Anne Hird
retired female middle and long distance runner
Anne Hird (née Sullivan, born April 8, 1959) is a retired American middle-distance and long-distance runner who was the U.S. national champion for the distances of 30 kilometers and 10 miles. She has won multiple national and international races.
Professional career
As a high schooler, Anne Sullivan won races and set records in the Rhode Island high schools. She would later be inducted into the state's interscholastic hall of fame (in 2006). She began college at Harvard University, where she was the fastest on her team and an All-American, but transferred to Brown University where she ran for the Brown Bears in track and cross country. She set records in the 3,000 and 5,000 meter races for the Ivy League Conference during the 1979 Outdoor Championships. She went to the woman's national final that year for the 10,000 meter race, finishing sixth.
While she was a 20-year-old student at Brown, she took on the Cherry Blossom Ten Mile Run, which was the US National Championship for 1980. She led the crowd of 685 women to a fast finish in 55:34, busting Joan Benoit's previous course record by eight seconds. At the 25K New England Athletic's Congress race that year, she finished second to Nancy Conz, who set an American record in the race.
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This entry incorporates text from “Anne Hird” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.