'Somebody had to go first'

On Thanksgiving morning, about half of the 15,000 runners who will cross the finish line of the 75th annual Manchester Road Race will be female.

And they should all stop and thank Dr. Julia Chase-Brand.

It was 50 years ago Thursday morning, that Chase, a dark-haired 19-year-old from Groton, defied powerful Amateur Athletic Union officials and became the first of her gender to run the 4.78-mile road race at a time when women were banned from such events.

On Thursday, the now 69-year-old Chase-Brand again will take the starting line in Manchester wearing the same Smith College gym suit she wore in 1961. This time, race officials are not only letting her run, they're celebrating her presence.

"It's like coming full circle," Chase-Brand said as she relaxed in the living room of her Cove View Road home in New London. She had just finished a day of work at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London, where she is the medical director of outpatient psychiatry. "There's been 50 years of women out there on the roads, so there's a sense of completion."

While two other women ran the race in 1961, the pre-race attention was focused on Chase-Brand, who had competed in that year's Olympic Trials, when word of her plan leaked out.

Publications such as Sports Illustrated, Life Magazine and The New York Times wrote stories about the girl who grew up running through the woods of Groton and was now challenging the notion that women risked serious injury to their reproductive health by racing long distances.

She was tabloid newspaper fodder with back page headlines such as "She Wants to Chase the Boys" in The New York Daily News, and this gem from the Cleveland Press: "Why Does Julia Keep Running after Men?"

It was partly her decision to challenge the ban on women running in distance races that led race officials to allow women into such events. The first Olympic Marathon for women was held in 1984.

Kelley was her coach

Chase-Brand grew up as the middle of five children on a small piece of farmland on Shennecossett Road near Baker Cove in Groton.

She attended Eastern Point Elementary School, West Side Middle School and then the Williams School.

"I remember being 5 or 6 and if I missed the bus to school it was fun because I got to run the mile or mile-and-a-half to school through Shennecossett Golf Course and along the railroad tracks," she recalled.

She was 7 when her father told her about cross-country running.

"I thought it was so cool you could go out and run through the woods," she said.

It wasn't long until she discovered there was a running star in her town: Johnny Kelley of Mystic, a local teacher and coach, would win the 1957 Boston Marathon, eight straight national marathon titles and would run in two Olympic marathons.

When Chase-Brand and her father would head off to daily Mass during Lent, they would see Kelley out training.

"He was a beautiful runner," she said of Kelley, who died in August. "I cut out all the clippings about him I could find."

Soon Chase-Brand began standing down by the railroad tracks every day waiting for Kelley to pass by so she could say hello. The she'd wait for him to return.

"It just made my day," she said.

Although Chase-Brand was running on her own, she was not allowed to compete in Connecticut.

New England record

One day, in the spring of 1960 while out for a run, she crossed paths with Kelley and his training partner, George Terry. They told her about the upcoming New England track championships and offered to train her.

On July 4, 1960, Chase-Brand stepped onto a track for the first time. To get in the race, she had to say she lived in Westerly because Connecticut did not allow competitive running for women.

In her first competitive race, she set the New England record in the 880-yard run with a time of 2:42.

Two weeks later, the novice runner found herself in Abilene, Texas, for the U.S. Olympic Trials. She ran 2:32 despite wearing her brother's shorts and T-shirt, and running shoes so big they had to be secured with tape.

The next year, Kelley and Terry said they were going to race in Manchester and she should come along. But race officials said she wasn't welcome.

Terry argued that it made no sense for the race to allow 7-year-old boys but not one of the country's most talented women.

"We tried to get through to the AAU and the Manchester people but they would not budge," Chase-Brand said. " It became clear I had to do a public challenge."

So she quietly continued training. A month before Manchester, she finished a seven-mile race in Chicopee, Mass., to "make sure I didn't make a fool of myself" on Thanksgiving Day.

The Associated Press found out about her plan and soon there were stories about Chase-Brand everywhere.

"Today you would say it went viral," she said. "The press was very much behind me. And I was getting letters from people in Finland, Japan, Africa, all over."

The week before the race the AAU made its position clear: If Chase-Brand ran she would receive a lifetime ban and would be stripped of her New England championship medals.

"I said, 'I'm going to run anyway,' Somebody had to go first."

She said she chose to wear her conservative Smith College gym suit, which resembled a skirt. She put on lipstick and fixed her hair.

"I wanted to say, 'I'm a girl. I'm here and I'm a serious runner,'" she said.

Chase-Brand said it was part of her makeup to run.

"I, by nature, am a distance runner," she said. "I'm an animal who runs in the woods. I've been that way since I

was 5 or 6."

Jubilation at the finish

On the morning of the race, Chase-Brand said she tried to do her warm-up and stay focused. That's when Terry told her that British Olympian Chris McKenzie and Dianne Lechausse, a Manchester high schooler, also had decided to run.

A few minutes later, race officials tried to block the trio from running. A photo taken that morning shows a burly race official sternly looking at her while she holds up her hands and pleads her case.

"We waited for the gun to go off and then started a half block behind and ran on the sidewalk," she said.

Chase-Brand said the male runners in the race were supportive and the crowds cheered as she passed.

"Everyone knew my name at that point," she said.

While McKenzie ran ahead of Chase-Brand, she did not cross the finish line first because she did not want to incur a lifetime ban from competition.

Chase-Brand crossed the line in 33:40, which put her ahead of 10 of the men in the field of 138. That time would have placed her among the top 800 in last year's race when more than 13,000 ran.

"It was absolute jubilation when it was over," she said.

She then waited to see what would happen. But race officials ignored her.

She went home for Thanksgiving dinner and then returned to college.

A month later, Terry got a call from an official who told him the AAU would allow some longer distance races for women on the track in the spring. Chase-Brand's run had made a difference.

"But in return, you have to promise that Julia will never embarrass us again," the official said.

So Chase-Brand agreed not to run any more road races.

"What I wanted most, I had to give up," she said.

Over the next few years, she continued to compete at shorter distances on the track and even moved to California to train with the Los Angeles Track Club.

In 1965, she considered trying to run the Boston Marathon, which would have made her the first woman to run the country's most prestigious race.

"But I had made a promise not to run," she said.

And just like that, her running career was over.

"It was time to make a choice. I was starting the next phase of my life. As a woman, there was no way to support yourself running," she said. "So I went on to do other fascinating things like study wild animals in the jungle."

Back to school

Chase-Brand earned a zoology degree from Smith College, a master's degree in anatomy and physiology from the University of Indiana, did post-doctoral work at Princeton University, and studied the facial expressions of gorillas and children at the University of Pennsylvania.

She traveled to exotic locales such as Trinidad, Australia and Africa to study animals in the wild. Along the way, she married George Brand; they have two children and two grandchildren.

She taught for 25 years at Barnard College and five at Rutgers University. In 1992, she enrolled in the Albert Einstein Medical School in New York where her former students were her classmates and professors. Four years later, at the age of 53, she graduated and became a psychiatrist.

"You go in the next door and see what fun you can have there," she said.

Four years ago, she decided it was "time to come home." So she and her husband moved to New London and she began working at L&M.

While two knee surgeries have curtailed her running to just once a week, Chase-Brand said she supplements her training with swimming and biking. She also ran the Lawrence & Memorial 3.5-mile Spring Stride earlier this year in preparation for Manchester.

Thursday will not be the first time Chase-Brand has run the Manchester Road Race since that day in 1961. She's run it six other times since, and several years ago she was named the honorary race committee chairwoman.

Her decision to run it on the 50th anniversary stemmed from one of her many long talks with Kelley in his running shoe store in Olde Mistick Village.

"On Thursdays I'd go to the clinic in Mystic and afterwards I would hang out at the store with Johnny. It was nice. Instead of Tuesdays with Morrie, it was Thursdays with Johnny," she joked.

With Kelley being honored by the Boston Marathon in 2007 on the 50th anniversary of his victory, he said it seemed right for Chase-Brand to run in Manchester on the golden anniversary of her historic run.

The impact of her decision to run that first race came into focus when she watched the first women's Olympic marathon in 1984. Maine's Joan Benoit won the gold medal just 17 days after knee surgery.

"You get just a few pure experiences in life and that was one of them for me. She was a masterful runner. When I was watching her win, I was absolutely jubilant," recalled Chase-Brand, tears welling up in her eyes. "After the race, she said she wanted to thank all the people who made this possible."

"I bawled like a kid," she said.

j.wojtas@theday.com