Nina Kuscsik, who helped open the marathon to women, dies at 86

Nina Kuscsik, who helped break open the boys’ club of long-distance running, challenging sexist attitudes and scientific misconceptions while becoming the first woman to run in the New York City Marathon and the first woman to officially win the Boston Marathon, died June 8 at a hospital in Brookhaven, New York. She was 86.

The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease, her daughter Chris Wiese said.

Kuscsik was 28, living on Long Island with her husband and two children, when in 1968 she bought an instructional manual called “Jogging.” Written by Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman and heart specialist W.E. Harris, the book “said that if a high school girl could run a seven-minute mile, she was worth training,” Kuscsik later recalled. “So I went out and ran a 7:05 mile.”

At the time, Kuscsik was pregnant with her third child. She continued to run until she was three or four months pregnant – then returned to the sport not long after giving birth, eventually logging 60 or 70 miles a week while running around the block in circles, stopping at her house once a mile to check on the kids.

“The police thought I was running away from something,” she told ESPN in 2022. “And I had to be like, ‘No, I’m just running for fun.’ The neighbors thought I was crazy.”

Running, especially at long distances like the 26.2-mile marathon, was considered a man’s sport, too taxing for dainty, delicate women to manage. The Amateur Athletic Union, the sport’s governing body in the United States, barred women from competing in races longer than 5 miles. When Kuscsik did compete in an AAU meet, she recalled, she had to be “accompanied by a female chaperone.”

Some skeptics claimed that a woman’s uterus would fall out if she ran long distances like the marathon. Others suggested that high-intensity competitions were simply unladylike. While interviewing Kuscsik in 1972, a reporter argued that “long-distance running isn’t the most womanly thing,” given “all that sweating and grunting.”

“Who says it is not the most feminine thing a woman can do and who says sweating or grunting isn’t feminine?” Kuscsik replied, according to Runner’s World magazine. “I have yet to meet a female runner who grunts. Although a lot of men do. Running is neither masculine or feminine. It’s just healthy.”

Kuscsik ran her first marathon in 1969, becoming one of four women to finish that year’s Boston Marathon. The women ran unofficially, following in the footsteps of Bobbi Gibb, who became the event’s first female finisher while “banditing” the race in 1966, running without a bib. Another runner, Kathrine Switzer, had managed to become the first woman to officially run Boston in 1967, when she obtained a bib after registering for the race with her initials instead of her full name. (Switzer was disqualified for running with the men.)

When the New York City Marathon was first organized in 1970, co-founders Vince Chiappetta and Fred Lebow encouraged Kuscsik to run in defiance of the AAU. Out of 127 runners to take their place at the starting line, she was the only woman.

Kuscsik had to drop out of the race because of illness. But the next year she returned and, with a time of 2:56:04, finished second among female runners. She and the winner, Beth Bonner, were the first two American women to finish a marathon in under three hours.

A month later, at the AAU’s annual conference in 1971, Kuscsik presented a proposal seeking to allow women to race in long-distance events that were sanctioned by the association. The AAU agreed to change its rules, to a point: It raised the maximum allowed distance for female runners from 5 miles to 10, and it also declared that “certain women” could run marathons – creating an opening that, in practice, seemed to allow anyone in good shape to compete in the event.

The rule change paved the way for Kuscsik to officially run Boston, the world’s oldest annual marathon. In 1972, she became the first woman to officially win the race, topping a field of eight women with a time of 3:10:26.

“We were all very proud of her,” Sara Mae Berman, one of the eight women who ran that day, said in a phone interview. “We had sort of an unpublished compact with each other, that you didn’t start a marathon if you couldn’t finish it. If you had to drop out, the people from the AAU would say, ‘See, we told you it wasn’t good [for women to run].’ We really were very concerned about finishing.”

For Kuscsik and other female marathoners, getting to run Boston was only a partial victory. Under AAU rules, women had a “separate but equal” starting line, in which they began either 10 minutes before or after the men, or started the race in a separate area off to the side.

As the sport grew in popularity over the years, Kuscsik and other women came to back the separate start times, which helped give elite women a spotlight of their own. But in the 1970s, at a time when marathons were still relatively small events, they pushed for parity, notably through an eye-catching protest that Kuscsik helped coordinate at the 1972 New York City Marathon.

When the starter’s gun went off that year, Kuscsik and the five other female entrants sat down instead of running, smiling and laughing while holding cardboard signs. (“Hey AAU, This Is 1972: Wake Up.”) After 10 minutes, the women got up and joined the race’s 272 men, leaving at the same time.

As she had in Boston, Kuscsik became the first woman to finish. She then made a return appearance to the AAU’s convention, where the rules on a “separate but equal” starting line for women were ultimately scrapped. Federal Title IX legislation, passed that same year, helped further level the playing field, triggering an explosion of women’s sports in schools and colleges.

Newspapers covered Kuscsik and her peers with a mix of condescension and amazement, marveling at the “galloping housewife” who trained while looking after her children. But male runners were overwhelmingly supportive, said Kuscsik, who also developed close bonds with the women who ran alongside her.

“She wanted to get everybody involved in long-distance running,” said Pat Barrett, one of the “Six Who Sat” at the start of the 1972 New York City Marathon. In a phone interview, she described Kuscsik as an idol and mentor, recalling how Kuscsik urged her to run the Boston Marathon the first year it was opened to women, as a way to promote the growth of the sport and demonstrate that women could do it.

“You need to show up,” she recalled Kuscsik saying, “or I’m going to break your legs.” (“She was just kidding,” Barrett added, saying that “if it wasn’t for Nina, I wouldn’t have gone up there.” Barrett came in fourth.)

Kuscsik continued to race, successfully defending her title in the 1973 New York City Marathon, while serving on long-distance running committees with the AAU and later with USA Track & Field. Joined by runners including Switzer and Jacqueline Hansen, who beat Mr. Kuscsik at the 1973 Boston Marathon, she helped push for the inclusion of a women’s marathon in the Olympics. The event was finally added at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles.

“She was a warrior,” Hansen said, “who was present every step of the way, getting the women’s distance increased by our federation here at home, all the way to getting the marathon accepted by the International Olympic Committee.”

The second of four children, Nina Louise Marmorino was born in Brooklyn on Jan. 2, 1939. Her father was an Italian immigrant who became a vice president at a food-flavoring company; her mother was a nurse.

As a young girl, Kuscsik joined other kids in playing stickball, stoopball, basketball and ringolevio, a neighborhood version of tag. She later won state championships in ice and roller skating, and cycling.

Kuscsik graduated from high school at 16 and enrolled in nursing school, petitioning the state so that she could receive her nursing license at 18 instead of the typical age of 21, according to her family. She worked at the Brooklyn Hospital Center and stepped away from nursing after starting a family with her husband, Richard Kuscsik, whom she married in the early 1960s.

They divorced in 1973. By her account, they separated in part because of running: “I never had any confidence in myself as a wife, as a mother, as a woman,” she told the New York Times. “Running gave me confidence and I came out of my shell.”

Kuscsik went back to work, serving for some 40 years as a patient representative at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan. In addition to her daughter, Wiese, survivors include two sons, Stephen and Timothy Kuscsik; a brother and sister; and two grandsons.

Collaborating with Switzer and Lebow in 1972, Kuscsik co-founded the Crazylegs Mini Marathon, billed as the first open road race for women. (It’s now known as the Mastercard New York Mini 10K.) The inaugural event had 72 participants, along with a pair of Playboy bunnies who had been hired by Lebow – the New York Road Runners’ showman impresario – to drum up publicity.

Five years later, Kuscsik set a personal best in the marathon, with a time of 2:50:22, along with a U.S. record for the 50-mile, which she completed in 6:35:53 in Central Park. She completed more than 80 marathons, in addition to winning three straight races up the steps of the Empire State Building, and in 1999 was inducted into the National Distance Running Hall of Fame.

Long after her marathon days were over, Kuscsik continued to cycle, at times pedaling 100 miles a day while participating in the annual RAGBRAI biking event across the state of Iowa.

In 2021, she held the finish-line tape for the women’s champion at the 50th running of the New York City Marathon, a race that has expanded into the world’s largest marathon event. It drew 55,529 finishers last year, nearly 25,000 of whom were women.

“Seeing how many women are running marathons today, it just makes you realize you can change things,” she told Runner’s World in 2016. “It’s really important that we’ve finally come to the idea that your body was meant to be used. And the freedom of the run – it’s just wonderful.”