Biography
Gorman, who grew up in Japan's Fukushima prefecture during the post-war years, moved to the United States in 1964. 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, 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. She is currently 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.
In 1981, a film called "Ritoru Champion" (known on video in America as My Champion was a film starring Chris Mitchum, documenting the events of Gorman's life.
Frequently injured in subsequent years, Gorman competed sporadically through the years 1978 to 1981. She did, however, manage to set a women's world record in the half-marathon in 1978. Gorman decided to retire from competitive running in 1982. Gorman now lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Gorman has been 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.
Read more about this topic: Miki Gorman
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“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
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“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)