Early in 1975, Grete Andersen was asked by a Norwegian sports reporter whether she held any ambitions to move up in distance to the 3000m.

“No,” she replied. “I’ve raced it once before and I thought it was far too long.”

That initial attempt, in 1973, took the pigtailed Oslo primary school teacher – the future Grete Waitz, the future all-time great of the 42,195m marathon – a modest 9:34.2.

At the start of the 1975 outdoor track season, the women’s world record for 3000m stood at 8:52.8.

It had been set in 1974 by Lyudmila Bragina, the Soviet sensation against whom the 18-year-old Waitz (then named Andersen) had attempted to measure up in the inaugural Olympic 1500m for women in 1972.

Her senior by 11 years, Bragina won the opening heat in 4:06.5, breaking her own world record for that distance; she proceeded to improve the global mark with victories in her semifinal (4:05.1) and the final (a stunning 4:01.4). Waitz finished sixth in heat two, clocking 4:16:00.

The young Norwegian was overjoyed when she made the 1500m podium at the 1974 European Championships in Rome, pipping Tatyana Kazankina, the future Olympic 800m and 1500m champion and world record-holder, to the bronze medal in 4:05.2.

Early retirement

By then, the 3000m had become the longest championship distance for women.

But, rather than a step up to the seven-and-a-half lap distance, Waitz was contemplating stepping into retirement from international competition as she celebrated her 21st birthday in the autumn of 1974.

“The girl I was training with retired and I felt very lonely,” Waitz later confided in a Runner’s World interview, “so I said, ‘Well, I think I’ll do the same’.

“I felt already at that time I’d done a lot. I’d been running internationally for four years. I’d been in the European Championships [for the first time, as a 17-year-old in the 1500m heats in Helsinki in 1971].

I was in the Olympics in 1972. I’d been travelling a lot. I felt I already had a good career.”

Not for the last time in her long, distinguished career, Waitz was persuaded to keep on running by Jack Henry Nilsen, her training partner and coach at the Vidar Sportsklubben in Oslo and her fiancé at the time.

Not only that, he convinced her to have a serious crack at the 3000m, pointing out how much more comfortable she appeared the longer the distance she ran in training.

Wedding bells and a world record

Thus, on Tuesday 24 June 1975, Waitz lined up for her international 3000m debut on the opening night of the Norway v Sweden v East Germany fixture at the Bislett Stadium in Oslo.

It was to be her final race under her maiden name. Three days later she was to marry Nilsen and, together, the couple would assume the new surname of Waitz.

Initially, Inger Knutson of Sweden tried to go with Waitz’s high paced tempo from the off. Before the opening lap was through, however, it was the Norwegian versus the clock.

Passing 1000m in 2:55.0 and 2000m in 5:52.0, the Norwegian prevailed.

She crossed the line in 8:46.6, emphatically stamping her name in the world record book, for the first and last time, as Grete Andersen.

She set five more as Grete Waitz: a second one at 3000m at Bislett in 1976 (8:45.4), then four as the trailblazing pioneer who – in her golden years, from 1978 to 1983 – took the women’s marathon record crashing through the 2:30m barrier to 2:25:28.7.

Bislett first

Still, that home town-breakthrough 50 years ago was a pivotal performance in the running life of Grete Waitz.

It was the first world record by a woman in the hallowed Bislett Stadion, 51 years after the first by a male athlete at the former Oslo speed skating arena: a 1:03.8 clocking at 500m by Adriaan Paulen, the Dutch athlete who served as President of the IAAF, the forerunner of World Athletics, from 1976 to 1981.

The Grete Waitz statue outside Bislett Stadium

It also inspired Waitz to press ahead in her international track career by increasing her training regime to two sessions a day in preparation for the 1976 Olympics in Montreal.

She rose at 4:30am each day to fit in a hilly 12-14km run with Jack before her teaching duties at Bjolsen Elementary School, then completed a track session after work with her older brothers.

As a young girl, Waitz had been discouraged from playing out with Jan and Arild. “My parents thought the activities were too physical for a girl,” she recalled.

“They wanted me to stay home and learn the piano, which I hated.

“When I told them I wanted to join a track club, they didn’t think it was a good idea.

They said, ‘That’s for your brothers’. They thought I’d lose interest and quit.”

Grete couldn’t join her brothers at their club because IK Tjalve didn’t accept female athletes.

She joined SK Vidar, tried the high jump, the long jump and the sprints, then graduated to the middle distances.

The rest is history.

An all-time great

Her parents became two of her most ardent fans, alongside Jack and her brothers.

Grete Waitz wins the 1983 London Marathon (© Allsport / Getty Images)

And Waitz became one of the all-time greats of her sport: a record-equalling five-time world cross-country champion, the first women’s marathon world champion, runner-up in the inaugural Olympic marathon for women and nine-time winner of the New York City Marathon.

She became a giant of the marathon almost by chance.

At the end of the 1978 track season, she was considering retiring from international competition to concentrate on teaching when Jack persuaded her to give the marathon a try on a second honeymoon trip to New York.

Unassuming in manner and inspirational in deed, Waitz died from cancer in 2011. She was just 57.

Her considerable legend lives on. A World Athletics Heritage Plaque stands in her honour near to a bronze statue of her at the entrance to the Bislett track where Waitz made her first mark of greatness half a century ago.

Simon Turnbulll for World Athletics Heritage