Five years after Boston 1967, I went to the Munich Olympics. I realized that major sponsorship could help me create the opportunity. I wrote a big proposal to Avon cosmetics on how creating a global series of women's races could lead to getting women in the Olympic marathon. People thought I was smoking poppy at the time. The longest event in the Olympic Games was 800m.

A lack of forgiveness is a waste of time and it's very enriching to forgive and move on but those are things that come with time.

I said that there's going to come a day in our lives when women's running is as popular and as men's. Looking back, I obviously had a great sense of vision. And I was right.

When I was first running marathons, we were sailing on a flat earth. We were afraid we'd get big legs, grow mustaches, not get boyfriends, not be able to have babies. Women thought that something would happen to them, that they'd break down or turn into men, something shadowy, when they were only limited by their own society's sense of limitations.

When I go to the Boston Marathon now, I have wet shoulders—women fall into my arms crying. They're weeping for joy because running has changed their lives. They feel they can do anything.

I don't have any kids of my own, quite by choice. There are two reasons for that. One, I had a sense of obligation for what my life would be and a vision of how to get that accomplished and it didn't include children. It's not that I don't like them, it's just that if you have them, they deserve 100 per cent of your attention.

All you need is the courage to believe in yourself and put one foot in front of the other.