Kathryn Bertine - As Good As Gold: 1 Woman, 9 Sports, 10 Countries, and a 2-Year Quest to Make the Summer Olympics

This book is dedicated to the people who let me sleep on their floor/couch/futon while I lived and wrote its contents. Thank you for being my home when I didnt have one of my own:

Robin and Dan Bratone, Natalie and Tom Siano, Beth and Alan Hall, Natalia Schultz, Pete Bertine, Jr., Beth Avery, Meg Forbes, Amory Rowe, Courtney Bennigson, Lara Kroepsch, Katie Blackett and Matt Schneider, Diane Dedek, Teri Albertazzi, Libby Ford, Alison Meadow and Dan Ferguson, Sarah and Charlie Hatfield, Tara and Todd Williams.

And to my parents, who surrendered sleep, weekends, and normalcy to take me to the rinks, fields, and races of my earliest athletic adventures. The roots of this quest grow deep. Thank you.

That road racing of mine five thousand miles of training and three hundred and nine races, just to play the cyclist. It was wonderful, though, that having started at the age of thirty I was still able to get a body that could really do something, that came in a solid twelfth in races amid a hundred hungry twenty-one-year-olds, that won occasionally in lesser races It was wonderful enough to have taught any number of these glory boys a lesson in strength, in courage, in character.

Tim Krabb, The Rider

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15:

Chapter 16:

Chapter 17:

Chapter 18:

Chapter 19:

Chapter 20:

O pportunity is everything.

Somewhere near the top of Heartbreak Hill in the then all-male 1967 Boston Marathon, when twenty-one miles of running into an icy headwind had erased all fear and anger, those words popped into my head with a clarity that changed my life.

Up to that point, I thought other women didnt get it when it came to sports. I exulted in the feeling of limitlessness that running gave me and felt sorry for the women who believed in their own powerless status. Despite being attacked earlier in this race by an event official who tried to throw me out of the competition simply because I was female, I prevailed and went on, determined to finish. And then, right at crunch point in my first big marathon, it struck me: I was just plain lucky. I was not physically talented, I was not a freak, I was not a firebrand feministall things people later called me. I was just a kid who wanted to run. And lucky for me, I was given an opportunity to try by a few men in my life who didnt care whether I was male or female. If I can just get this same opportunity out to other women, everything will change, I thought.

And it did. In just the few years since, there are now more women runners in the United States than men, we have near-parity in Olympic sports, and, thanks to Title IX, there should not be a single girl in this country who is denied a sports opportunity or who grows up with a sense of physical limitation. This is more than change; this is a revolution.

Kathryn Bertine was lucky, too. She was born into this current era of opportunity and knew it. Feeling both thrilled and obligated by the opportunities, she chased them down, first as a figure skater, then a rower, then a cyclist in search of the Holy Grail of sportsto make an Olympic team.

But she was also unlucky: Bertine is that particular kind of athlete who is very good at many things, but not great at anything and greatness is an Olympic requirement. This only fueled her, as athletic brilliance almost always is more than talentit is the product of many years of hard work, something she loved doing.

And then, at thirty, her drama begins. With time running out on the Learn-A-Sport body meter, Bertine is offered the athletes Greatest Dream: a salary and support to train and travel to make an Olympic team, any team, and write about it. For Bertine, who (like many of us) had forsaken love, possessions, security, and even her health in her drive to be a great athlete, to be given such an opportunity is priceless.

She takes it, and her story is unique in all of sports. Relentlessly, she takes us around the world, to sports training camps where we learn what it takes to be an Olympian in even the most obscure sport, to inside the arcane and murky political and administrative world of sports federations. Then, breathlessly we plummet with her down icy luge runs and pedal up volcanoes. We experience the bruises, scrapes, and chronic soreness that can be inflicted by nine different Olympic sports and the desperately hunting heart of a woman who is willing to give everything she has for a dream.

This is a story about hope, belief, and God knows, persistence. It is also a story of the future. Never before have there been so many opportunities in so many sports for women, never before has sport so opened its arms for global and transnational acceptance, and never before have so many women realized that they can excel beyond their wildest dreams.

Opportunity is everything.

KATHRINE SWITZER was the first woman to officially register and run in the Boston Marathon. She ran thirty-five marathons, won the New York City Marathon, and led the drive to make the womens marathon an Olympic event. She is now an Emmy-award-winning broadcaster of marathons and is the author of Marathon Woman: Running the Race to Revolutionize Womens Sports and Running and Walking for Women Over 40, and is co-author of 26.2: Marathon Stories.

W hile the idea for this book was conceived by ESPN, the first chapter was born in the lobby of a fertility clinic.

In the summer of 2005, I was living in a small town just west of Boulder, Colorado, doing my best to make it as a professional triathlete. For three years, I lived something of an atypical athletic lifestyle that involved training twenty to thirty hours a week in a sport consisting of three disciplines: swimming, biking, and running. The training was physically grueling, mentally draining, and financially debilitating. My annual salary was in the high four figures. I worked as a substitute teacher, a pet-sitter, a waitress, and a plethora of other jobs for which my masters degree was entirely irrelevant.

But I loved my chosen life of poverty, pride, and pasta. I was doing something that repeatedly taught me the greatest lessonhow to live in the moment. At thirty, most of my friends lives were on a different track. They had husbands, savings accounts, and in some cases multiple children. I had a troubled relationship, credit card debt, and three bicycles. But I also had a dream: to go as far as I could in triathlon. To compete against the best and see where it got me. The Olympics? Ironman World Championship? Nowhere? But journeys always lead somewhere, and that was good enough for me.

In the autumn of 2005, the journey got bumpy. I was engaged to the wrong man. He carried the burden of alcoholism on his shoulders, and when the engagement became impossible, I left. The problem with leaving, however, is that it usually means you have to leave. House, job, bed, dogeverything. Leaving is hard. Harder still when youre not sure where to go. On a chilly October morning, I gathered up what was left of my confidence, courage, and energy. My few clothes and cheap furniture went into storage. I put my ring on his table, my bags and road bike in my truck, and drove to what would be the first of twenty-two places up and down the East Coast where I would sleep over the next ten months, broken down as follows: