Most people in the late 1960s and early ‘70s couldn’t comprehend anyone racing long distances on foot. The running boom had not yet boomed. And to a young Long Island grade-schooler named Tim Kuscsik, running appeared “wasteful,” his mother recounted with good humor years later, “because he kept hearing how we always were ‘breaking records’ when we ran. And he thought running was dangerous because he would always hear me talk about ‘dying’ on the course.”
At the time, Nina Kuscsik was in the process of becoming the first celebrity of women’s marathoning. It’s just that the youngest of her three children was operating with the conventional wisdom of that time, when the rare jogger could be expected to hear a snarky recommendation, shouted from a passing car, to “get a horse.” As citizen races began to appear, one of my colleagues in Newsday’s sports department, an otherwise open-minded reporter, grumbled about “a bunch of crazy people running around in their underwear. Why is that worth a story?”
By the time Nina Kuscsik died in early June at 86, it long ago had become abundantly clear how ordinary the running lifestyle is, and how much Kuscsik had to do with normalizing the activity—especially for women and girls—competitively and otherwise.
In 1970, Kuscsik was the only female to compete in the inaugural New York City Marathon, which had a total of 127 entrants, 55 of them finishing the 26-mile, 385-yard challenge. (Battling a fever, she did not finish, but was New York’s first female champion in both 1972 and ’73.)
These days? There were 55,646 finishers in last year’s New York race, roughly half—24,732—women.
Kuscsik was the first official women’s champion in the Boston Marathon, the only race at that distance widely known outside of the Olympics, in 1972. She had first run Boston as a “bandit” three years earlier, because the grand pooh-bahs of foot racing banned women from such long-distance efforts. That prohibition, she said, was “because they thought your uterus was going to fall out.”
It took her New York victories and that barrier-breaking first official Boston women’s title in ‘72 to rattle the Old Boys’ club. When women at last were allowed, in 1984, to run the Olympic race that had been in the men’s Olympic program since 1896, Kuscsik qualified—at 45—for the U.S. Marathon Trials, but an injury suffered when she had experimented with tennis kept her from qualifying for the Games.
It was Kuscsik’s persistence, both as a competitor and as chairperson of the women’s long-distance committee, that finally got females their own Olympic marathon. She once held the record for the 50-mile (80-kilometer) run and was the first woman to finish the gimmicky (but challenging) Empire State Building Run-Up in 1979, 1980 and 1981.
She was such a regular presence on her Long Island community’s roads, training 70 to 100 miles a week, that she found she could “take one of the kids to the doctor and the doctor wanted to talk to me about running,” she once said. She was so omnipresent in the running world that, when she chose to run the 1977 women’s national marathon championship in Minneapolis, instead of the New York City race the same day, her phone call to the New York Road Runners Club for a progress report from the Big Apple brought the news that “Miki Gorman was leading, Gayle Barron second and Nina Kuscsik third.”
“Sometimes,” Kuscsik once said, “I guess I almost feel responsible for everything. Title IX and everything. Of course, I’m not. Still, Title IX aside, women wouldn’t have started running long distance if we”—her fellow pioneers included Katherine Switzer, Roberta Gibb, Beth Bonner—“hadn’t showed them it was possible. And to see women and girls are out there running…I get chills every time I see that.”
Over a half-century, she demonstrated that running was neither wasteful nor dangerous. And that, as she once said, was “neither masculine or feminine. It’s just healthy.”