Marie Mulder
Marie Mulder began running competitively as a way to participate in organized sports. Marie was good at playing baseball, football and other sports, and describes herself as a tomboy.
Marie Mulder featured in “Young Americans”
“I was a very good baseball player; I outplayed the boys in the neighborhood. I could not join Little League—girls couldn’t do that back then,” she said. “I just happened to come across a local meet and went and a coach said he thought I would do well and asked me to come train for him. So, I did.”
Marie quickly found freedom and joy not only in the act of running but also in competition. Since women and girls were unable to participate formally in most sports during the 1950s and 1960s, it was through running competitively that Marie was able to discover the space to enjoy movement and to excel at it.
“Running in general—it was the freedom, just the absolute freedom,” she said. “The feeling of everything in my body working, the legs moving, feeling the blood flow, there was a feeling about it that was just wonderful, just freeing and wonderful.”
She also found she enjoyed the competitive aspects of the sport. Upon joining Will’s Spikettes in Sacramento, California, in 1963, Marie’s talent for running became evident very quickly. Will’s Spikettes ran against other city teams, including those from nearby Oakland, Santa Clara, and Roseville. This was one of the only ways in which girls could compete “formally” in organized sports.
Unlike the famed Tigerbelles of Tennessee, who were succeeding in sprinting at the time, Marie’s team focused on distance – but not necessarily the longer distances they might have wanted to run, since women and girls were restricted to the 800 meters.
“That was an ongoing fight, because I really should have been running three, five, ten [kilometers],” Marie said. “I didn't have the speed. Really middle distance; what I was doing middle distance, but back then it was called long distance. And that's as far as we got to go.”
Despite these barriers, what motivated Marie to continue her journey was a desire to compete and to improve. She set goals for herself for competition and felt a deep appreciation for the ability to run competitively at all.
Her career, though brief, was triumphant. About a year after she began running, she won both the 800 meters and the 1,500 meters at the National AAU Track & Field Championships—the first time women were allowed to compete at a distance beyond the half-mile. That earned her a spot in the U.S.-Russia meet in Kiev later that year, where days after her 15th birthday, she ran 2:07.3 in the 800 meters to place second and break the American record by 1.5 seconds.
For many folks, being a runner is critical to their identity throughout their life. For Marie, however, running and competing as a runner was a moment in time. Her father took a position in Washington D.C. And after she moved from the West Coast to the East Coast in 1965, Marie’s life shifted focus; she developed injuries and struggled with the weather, so running did not fit so easily into her journey forward. But what remained was a focus on continued self-improvement and growth.
Speaking fondly of her time as a competitive runner, Marie said, “My favorite Olympic athlete is Eric Heiden. He did all five of the speed skating [events]—he did sprinting to long distance, an incredible, incredible achievement. And yet, he went on in life, and he did not live his life as that. He became an orthopedic surgeon. And his take on it was, what he did then was something he did while he was on his way to becoming who he was going to become,” she said.
Note about the author: Pilar Arthur-Snead is a Road Runners Club of America Level 1 Certified Coach, Ultrarunner and the host of The Last Tenth Podcast. She is based in Albany, NY.
