Doris Brown Heritage
In this episode, you will hear an interview with Doris Brown Heritage done by Amy Begley as part of the Road Runners Club of America oral history project. It was recorded by phone in 2013.
Doris Brown Heritage has always had a need to run. During a career that spanned roughly twenty years, Brown Heritage held every woman’s national and world record from the 440 yards to the marathon. In 1966 she became the first woman to run an indoor sub-five-minute mile in 4:52. Ten years later, on a lark with little training, she won her first marathon, the 1976 Vancouver International Marathon in 2:47:35 at the age of 34.
She is a two-time Olympian (1968, 800m, 1972 1500m) and is a living legend in her home state where she was named Seattle’s 1971 Man of the Year in Sports. She found that hilarious. Her most acclaimed accomplishment was winning five consecutive International World Cross-Country Championships from 1967 through 1971. “She is a remarkable woman who should have the name recognition of Jim Ryan,” claims Charlotte Lettis Richardson who included Brown Heritage in her documentary Run Like a Girl.
Doris Severtsen’s need to run started as a young girl growing up in a Norwegian family from Gig Harbor, Washington, on the coastal Puget Sound region. The family lived a simple life on a farm and Brown Heritage and her siblings were expected to do daily chores such as caring for the animals, preparing meals, schoolwork, practicing the French horn, and piano lessons which left little time for anything else such as socializing with other kids. It was a strict upbringing, but she found time to add one extra item: run.
She loved nothing more than to run through the rugged woods, windy beaches, and tidal pools of Puget Sound. She once claimed that she developed her speed from running away from bears.
Doris with Francie Larrieu at World XC Championships 1970
During the pre-Title IX years, she wasn’t allowed to run on a high school team. As a young teenager she joined the Tacoma Mic-Macs, a Washington state sponsored track team for middle-school girls. Her coach, Mr. McQuarrie, a devoted runner, saw her potential but he had limited coaching skills. Basically, he told the girls to run as fast they could. At races, he encouraged the girls to eat doughnuts at the start for fuel and Brown Heritage gobbled them down. “I would run full speed for a 400-meter race, cross the finish line, and then feel like upchucking but thankfully never did.”
She would occasionally be invited to run with the boys team which helped build her endurance. In 1960, while just 17, she ran the 800 meters fast enough to qualify for that year’s Olympic Track Trials in Abilene, Texas. That would turn out to be a life-changing event for her and all the women who ran in that historic event, the first time since 1928 that the 800 was included as an Olympic event for women.
She took a week’s long train ride from Seattle, riding in coach with many sleepless nights. When the train stopped at stations, the team would get out and run on the tracks to keep in shape. She arrived in Abilene and joined the hundreds of young women who were there to make Olympic history. She advanced through the qualifying rounds but in the finals, coming off the last turn, another racer’s elbow slammed into her ribs knocking the wind out of her. She finished third but only the winner, Pat Connolly, would go to Rome. Somewhat disappointed, she viewed it as a positive lesson: “When you put yourself on the line in a race and expose yourself to the unknown, you learn things about yourself that are very exciting.”
After Abilene, the team got on a bus headed to Kansas. It was on that bus that Brown Heritage experienced discrimination for the first time. Some of the women who raced in the Olympic Track Trials were African Americans. When they boarded the bus, they were ordered to sit in the back. Brown Heritage and the other white members of the team promptly sat in the back, taking up all the seats.
In 1964 her career took off under the tutelage of Ken Foreman, the coach at Seattle Pacific University (SPU) where she attended college and would go on to get her master’s degree and become the first female coach of their cross-country and track team.
In Foreman’s biography of Brown Heritage, The Fragile Champion, he states: “The petite young lady who walked into my office with a great burn to succeed, made a coach out of me. She taught me about effort, commitment, discipline, and the unlimited strength of the human will.”
They worked well together, forming a lifelong bond. She reveled in the workouts, running twice a day, jumping over boulders and picnic tables, an early form of what we now call plyometrics. Foreman was always humbled by her commitment to excellence. “She is considered the world’s greatest female distance runner and the second-ever female to be named to the U.S.A. Track Coaches Hall of Fame,” states Foreman.
In 1966 Foreman thought she was ready to go after the indoor mile record at the Canadian Indoor Championships. She won in 4:52. She was so far off anyone’s radar that when she won, the announcer called her the bespeckled girl with a pigtail.
Winning XC World Championships in Blackburn, England
Her biggest achievement was yet to come with an invitation to the 1967 World Cross Country Championships in Wales. This was the first time in 100 years that females were invited, and she was honored and exhilarated to attend.
The course was tailor-made for a girl who grew up in the woods. Foreman advised her to go out with caution as the course was littered with downed trees and mud from a recent storm. But this only thrilled her as she ran wild and free, recalling her days running through the storms of Puget Sound. She handily won and would repeat her World Cross-Country win four more times.
Jacqueline Hansen (Starting Line April 2022) has known Brown Heritage for more than 40 years. “She was my idol when I started running,” recalls Hansen. “Doris is one of a kind. She played a huge role in the development of women’s sports but is so humble, always encouraging others to do their best.” They still talk often but now, “instead of talking about our races and times we talk about our aches and pains,” laughs Hansen.
Some of Brown Heritage’s words to live by are, “Good is not good enough. You should always strive to be better!” She strived to be the best she could at her two Olympic venues, but the outcome was disappointing. At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, she qualified for the 800-meters. It was a crowded field with the women jostling for position. In the final stretch, she tangled with the pack, stumbled, got back up but it was too late. She finished fifth.
The podium of the World XC Championships 1970.
At the 1972 Munich Olympics she qualified for the1500m event, the first women’s 1500m event in Olympic history. She felt more than ready and was looking to medal. While walking to the track before the race she stepped on a movable curb, breaking five bones in her ankle. Her Olympic dream was as shattered as her foot, which never healed properly afterwards.
By 1972 Brown Heritage realized her best competitive days were behind her due to injuries. She kept running for enjoyment and concentrated on her coaching at SPU. Some of the girls she coached decided to run a marathon and asked her to accompany them to the 1976 Vancouver Marathon. She was 34 at the time and had never run a marathon but thought it would be fun. She took first place finishing in 2:47:35.
Doris at the World Masters Championships in Eugene, Oregon in 1994. She won the 800m.
Days later she received a call from Fred Lebow inviting her to run the 1976 New York City Marathon. This was the year the course would leave Central Park and include all five boroughs. At first, she turned him down as the logistics to get to New York were daunting for her and she had only been training for the 800m.
Lebow would not take no for an answer. She relented and placed second to the winner, Miki Gorman, in 2:53:02. She apologized for her slow time but typical of Brown Heritage’s humble nature, never mentioned that she only had one hour of sleep the night before the race due to the red-eye flight she took to New York.
Coaching and teaching physical education at SPU became her full-time passion and occupation for the next four decades but she still found time to get in her runs and other pleasures. Several days a week she ran from her home to school, then worked out with her team, and ran back home at the end of the day, 10 miles each way. When she was scheduled for a hip replacement in 2004, she got up at 4:30 a.m. before the surgery and ran five miles. In 1960 she founded the Falcon Running Camp on Whidbey Island with Foreman, the first running camp for coaches.
Retired from running and coaching, Doris and her husband, Ralph, live in Stanwood, WA. They recently lost their third dog, Deena Kastor. Two previous beloved dogs were named Lasse Viren and Zola Budd. She stays active by walking but feels that not running has aged her. “I ran fast and long, at least 10 miles a day, for most of my life,” she explains. “That level of fitness has been reduced to walking 2-to-3 miles a day since my arthritis and joint surgeries prevent me from jogging and running. When you lose fitness, you age faster.”
Now 81 and diagnosed with Dementia, Brown Heritage reflects on her life and career and what she is most proud of. “I feel privileged to have participated in the running movement at a time when women had to struggle for equality and the right to race,” she states.
“I never made money when I ran. When I went to Wales for my first International World Cross Country Invitational, I had to borrow money from the bank to pay for the trip. It took me five years to pay back the loan.”
Her philosophy of life and running is summed by this statement from Brown Heritage: “You have to reach beyond your grasp. That’s where the real living begins.”
Note about the author: Gail Waesche Kislevitz is an award-winning journalist and the author of six books on running and sports. She was a columnist for Runner’s World for fifteen years and her freelance work has appeared in Shape, Marathon and Beyond, and New York Runner.
