyfriend of the time, Tom Miller, was also running. He was a muscular guy who threw the hammer for the track team.

Miller resolved the situation. He charged into Semple with a good old-fashioned block.

Switzer kept going until she finished the race.

She and Briggs had no immediate idea of the impact. They began to realize it when they were driving home, Switzer said, and they saw photographs of her encounter with Semple on the front page of a paper some guy was reading at a Thruway rest stop.

Her life completely shifted. The story went around the world. Switzer — labeled by some in the running world as a troublemaker — was embraced by countless women as a symbol of guts, defiance and resolve. She coupled that role with journalism skills she learned at Syracuse to essentially transform herself into a living message.

As she told Richardson Saturday in an SU Newhouse 3 video studio: “Running has given me almost everything in my life.”

What she represents to Rosemarie Nelson is one great ongoing gift. Nelson is president of the Mountain Goat Run Foundation, established as part of the famous road race that climbs the hills of Syracuse. Nelson, under that Mountain Group umbrella, organized a group of about 60 spectators who will show up today at the dome to applaud with passion as Switzer is honored.

Nelson is 70. She is old enough to vividly remember a world in which there were virtually no real team sports for girls. She can remember how the Olympic Games did not add a women’s marathon until 1984, when Switzer played a key role in making sure women got that chance.

Beyond all else, Nelson is eternally grateful to Switzer for helping women to receive what is now casual access to the physical benefits of distance running, as well as the mental and spiritual gifts — the way your mind goes to new and mysterious places on a long run that you would never discover, unless you do it.

“Most women didn’t have that before her,” said Nelson, who started distance running in a serious way in her early 20s — not so long after Switzer blasted through the wall.

Nelson sees Switzer as a peer who helped to change everything. Michelle LaFleur, 53, is a generation or two younger. LaFleur was a five-time NCAA women’s running champion at SUNY Cortland. She qualified for three Olympic marathon trials. Her name was one of the first engraved in stone on the Mountain Goat running monument, in Syracuse.

Kathrine Switzer: Speaking at 2018 Syracuse University commencement. Credit: Courtesy Syracuse University

LaFleur, now of Georgia, said of Switzer’s courage: “It gives me the chills.” She cannot imagine life without the benefits of distance running. She speaks with gratitude of the women who created that opportunity, and she recalls how she had a chance to thank Switzer directly when LaFleur was excelling in the Avon International Women’s Running Circuit, which Switzer founded.

“I’m just so happy,” LaFleur said about Switzer’s number, rising up in the dome.

Switzer admits she occasionally dreamed this moment might happen, though she hardly counted on it. She has already received countless honors. She is in the Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, alongside fellow giants. The Boston Athletic Association retired bib number 261 from the marathon. As for SU, it invited her to serve as the 2018 commencement speaker, and the university archives agreed last year to accept and curate Switzer’s papers, after she hired an aide to sift through a lifetime of documents.

Saturday, with the documentary interview completed at Newhouse, she awaited a ride on the snowy sidewalk of Waverly Avenue. The previous night, as she tried to fall asleep in her hotel, she heard the clank and roar of plows beneath the streetlights, a distinctly Syracuse sound that brought her back to side-by-side runs with Briggs on frigid evenings, and she wondered what her old coach might think of all this now.

“The hot damn moment,” she said again, as if he heard her through the snow.  

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Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Central Current. He has been an Upstate journalist for more than 50 years. He held his first reporting job as a teenager and worked for newspapers in Dunkirk, Niagara...