Loveland mayor defies doctors, council

LOVELAND — Jacki Marsh wormed her way to the front of the group of 75 of the best women runners in the world, determined to prove her T-shirt wrong.

The Crazylegs Mini Marathon was a bit of a publicity stunt to sell L’eggs pantyhose, but it was also an opportunity. This was in 1972, a time when men still thought that a marathon would either give a woman a nervous breakdown or cause infertility, most likely because, ahem, her uterus would fall out. This race featured Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to finish the Boston Marathon as a numbered entrant, and Nina Kuscsik, the first woman to win it, after she petitioned the Amateur Athletic Union to allow women to run 26.2 miles. It was a race that seemed to take women runners seriously.

“It was incredible, even unbelievable, to see 75 women in a race,” Marsh said. “More frequently, I was the only woman in a race.”

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Officials gave Marsh the No. 5 because they expected her to finish fifth. Kuscsik wore No. 1. The officials didn’t mean it as an insult, and Marsh didn’t take it that way. But when the gun went off, and she saw three women take off with it, she followed them, determined to stay on their heels.

A few football fields into the race, the trio veered off. The women were Playboy Bunnies. This race, remember, was still a bit of a publicity stunt. Marsh silently thanked the bunnies for the fast start, kept her lead and crossed the line 200 yards ahead of anyone else.

A dozen years later, Marsh considered herself a contender for the 1984 U.S. Olympic Team, when women would finally be allowed to compete in the marathon. A week before her qualifying race, she got the flu. Only it wasn’t the flu. It was a heart disease, and doctors told her it would kill her in five years, if she was lucky to live that long. She was 30 years old.

Marsh is now 64, a woman who defies her doctors as well as the Loveland City Council, where she sits as mayor and prides herself on being the prickly pear in the city’s fruit bowl. She also owns Rabbask, a boutique that sells wares from more than 100 Colorado artists, including her own bead jewelry. Even after five pretty good years, the store is month-to-month, she said, and if she loses the building, she also loses the loft where she lives. Yet when the tight margins worry her, or she finds herself spending more than the $1,000 a month she earns as mayor on part-time help to make up for all the time she’s away as a public official, she thinks about her running and the heart disease that shortened it. All that history — and that’s exactly what it is, given her place as a running pioneer — gives her the courage to keep going as a business owner, an artist and Loveland’s contentious mayor.

“You have to be strong to be a runner,” Marsh said. “You can’t be anything else.”

Marsh believes that if men weren’t so concerned about uteruses back when she was in her prime, she would have held the women’s world record for a marathon. She practiced with, among others, Francie Larrieu Smith, a five-time Olympian. Many times, her weekend training run consisted of a 16-mile run with Larrieu and another 16 with the other members of her running club. But two years before the 1984 Olympics, when she would finally get a chance to prove herself, doctors told her the flu was actually cardiomyopathy, a disease that causes irregular heartbeats. It took doctors two years to diagnose it, given that heart problems didn’t seem possible for a woman who could run a five-minute mile. Up to 80 percent, Marsh said, die within five years.

The disease, she said, has been a rollercoaster ever since. In 2004, after a bad stretch, she expected the battery on her latest pacemaker to run out in eight years, so she left her husband, her health insurance and her horses and cats a year later to move to Salt Lake City to be a grandmother and enjoy the time she had left before God finally took her.

Marsh could not sit still, and after purchasing a bead collection from a photographer friend who needed money, along with the photos of Rabbask, her horse, that still hang in her home and shop, she learned how to make jewelry well enough to land her work in art boutiques around the world.

She enjoyed the creative job but resented the galleries that took 50 percent of her sales, and when her son moved to Fort Collins with his family, she opened Rabbask in downtown Loveland. She takes 33 percent, not 50, and doesn’t charge a fee for the space.

She ran for mayor after attending city council meetings for four years, something she started after a city official told her to do so when she complained about not being made aware of downtown improvements until the work began. When you ask how she opened her own space, she likely will tell you this whole story, the whole long road, possibly in one breath, pausing only for her loud, bracing laugh. Owning an actual store, not a page on Etsy or Ebay, is scary, but running made her strong, and having a heart disease that was supposed to kill her instead galvanized her. Life is indeed short, even when it’s not nearly as short as it was supposed to be, and so why not open your own business? Obamacare saved her, she said, giving her the life insurance she needed to pay for a new pacemaker, and it’s a good one. She feels better than ever. She’s even thinking about running again.

Running made her strong. It turned her into the outgoing business owner she is now, instead of the shy girl who was afraid of her abusive father.

“I was not popular in high school,” Marsh said. “I was a kid who was afraid of life. But running made me strong.”

It gave her the strength to go on. Sometimes she still feels that insecure little kid inside her. But she is also strong. Running, most of all, strengthens the core of who she is, and she knows that will never change, even as the world changes rapidly around her.