“All I want to do is speed, speed.“
1979 Cascade RunOff 15K. Coming back into town, it’s downhill, and I ran my fastest five kilometers ever. Distinctly remember there was a headwind and so I instinctively tucked in behind the runner ahead of me. I recognized the back view of Miki Gorman, she was famous after all, and I laughed to myself. I am 6’3″ tall and she barely broke five feet. She was no wind-break but she towed me to a personal record.
Not the size of the woman in the fight, but the fight in the woman, that makes all the difference.
Miki Gorman was a fighter.
Michiko “Miki” Suwa Gorman (August 9, 1935 – September 19, 2015) was an American marathon runner of Japanese ancestry. Gorman did not begin running competitively until she was in her mid-30s, but rapidly emerged as one of the elite marathoning women of the mid-1970s. She is the only woman to win both the Boston and New York City marathons twice and is the first of only two woman runners to win both marathons in the same year.
Michiko Suwa was born to Japanese parents in Qingdao, China, grew up in Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture during the post-war years and moved to the United States in 1964. Shortly after she moved, she married Michael Gorman. At 5’0½” tall and 86 pounds, she took up running while in her early 30s to gain weight. In 1970, as her first event, Michiko (later “Miki” Gorman) ran an indoor 100 mile run in 21:04:00 in Los Angeles, California.
Gorman set an unofficial world’s best for the women’s marathon of 2:46:36 at the Western Hemisphere Marathon (now the Culver City Marathon) on December 3, 1973, just four years after she started to run. Four months later, in April 1974, she won the Boston Marathon in a course record of 2:47:11. Gorman would also place second at Boston in 1976, and won Boston again in 1977.
Gorman also won the New York City Marathon twice, in 1976 and 1977, at the age of 41 and 42 respectively. Until November 5, 2017, when the race was won by Shalane Flanagan, she had been the last American woman to win the New York City Marathon. She set a personal best during her 1976 victory with a time of 2:39:11, then the second fastest women’s marathon in history and just a minute off the world record.
Gorman participated in the 1977 World Masters Athletics Championships in Gothenburg, Sweden and again in 1979 when they were held in Hanover, West Germany. At Gothenburg, she easily won her masters division in the 1500 meters, 3000 meters, cross-country, and marathon competitions. In Hanover, at the age of 44, she won her division in the 5000 meters, 10000 meters, and marathon races.
In 1978, Gorman set a women’s world record in the half-marathon. Frequently injured in subsequent years, Gorman competed sporadically through the years 1978 to 1981. She decided to retire from competitive running in 1982. In Miki Gorman’s hometown of Atsugi, Japan, the city named a 10 km in honor of her called the Gorman Cup.
Gorman was inducted into both the Road Runners Club of America Hall of Fame and the USATF Masters Hall of Fame, as well as the National Distance Running Hall of Fame. In 1979, the Supersisters trading card set was produced and distributed; one of the cards featured Gorman’s name and picture. In 1981, a film called “Ritoru Champion” (known on video in America as My Champion), starring Yoko Shimada and Chris Mitchum and documenting the events of Gorman’s life, was released.
Gorman died in Bellingham, Washington, at age 80 after a five-year battle with cancer.
(Source: Wikipedia)
Overlooked No More: Miki Gorman, the Unlikely Marathon Winner
Gorman at 40, was self-conscious about her body and had recently given birth when she entered the New York City Marathon. Her win made her that much more of a pioneer for women in the sport.
Oct. 31, 2018
Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we’re adding the stories of remarkable people whose deaths went unreported in The Times.
By Amisha Padnani
Miki Gorman was sitting alone at a corner table of a Magic Pan restaurant in Manhattan on Oct. 23, 1976, when her food arrived: not one, but two large crepes stuffed with mushroom and spinach souffle.
A couple sitting nearby gawked at her. Gorman, at 5 feet tall or so, weighed only 90 pounds, and the plates of food covered her table.
“I’m running the New York City Marathon tomorrow!” she told them. “And I’m going to win.”
And so she did, the first woman to cross the finish line the next day. Even more, she won again the following year. No other American woman would take the title for the next four decades.
“We’ve gone so long without winning, I can’t believe it,” Gorman told The Washington Post in 2004, long after her retirement in 1982. “My win was a lifetime ago.”
It wasn’t until 2017 that Shalane Flanagan would end the 40-year drought, crying, cursing and pumping her fist as she broke the finish line tape at 2:26:53. It was no small feat; by that time the New York City Marathon had become the world’s largest race, with more than 50,000 participants. (This year’s marathon is on Sunday.)
Gorman was not around to see Flanagan’s victory; she died on Sept. 19, 2015, at 80, in Bellingham, Wash. The cause was metastasized lung cancer, her daughter, Danielle Nagel, said.
Despite Gorman’s accomplishments, news of her death was not widely reported at the time. No word of it reached The New York Times.
If it had, readers would have learned of record-breaking achievements that landed her in several halls of fame. One feat, in 1978, was a world best for a woman in the half marathon, at 1:15:58. She also won the Boston Marathon in the women’s category in 1974 and 1977, the latter victory coming, remarkably, the same year that she won in New York. She is the only woman known to have won both races twice.
“She ran everything, from track races and really quick stuff all the way to these 100-mile races,” said George Hirsch, chairman of New York Road Runners, a nonprofit running group that organizes the marathon. “There’s no one that I know of to this day who has that kind of a range and excelled in them all.”
Her success followed a life of hardship.
Gorman was born Michiko Suwa on Aug. 9, 1935, to Japanese parents in occupied China, where her father was working for Japan’s imperial army. They later moved to Tokyo; after World War II, she helped care for her younger twin brothers there.
“My father returned from the military looking like a skeleton,” she wrote in a first-person account for The New York Times in 2005. “Well, we all looked like skeletons. We were always hungry.”
Their diet, she wrote, had consisted of soybeans that had been soaked for a couple of days, along with a little rice.
She was 28 in about 1963 when an American Army officer stationed in Japan offered her a job in the United States as a nanny. He brought her to his home in Pennsylvania, where she worked long hours doing household chores for the family.
A few years later she answered an ad from California seeking a secretary who could speak both Japanese and English. She got the job and moved to Los Angeles.
There she earned $300 a month (about $2,400 in today’s money), sending some of her pay home to her mother in Japan.
In the 1960s she met and married Michael Gorman, a stockbroker from Cleveland. Miki Gorman worked as a secretary during her running years and afterward, retiring in 1994. She and her husband separated in 1982.
Not long after their marriage she confided in him that she felt insecure about her looks. “I was embarrassed that I was so small,” she told Runner’s World magazine in 2010.
Her husband suggested that she accompany him to an athletic club, thinking that if she exercised she would be hungrier and would eat more and put on weight. Though she didn’t gain weight, she returned to the club regularly to run along an indoor track.
The club offered a trophy for the member who ran the most miles for a month, and in October 1968 Gorman set her sights on winning. The contest included a 100-mile race that would involve running 1,075 laps on the track. She began training.
“The first year I stopped at 86 miles,” she said. “I cried.”
The following weekend she ran more than 20 miles, surpassing her competitors. “I got a huge trophy,” she told The New York Times in 2010.
She returned the next year and finished all 100 miles, then competed in the race again the next three years.
Gorman started running in cross-country races and found that she could win easily. Once she began passing taller and younger women, she realized her height and weight were not disadvantages.
“I gained so much confidence from my running,” she said. “I finally realized that being small didn’t have to hold me back.”
Laszlo Tabori, the celebrated Hungarian coach who was then based in Los Angeles (he died in May), took notice of her wins and began training her.
By the time Gorman signed up for the New York City Marathon in 1975 — five years after its inception — she was an unlikely candidate to win. She was already 40, considered old for an elite runner, and had given birth to a daughter, her only child, at the start of the year.
But while most runners train to build up to the 26.2-mile distance, Gorman had been running 100-mile distances. She wound up finishing second among women, behind Kim Merritt.
The next year was the first time the marathon course would traverse all five boroughs of New York City, having until then been confined to loops through Central Park. Some 2,090 runners lined up at the start on Staten Island, by the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. Only 88 of them were women.
Gorman quickly lost sight of Merritt ahead of her. Still, she zipped along the course, dodging obstacles, according to the book “First Ladies of Running” (2016), by Amby Burfoot.
Few roadside barriers protected the route in those days, and at one point a St. Bernard dog bounded right up to her. (“He was almost as tall as I was,” Gorman said.) Then there was the metal grating, now covered, on the Queensboro Bridge. (“My toes felt like they were on fire.”) The wind blowing against the runners was no help, either. (“I tucked behind the bigger runners whenever I could.”)
But then she caught sight of Merritt and bore down on her. As they entered the hills of Central Park, the final stretch of the race, she rolled past Merritt, barely giving her a glance, and kept her pace all the way to the end. Her time was 2:39:11, a course record for women.
A surprise awaited at the finish: The couple from the night before at the Magic Pan restaurant had come to watch the race.
“She was happy to see them,” her daughter said. “And the couple was shocked that this little Japanese woman actually won.”
Just as she said she would.
Miki Gorman, Women’s Marathon Pioneer, Dies at 80
Boston and New York City winner was a key figure in the early days of big-city marathons.
BY ROGER ROBINSON OCT 6, 2015 for Runners’ World
Gorman, a Japanese-born American, won the Boston and New York City marathons in the mid-1970s, playing an important role in keeping American runners and races at the forefront of the newly established women’s marathon. She set the world’s fastest time by a woman in a certified marathon race in 1973 (2:46:36), and a world best for the half marathon in 1978 (1:15:58). In 1976, she also ran what was then history’s second-fastest marathon time, 2:39:11, which was her personal record.
If the women’s marathon been included in the 1976 Olympics, or if the IAAF World Championships had been created by then, Gorman would certainly have been a leading medal contender. Lacking those ultimate goals, and the fame they gave later to Joan Benoit Samuelson and Grete Waitz, Gorman achieved the best then available, by winning the triple sequence of New York City in 1976, Boston in 1977, and New York City in 1977. The quality of her performances helped position those two races as major annual marathons for women as well as men.
She was born Michiko Suwa on August 9, 1935, to Japanese parents, in China, where her father was serving in the imperial army. During World War II, she and her twin younger brothers were evacuated from Tokyo just before fire-bombing razed the city. At age 8 she helped her little brothers survive, and walked six miles each way to attend school.
In 1951, one of the first signs of Japan’s re-emergence from defeat was to send a marathon team to Boston, including the winner, Shigeki Tanaka.
“But no women ever ran in Japan in those years. Women could not do anything so public,” Gorman told Running Times in 2010. There is thus a case for seeing her as the precursor of Japan’s famed line of women marathoners, which includes two Olympic gold medalists, as well as being historically significant as an American runner.
In 1963, at age 28, she moved to the United States, working and attending college in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She married businessman Michael Gorman, and moved with him to Los Angeles.
There she became probably the only person ever to take up running in order to gain weight.
“I was embarrassed that I was so small [5 feet, 87 pounds]. My husband helped me go to the gym where he was a member, and I began to run,” she said in 2010.
Despite some disapproval from male members of the gym, she persisted, and found a mentor who encouraged her to enter a 100-mile/ 24-hour indoors race, inside the gym. The first time, she stopped, exhausted, at 86 miles, but returned the next year, and eventually completed the annual indoors ultra event four times.
She also experimented with cross country, where women were slightly more familiar, and began to win. She linked up with Lazlo Tabori, the athlete-coach originally from Hungary, who was then based in Los Angeles and coaching Jacqueline Hansen, among other leading male and female runners.
Gorman tried track, and finally the marathon. Women were only then becoming officially accepted, and only seven performances faster than 3:00 had been recorded since the first, 2:46:30 by Australian Adrienne Beames at Werribee, Melbourne, in 1971. In Gorman’s debut, at the Western Hemisphere Marathon, in Culver City, California, in December 1973, she ran 2:46:36, only six seconds slower than Beames’ off-the-charts time. Beames’ run was unsanctioned, effectively a time trial, though accurately measured, so Gorman’s became the world’s best in a competitive situation. Gorman was 38.
Four months later she won the 1974 Boston, in a course record 2:47:11. In 1975, she was second to Kim Merritt at New York City. Then came the New York City-Boston-New York City triple, in 1976-77. The third was achieved at age 42, as a new mother.
Gorman’s fastest, 2:39:11 at New York in 1976, (when the world best was Hansen’s 2:38:19) was a prodigious performance. She finished 14 minutes ahead of Doris Heritage Brown, in the first five-boroughs version of the marathon, when the course included cobbles, gratings, tight corners, pedestrian bridges, and flights of steps. And, for the tiny Gorman, a collision on one narrow bridge with a large St. Bernard dog.
The Avon Women’s Running Circuit sent Gorman and her baby to Japan, as ambassador and role model for Japanese women runners. Her world record for the half marathon came in 1978, but injuries ended her marathon career. Shy and retiring, Gorman lost contact with the sport, and moved with her daughter, a leading yoga teacher, to Vancouver, and then Carlsbad, California.
Though always reluctant to accept acclaim, Gorman was honored by the New York Road Runners as “Runner of the 1970s” in 2009, and inducted into the USATF Masters Hall of Fame (1996), the Road Runners Club of America Hall of Fame (2001), the National Distance Running Hall of Fame (2010), and the New York Road Runners Hall of Fame (2012). In 1981, a film called Ritoru Champion (known on video in America as My Champion) documented Gorman’s life.
Diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2010, Gorman was declared cancer free shortly before attending her Hall of Fame induction at New York in 2012, but suffered a recurrence in 2013.
As the Miles and the Years Pass By
By Miki Gorman for The New York Times. October 30, 2005
The night before the 1976 New York City Marathon, I was sitting alone at a corner table of the Magic Pan restaurant. While waiting to be served, I thought about my condition and training of the past year. I was confident of winning but knew it wouldn’t be easy. Once again, my strongest competitor, Kim Merritt, the young, beautiful blonde I had been unable to beat, would be defending her title.
After I was served my dinner — two full entrees of mushroom and spinach soufflé — a British couple next to me stopped their conversation and looked at me amazedly, comparing the dishes with my size. I weighed 90 pounds.
“I’m running the New York City Marathon tomorrow!” I said. “And I’m going to win.” Their eyes got even bigger. “Are you?” they said, adding that they would be at the finish line.
The blast of the starting cannon was startling. The race had begun. Several helicopters were flying overhead. Soon after we ran up the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, Kim was out of sight, as usual. The course was challenging. We ran over cobblestone streets and a pedestrian bridge, where I bumped into a St. Bernard. The hardest part was running over the steel on the Queensboro Bridge; we didn’t have thick-soled running shoes back then.
But I was used to less-than-ideal conditions. I was born to Japanese parents in occupied China in 1935, and my family lived in Tokyo after World War II. Tokyo was a vast burned field. My father returned from the military looking like a skeleton. Well, we all looked like skeletons. We were always hungry. Often we ate hard soybeans that we would soak for a couple of days. And rice. A few grains of rice floating in water. No seasoning. I was about 9 years old, and I had twin brothers who were a year old. We had trouble feeding them.
My father found work as a medical practitioner in a remote mountain area north of Tokyo. I was a fifth grader. The elementary school had only three classrooms. Two grades were combined as one class, and the school was five kilometers away, so we had to walk 10 kilometers every day; there were no buses. The villages had only a barbershop and a bicycle repair shop. No bookstores or candy stores, but straw roofs and unpaved roads next to the river. The green valley looked rather strange but beautiful.
I moved to the United States when I was 28 to work as a nanny in a small town in Pennsylvania and to attend Carlisle Commercial College. Then I found a job in Los Angeles, where I started running. I wanted to run because I wanted a trophy, to tell you the truth. And I wanted to gain weight. I weighed 84 pounds when I came to America, and I figured if I ran, I would become hungry and eat more. I guess it worked.
Most people start out by doing 5- or 10-kilometer races (3.1 or 6.2 miles), but I started with a 100-mile indoor race. There was a race at the Los Angeles Athletic Club that was 100 miles, and you had to finish in one day. It was not an official race, because you had to keep count of your own laps, and 100 miles was 1,075 laps.
The first time I ran the New York City Marathon was in the fall of 1975, and I had given birth to my daughter that January. The marathon then was four loops around Central Park. That was extremely difficult because it was hilly, and after you finished a loop, you had to start all over again. I finished second to Kim. I decided to train hard for 1976.
The spectators were fantastic. Nearly 30 years later, I can still hear their cheering voices. Kim was nowhere to be seen for a long time, but I was relaxed, running at my pace, until I spotted her familiar long, blond hair. My heart started beating faster. The distance between us was narrowing, and finally I caught her outside Central Park. I ran beside her for a while, pretending I was still fresh. Then I passed her and accelerated as fast as I could, using up all my lung capacity. I was shocked to hear my own huge sounds of inhaling for the rest of the race. The first and only time I looked back to see where Kim was, I couldn’t see her.
With a police escort, I crossed the finish line. Tears ran from my eyes. My body was crying from fatigue. As promised, the British couple was there and waving enthusiastically. I established a course record, 2 hours 39 minutes 11 seconds.
I didn’t win any money for winning the Boston Marathon and the New York City Marathon. It’s much different now. And things are different back in the small village in Japan. The roads are paved, the roofs are modernized and televisions are in every household. This year, several villages merged and became one town, Aizumachi, in Fukushima.
I visit every five years to attend a road race that was established in honor of my winning the New York and Boston marathons. Its participants are few compared with those for road races in big cities, but it is a well-organized and lovely foot race. This year was its 20th anniversary.
Personal bests
| Type | Distance | Time | Flags | Site | Date | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RD | 5 km | 17:59 | Los Angeles CA/USA | 09 Aug 1981 | ||
| RD | 10 km | 35:23 | Beverly Hills CA/USA | 17 Sep 1978 | ||
| RD | 15 km | 57:15 | Portland OR/USA | 24 Jun 1979 | ||
| RD | Half Mara | 1:15:58 | Pasadena CA/USA | 19 Nov 1978 | ||
| RD | 25 km | 1:38:40 | n/a CA/USA | 12 Mar 1977 | ||
| RD | 30 km | 2:03:17 | Springdale OH/USA | 06 May 1979 | ||
| RD | Marathon | 2:46:37 | Culver City CA/USA | 02 Dec 1973 | ||
| OT | 3 km | 10:15.4 | Goteborg SWE | 08 Aug 1977 | ||
| OT | 5 km | 17:39.2 | Hannover GER | 30 Jul 1979 | ||
| OT | 10 km | 36:21.9 | Hannover GER | 27 Jul 1979 |
| Date | Finished | Time | Flags | Type | Distance | Site | Race | Prize money | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 09 Aug 1981 | 1 | 17:59 | RD | 5 km | Los Angeles CA/USA | Nisei Week | |||
| 19 Oct 1980 | 7 | 37:47 | RD | 10 km | Los Angeles CA/USA | Los Angeles AC Mercury | |||
| 14 Sep 1980 | 5 | 36:31 | x | RD | 10 km | Los Angeles CA/USA | NBC Peacock | ||
| 09 Aug 1980 | 14 | 37:41 | RD | 10 km | Seattle WA/USA | Sportswest Women’s | |||
| 18 Nov 1979 | 16 | 2:54:09 | RD | Marathon | Tokyo JPN | Tokyo International Women’s | |||
| 11 Nov 1979 | 3 | 35:47 | RD | 10 km | Santa Monica CA/USA | L’eggs YWCA | |||
| 04 Nov 1979 | 4 | 37:30 | RD | 10 km | Inglewood CA/USA | Naturite International | |||
| 04 Oct 1979 | 1 | 36:06 | RD | 10 km | Los Angeles CA/USA | Mercury | |||
| 22 Sep 1979 | 32 | 2:56:55 | RD | Marathon | Waldniel GER | Avon | |||
| 02 Aug 1979 | 2 | 2:54:10 | RD | Marathon | Hannover GER | World Veterans Championships | |||
| 30 Jul 1979 | 1? | 17:39.2 | OT | 5 km | Hannover GER | World Veterans Championships | |||
| 27 Jul 1979 | 3? | 36:21.9 | OT | 10 km | Hannover GER | World Veterans Championships | |||
| 01 Jul 1979 | 3 | 36:19 | RD | 10 km | Century City CA/USA | Century City | |||
| 24 Jun 1979 | 7 | 57:15 | RD | 15 km | Portland OR/USA | Cascade Run-Off | |||
| 02 Jun 1979 | 26 | 36:45 | x | RD | 10 km | New York NY/USA | Mini-Marathon | ||
| 06 May 1979 | 12 | 2:03:17 | RD | 30 km | Springdale OH/USA | Avon | |||
| 28 Apr 1979 | 7 | 59:53 | x | RD | 10 mi | New York NY/USA | Trevira Twosome | ||
| 21 Apr 1979 | 2 | 38:05 | RD | 10 km | Palos Verdes CA/USA | George Allen March of Dimes | |||
| 14 Jan 1979 | 4 | 18:24 | RD | 5 km | Los Angeles CA/USA | Sunkist Qualifier | |||
| 31 Dec 1978 | 5 | 28:02 | RD | 8 km | Los Altos CA/USA | Runner’s World Midnight | |||
| 26 Nov 1978 | 2 | 36:44 | RD | 10 km | Los Angeles CA/USA | Mercury | |||
| 19 Nov 1978 | 1 | 1:15:58 | RD | Half Mara | Pasadena CA/USA | Rose Bowl | |||
| 12 Nov 1978 | 1 | 35:31 | RD | 10 km | Hollywood CA/USA | Hollywood | |||
| 05 Nov 1978 | 1 | 35:35 | RD | 10 km | Los Angeles CA/USA | Quaker 100% Natural | |||
| 22 Oct 1978 | 22 | 2:58:15 | x | RD | Marathon | New York NY/USA | New York City | ||
| 17 Sep 1978 | 2 | 35:23 | RD | 10 km | Beverly Hills CA/USA | Perrier Beverly Hills | |||
| 03 Jun 1978 | 15 | 36:24 | RD | 10 km | New York NY/USA | L’eggs | |||
| 20 May 1978 | 1 | 1:20:56 | RD | Half Mara | Indianapolis IN/USA | 500 Festival | |||
| 19 Mar 1978 | DNF | DNF | RD | Marathon | Atlanta GA/USA | Avon | |||
| 05 Nov 1977 | 2 | 36:00.0 | RD | 10 km | Guyanilla PUR | n/a | |||
| 23 Oct 1977 | 1 | 2:43:10.0 | x | RD | Marathon | New York NY/USA | New York City | ||
| 13 Aug 1977 | 1 | 2:57:05 | RD | Marathon | Göteborg SWE | World Veterans Championships | |||
| 11 Aug 1977 | 1 | 35:28 | XC | 10 km | Goteburg SWE | World Veteans Championships- V40 | |||
| 08 Aug 1977 | 1 | 10:15.4 | OT | 3 km | Goteborg SWE | World Masters Championships | |||
| 04 Jun 1977 | 9 | 36:00 | x | RD | 10 km | New York NY/USA | Mini-Marathon | ||
| 18 Apr 1977 | 1 | 2:48:33 | a | RD | Marathon | Boston MA/USA | Boston | ||
| 12 Mar 1977 | 1 | 1:38:40 | RD | 25 km | n/a CA/USA | n/a | |||
| 24 Oct 1976 | 1 | 2:39:11 | x | RD | Marathon | New York NY/USA | New York City | ||
| 09 May 1976 | 1 | 3:02:05 | a | RD | Marathon | Cleveland OH/USA | Case Western Reserve | ||
| 19 Apr 1976 | 2 | 2:52:27 | a | RD | Marathon | Boston MA/USA | Boston | ||
| 13 Mar 1976 | 1 | 1:40:17 | RD | 25 km | n/a CA/USA | n/a | |||
| 07 Dec 1975 | 1 | 2:47:45 | RD | Marathon | Culver City CA/USA | Western Hemisphere | |||
| 28 Sep 1975 | 2 | 2:53:02.8 | RD | Marathon | New York NY/USA | New York City | |||
| 15 Apr 1974 | 1 | 2:47:12 | a | RD | Marathon | Boston MA/USA | Boston | ||
| 02 Dec 1973 | 1 | 2:46:37 | RD | Marathon | Culver City CA/USA | Western Hemisphere | |||
| 31 Oct 1970 | 1 | 21:04:xx | IT | 100 mi | Los Angeles CA/USA | n/a |
Source: Association of Road Racing Statisticians