Early Life and Boston Marathon Victory
Born in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, of French and Scandinavian ancestry, Benoit took to long-distance running to help recover from a broken leg suffered while slaloming. At Bowdoin College she excelled in athletics. In 1977, after two years at Bowdoin, she accepted a running scholarship to North Carolina State, where she began concentrating solely on her running. She earned All-America honors at NC State in both 1977 and 1978, and in 1978 helped lead the Wolfpack to the Atlantic Coast Conference cross-country championship. After returning to Bowdoin to complete her degree, she entered the 1979 Boston Marathon as a relative unknown. She won the race, wearing a Boston Red Sox cap, in 2:35:15, knocking eight minutes off the competition record. She repeated that success with a victory again in 1983, that took more than two minutes off the world's best time, set by Grete Waitz in the London Marathon just the day before, despite having had surgery on her Achilles tendons two years earlier. Her Boston course record of 2:22:43, set in 1983, was not broken for another 11 years.
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