Toshiko d’Elia
In this episode, you will hear an interview with Toshi and her daughter Erica done by Amy Begley as part of the Road Runners Club of America oral history project. It was recorded by phone in 2013, a year before she passed away.
Toshiko d’Elia, the first female in the world to run a sub-three-hour marathon at age 50, took up running at the age of 40 to become a better mountain climber. Running was not even on her horizon.
d’Elia and her husband, Fred, were serious mountain climbers, having scaled peaks throughout the United States and around the world including Mount Fujiyama in Japan, and the Matterhorn in Switzerland. But it was in 1972 that Mount Rainier was to become her Waterloo. She didn’t have the stamina to summit and their guide ordered her off the climb. Determined to get stronger, she asked friends for advice and they all told her to take up jogging.
Back home in Ridgewood, New Jersey, she decided to take a jog and slipped on her thin Japanese sneakers, headed out the door, ran as fast as she could for a mile, and collapsed. Angry and disappointed, she turned to her daughter, Erica, who was the captain of the girls’ cross-country team at Ridgewood High School. Recalls Erica, “That was the beginning of early morning runs with my mom. I certainly didn’t want anyone seeing me running with my mother so we went out early.”
Erica taught her how to pace herself along with other running techniques. Within weeks she was comfortably running five miles. Erica decided to test her mother’s running and entered her in a spring countywide cross-country meet in Bergen County. She didn’t want to go but when Erica told her she would most likely come in last which would save that embarrassment for one of her teammates, she went. Erica recalls that morning: “All the girls took off fast from the start. I told my mom to pace herself but I wasn’t prepared to see her finish third. I finished first and started screaming when I saw her, “’Oh, my God, that’s my mother.’ ” A running star was born that day.
Toshiko d’Elia (nee Kishimoto) was born in 1930 in Kyoto Japan. During the post years of WWII she describes a harrowing childhood with no food. She recalled to a friend, “We starved. My mother would stand on food lines all day and come home with a cucumber to feed a family of six. I dreamed of being a bird so I could fly away.”
Wanting a better life than the traditional Japanese female of her time, which would have her enter an arranged marriage, she longed to go to college and won a Fulbright scholarship to study at Syracuse University in New York. But her father refused her permission to go to college, stating he would rather spend money on a new racehorse than a daughter’s education.
Her mother came to her rescue and bought her a steamship ticket to America. She earned a master’s degree in audiology at Syracuse and planned to teach deaf children. She also married the first boy she met at Syracuse and had a child, Erica. Six months later her husband left her. D’elia told her daughter she thinks he thought he married a subservient Japanese woman who would take care of him and instead he got the feisty, newly liberated woman.
But she was also broke with no job and a child to support, so she returned to Japan with her daughter. Her father was furious with her saying she had disgraced the family and insisted she give up her child for adoption to save face and start her life fresh with an arranged marriage. Her mother once again came to her rescue and gave her the money to return to the states where she got a teaching job at the New York School for the Deaf in White Plains, New York, met Fred d’Elia and moved to Ridgewood.
Settled in Ridgewood with Fred and Erica and happily “jogging,” she started her day with a 1-2-mile run and then drove to work.
In 1975, d’Elia started going into Manhattan to race with New York Road Runners, the only races in the area. She made friends with Nina Kuscisk, Fred Lebow, Ted Corbitt, and Kathrine Switzer. She was recruited to run with a female elite team, Atalanta, coached by Bob Glover. She was unstoppable and was given the nickname Sea Biscuit after the horse that would never quit.
She was running 5Ks and 10Ks, and when a friend suggested she try a marathon, she said, “That distance is only for horses to run.” But she was willing to try a half-marathon and signed up for the 1976 New Jersey Half Marathon that also had a full marathon.
She only trained to run 13.1 miles to see if she could go the distance. When she reached the halfway point a friend’s husband, who was supposed to meet her, never showed up so she kept running, finishing in 3:25, qualifying her for the Boston Marathon. Three months later she ran the Boston Marathon in 3:15. Seven months later she ran the New York City Marathon and was the third women’s finisher in 3:08:15.
By 1977, she was running 90 miles a week and winning long-distance races as well as sprinting events in 40-years-and-over competition. At age 50 she ran the 1980 Boston Marathon in 3:09. A Japanese reporter who was at the Boston Marathon interviewed her. The next day, she received a call from her brother in Kyoto telling her she was famous and on the front page of the Tokyo Times. She was invited to speak at the Women’s World Sports Symposium in Tokyo. After being away for 16 years and vowing she would never return, she went back to Japan a women’s hero.
A book about her life, Running On and a movie based on the book was released in Japan and translated in the United States.
Glover decided the time was right to go after the sub-three hour record. He had her training 100 miles a week, with speed workouts and hill repeats. d’Elia was up for the challenge and trained with a fierce determination.
In 1980 at the World Veteran’s Marathon Champions in Glasgow, Scotland, she became the first woman in the world to run a sub-three-hour marathon, finishing in 2:57:25. For her achievement, she was given Runner's World Magazine’s Paavo Nurmi Award. She was also the first woman over 65 to run a sub-seven-minute mile indoors. In 1996 she was inaugurated into the first class of the Masters division of the USATF National Track and Field Hall of Fame.
She kept her winning streak going into her 70s. In January 2001, she broke the indoor world record for women age 70 in the 1,500-meter run with a time of 6:47:46. A few weeks later she broke records in the 800-meter, five-kilometer, and 10-kilometer runs. On the day she broke the world record in the 1,500, she was prepared to go after the world record in the 3,000 but decided that, “one world record in a day was enough.”
She has been featured in Sports Illustrated, and is part of a permanent exhibit on running legends at the New Balance Armory in Washington Heights.
Despite having open-heart surgery when she was 78, d’Elia kept setting age-group records until December 2014 when she was diagnosed with brain cancer. She passed away peacefully surrounded by family at age 84.
“She was in the pool every day at 7a.m.,” her daughter said. “She swam a mile and ran in the water for 45 minutes. Then there was a yoga class. Then she came home for lunch and a nap. Then, in the afternoon, she ran three to five miles. That was her day, until the day she couldn’t.”
After every race, the first thing she did was to remove her shoes and thank her feet for taking care of her. Then she would have a beer. She viewed running as a friendship that needed to be respected. The first thing she taught new runners was to know their limits. One of her many famous quotes was, “Respect your injuries. There will be always be another race but if you don’t heal you won’t be there to run it.”
Her philosophy on running should be adopted by all runners: “I view running as a necessary tool to help get me through life, so I do everything I can to nurture it, take care of it, and appreciate it. I want to hold on to my friend for as long as I live.”
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.
