After a ‘Wonderful Life’ of Running, Kuscsik Awaits Hall

On the weekend it was announced that Nina Kuscsik would be honored in perpetuity by her sport, a woman reportedly received one-third of a million dollars for winning a marathon in England. The soon-to-be immortal had a most human reaction. “Wow!” she said.

Wow, indeed. Even at Boston, where Kuscsik was hailed as the first official female champion in 1972, Fatuma Roba accepted approximately $160,000 Monday for her third consecutive victory in that city’s annual Patriot’s Day marathon. Back in the middle ages of distance running, Kuscsik was presented with a laurel wreath in addition to the bowl of stew traditionally offered to finishers.

“The world was different then,” Kuscsik said the other night following work at Mount Sinai Medical Center, where the former nurse serves as a patient representative. “I can remember running Boston, driving back that night, sleeping in the locker room and going to work the next morning.” She laughed at the memory and it wasn’t forced.

Kuscsik, who began jogging around her Huntington Station neighborhood three decades ago as a way to stay in shape, is a member of the second class to be inducted into the National Distance Running Hall of Fame on July 10 in Utica. She will enter in the company of Billy Mills, Olympic champion in the 10,000 meters at Tokyo in 1964; five-time Olympian Francie Larrieu Smith; and Johnny (the Elder) Kelley, the 91-year-old two-time Boston Marathon winner who was sidelined from his annual participation this

week by colon surgery. The inaugural class included Frank Shorter, Bill Rodgers, Joan Benoit Samuelson, Olympian and Road Runners Club founder Ted Corbitt and Kathrine Switzer, whose attempt to enter the 1967 Boston Marathon was met with physical force.

“I like my group,” Kuscsik decided with the delight of a woman who hadn’t set out to be a competitive runner, yet reached the pinnacle. Before joining the field at the 1969 Boston Marathon as an unofficial entrant, her only previous footrace was a 100-yard sprint at Randalls Island 13 years earlier. Boston became her goal “because I didn’t know of any other races.” Neither did the vast majority of the American public.

Kuscsik, a mother of three, said she was inspired by a few fitness books, among them “Jogging,” by former Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman. It contained pictures of “women jogging in rain kerchiefs and they looked older than me, so I thought I could do that.” Her efforts were not always appreciated by the constabulary, who suspected in that unenlightened era that she must be running away from something.

“The police took me off the Northern State on the day before Easter 1/8in 1969),” she recalled. Her left arm was in a cast at the time because of a sprained shoulder and the sleeve of her red sweatshirt was hanging loose, leading an observer to deduce that she was running alongside the parkway with a bloody appendage and to call authorities.

A year later, she ran in the Yonkers Marathon and was thrilled when the members of the winning Millrose team presented the first women’s finisher with their award. “I didn’t care if I was ‘official,’ ” Kuscsik said. “The runners treated me like an athlete.” As the only entrant in the inaugural New York City Marathon, she was suffering from the flu and dropped out after 14 miles, a bitter disappointment.

But she finished second to Beth Bonner in the 1971 renewal as they became the first two women to break the three-hour mark. And the following year, officials of the Boston Athletic Association finally relented and welcomed nine women who had met the qualifying standard to what was then the nation’s premier road race. With a time of 3:08:58, Kuscsik was almost 12 minutes faster than runner-up Elaine Pedersen. “The queen of the runners,” Pedersen dubbed the 33-year-old champion.

Women and the marathon both benefited from developments in 1972. Title IX legislation was passed that year and Shorter triumphed at the Munich Olympics, boosting the popularity of running in the United States. The hidebound Amateur Athletic Union even agreed to sanction women marathoners but still mandated a separate starting time for them at the New York City event on Oct. 1.

Ordered to start 10 minutes before the men, Kuscsik and five challengers staged a sit-down strike, complete with placards, to the applause of their male peers. They eventually started together with the men, which became the policy thereafter. Kuscsik won New York in both 1972 and 1973, when she handily defeated Switzer with a time of 2:57:07.

Subsequently, she would go on to set an American record at 50 miles, but what gave her greater satisfaction was her successful effort to have a women’s marathon included in the Olympics. First, she and her cohorts gained the endorsement of the New York Academy of Sciences, which determined the distance was no more dangerous for one gender than the other, then lobbied for the approval of the AAU and the International Track and Field Federation before taking their case to the IOC. The event was added in

time for the 1984 Games, too late for Kuscsik but a boon to Samuelson, who won the inaugural race in Los Angeles.

Kuscsik now finds her physical outlet in bicycling, including summer trips across the state of Iowa. She participated in the 100th Boston marathon two years ago, expecting just “to run to the train” but feeling good enough to finish, even if it took more than five hours. She entered New York along with her son and daughter-in-law last fall, but her knees forced her to walk much of the distance. Still, she got to enjoy the interaction between the spectators and competitors as never before.

The crowds, the times, the rewards have improved dramatically since Kuscsik started down the road. But not even the $330,000 allocated to Joyce Chepchumba of Kenya for her victory in the London Marathon on Sunday could convince the pioneer she had been born too soon. There was nothing, she decided, like the joy of self-discovery, of stretching herself to the limit.

“It was a wonderful life,” Kuscsik said.