Grete Waitz, the Rabbit Who Won New York: World Record, Then “Never Again”

01An application turned down

Grete Waitz is not a marathoner. She is a track runner: world records at 3,000 m in 1975 and 1976, 1,500 m at the Montreal Games. When she asks to run the New York City Marathon, she says, the answer is no. Then Fred Lebow, the race director, calls her. He needs a rabbit: someone who goes out fast and sets the pace for the favorites.

Lebow, she recalls, “never thought I would complete the race.” Maybe she didn’t either. Her longest run: 12 miles. The marathon is more than double that.

02A second honeymoon

She accepts. Her husband and coach, Jack, comes along. For the couple, New York will be a “second honeymoon.” The night before, a lovers’ dinner: shrimp cocktail, filet mignon, ice cream and red wine. Not exactly a marathon eve menu. Honeymoon, really? Jack is about to be disappointed.

03The rabbit doesn’t stop

On race day, she says, she lines up right at the front, not knowing anyone. She goes out fast. Then comes the wall. Around mile 19, her thighs seize up, she no longer knows which mile she is at, or where this famous Central Park is. She curses Jack, who got her into this. She would sum it up later: “I knew I was out of my league and hadn’t trained properly.”

042:32:30

She crosses the line first anyway, in 2:32:30. It is a world record, more than two minutes under the mark of West Germany’s Christa Vahlensieck (2:34:48, in Berlin, in 1977). The runner-up arrives more than nine minutes behind her. Grete herself did not know that day that she had broken the record, she says: entered so late, she was not even on the entry lists.

05The shoes

The finish is not the celebration she hoped for. All she wants, she would write, is to find Jack and go home. She finds him. “Some people said that she threw the shoes at me and that was in fact the case,” Jack confirmed in 2011. Furious, she blames him for pushing her into running: it was, she tells him, the worst thing she had ever done. Thirty years later, in 2008, she still remembered it: “I was hurting. I was mad. I was angry. I told Jack: ‘Never again!’”

06Nine New York City Marathon wins

She is back the very next year. Wins in New York in 1979 (2:27:33, a world record), 1980 (2:25:41, another world record), then five in a row from 1982 to 1986, and in 1988: nine in all, a record. In between, she becomes world marathon champion in Helsinki in 1983 and wins silver at the Los Angeles Games in 1984.

Grete Waitz died on April 19, 2011, in Oslo, aged 57. She had been diagnosed with cancer in 2005.