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Doris Brown Heritage is one of the most accomplished distance runners ever to come out of Pierce County. She graduated from Peninsula High and went on to Seattle Pacific University in a time when many schools didn’t have track programs for women. “During my school years, there were very few races for women,” Heritage told the SPU magazine “Response” in 2007. “Whitworth College let me run in their dual meets with SPU. If the race was a mile, I could run a half-mile of it. I was in some boys’ high school cross country races.” But Heritage didn’t let the pre-Title IX era slow her down. Brown became the first woman ever to break the 5-minute-mile barrier at an indoor meet when she posted a 4:52 in ‘66. She won five consecutive International Cross Country Championships from 1967-71 and she finished fifth in the 800-meter run at the 1968 Mexico Olympics. Brown set world records in the 3,000-meter (9:26.90) and 2-mile runs (10:07.00) in 1971. In ‘76, she won the Vancouver International Marathon, finished second in the New York City Marathon and was named “Washington’s Woman of the Year” by the state legislature. Brown was an assistant coach for Team USA at the 1984 Summer Olympics. As a coach at SPU, her runners have won all-America honors and national titles. Brown is a member of the United States Track and Field and Cross Country Coaches Association, the National Track and Field, National Distance Running and SPU halls of fame. “Doris, with her arduous training regime, is one of the most significant figures in the evolution of women’s running,” noted running journalist and historian Mel Watman told Runner’s World in 2017.Lexicon
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