Patti Catalano Dillon
In 1980, Patti Catalano became the first American woman to break 2:30 in the marathon. She has held American and world records at various distances—including the 5 mile, 10 mile, 10K, 15K, 20K, 30K and half-marathon, and she has been inducted into the RRCA Distance Running Hall of Fame. She won the Honolulu Marathon four times and finished second at the Boston Marathon three times, in 1979, 1980, and 1981. “Always a bridesmaid!” she quipped.
Patti—now Patti Catalano Dillon—is Mi’kmaq, which makes her the first Native American woman to achieve these running accolades.
In the spring of 1976, Dillon was turning 23. She was unhappy, smoked and drank a lot, and needed a change, so she decided to try running. The first time she went out for a run, she wore Daisy Duke cutoff shorts, a neoprene belt, multiple sweatshirts, and Earth shoes with a negative heel. She ran laps around a cemetery, where she figured no one would see her.
She managed to run almost seven miles, and it was hard, but it felt great. The feeling hit her in the shower afterward—she stood under the water and wept. “It really felt like I'd never had anything like that before in my life,” she explained. “It's the first time I ever breathed.”
After her muscles recovered from her first run, Dillon kept at it. At the time, the aerobics craze was ramping up, and jogging was becoming popular, so she would see men out jogging, but not women.
Dillon won the first five-miler she entered. When some men at the Y started talking about a marathon, she told them she was going to run one—even though she wasn’t sure what it was. Once she figured out what she was getting herself into, she started training, and she ran the October 1976 Ocean State Marathon in Rhode Island, winning it with a time of 2:53:40. She had been running for less than a year.
When running became part of her routine, Dillon stopped drinking right away, but it took her two years to quit smoking. She turned to what she called a Dudley Do-Right life. "It’s not so much that I did bad things. It was just that I was so lost,” she said. “And [running] gave me a direction. And I wanted to be better.”
She began to run more races, but she still didn’t see many other women running. It wasn’t until the 1977 Bonne Bell 10K, which more than 2,000 women ran, that Dillon ran with any sizable group of women. “I don't know where they came from. It was amazing. I never saw women running. You know, there'd be a spate of women in a few races that I did.”
In 1980, Dillon became one of the first women runners to sign a pro contract. She remembered that, as the lawyer was passing her a pen to sign with, he withheld it and said, “Oh, by the way, they don't want you to get pregnant.” She recalled, “I could just feel my stomach, my solar plexus, just go—but everything was all cheery,” and everyone celebrated the historic contract. But that feeling never left her.
The sponsorship allowed her to build a house and covered the foot surgery she needed after rupturing her plantar fascia. “On the other side of things, though, there's a level of freedom that's taken away. I couldn't run certain races—races that I wanted to run,” she said. She rode out the three-year contract.
In 1984, Dillon paid her own way to the Olympic Trials for the marathon and finished sixteenth. She wasn’t getting invited to races, so she decided to try for a marathon outside of the United States. She called the Rio de Janeiro Marathon race director and eventually convinced him to bring her in for the 1985 marathon.
On race day, she had to battle intestinal issues that threatened to sideline her, but she managed to win in 2:38:44. And that race marked a turning point: "I never had to race again. Everything I wanted was validated. Everything that I thought I wanted, I got. . . . It lifted so much off my shoulders. I could just live. I was so caught up in . . . relationships, partners, having my life threatened, you know, just awful, awful stuff, and being dumped and having to get up again and again to prove myself.” After that, she no longer felt she needed to prove herself to anyone.
Patti with Bobbi Gibb, Cheryl Treworgy, and Julia Chase-Brand.
After marriages that ended in divorce, she found her husband, Dan Dillon, with whom she has raised two kids. Together, they created the first homeschool running club in the country, the Homeschool Harriers. Now they live (and still run) in Connecticut. In 2022 she was named head coach of Wings of America’s Wings Elite Program for Native athletes, which is in a period of development. Dillon also coaches individuals privately.
Dillon’s mother was Mi’kmaq and raised her not to identify as Native. That didn’t come until later in life. "The Native-ness in me came out because I could run. I really attributed the running to the blood that I had, the high work ethic," she said. When running, she explained, “I felt different than other people, meaning that it flows in you—the ancestry. . . . And when it's acknowledged or you do something, it ignites, and it just flows through you.”
Dillon reconnected with her Mi’kmaq cousin’s daughter, who ran the 2023 Boston Marathon. “She said, ‘Yes, I can do this marathon because you have—you gave us running. We have running in our genes. Our family—it can run.’ And I was just—I just looked at her. I didn't know what to say, you know, my heart fell out.” Dillon just hugged her.
About the author: Allison Torres Burtka is a freelance writer and editor in metro Detroit. Her writing about runners and other athletes has appeared in the Guardian, Outside, Runner’s World, Women’s Running, espnW, and other publications. She is a co-lead of the Running Industry Diversity Coalition’s Media Subgroup. You can visit her writing portfolio and follow her on Instagram, Twitter, and Threads.
