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Marilyn King (born may 21 1949) is a two-time Olympian in the five event track and field Pentathlon, and the founder of Beyond Sports, a consulting business that applies Olympian Thinking (TM ) in the areas of business, education and peace. Her expertise in exceptional human performance has attracted a wide range of clients and opportunities, from Fortune 100 companies to working with inner city Oakland youth and collaborations with the United Nations and a 5 year think tank with thought leaders from around the world on the role of business in peacebuilding.
Early Life
King was born in Cambridge Mass to John Anthony King and Mary Helena King as the second of four children. As a Coast Guard family, moving every one to three years was the norm, and King engaged after school sports as a vehicle for making friends. After positive experiences in Santa Clara California, the family was transferred to New York City. As a high school sophomore marilyn reconnected with sports and joined the Long Island Mercurettes. Competing in her first Pentathlon she placed third in the Eastern States Pentathlon Championship. The following year she competed at the national championships and began her Olympic quest.
Athletic Career
At William Wilson junior high in Santa Clara marilyn was awarded a block W sweater and five stars for her achievements in various sports. Joining the Santa Clara Valley Girls’s Track Club in 1961 was a positive experience that led to the Long Island Mercurettes when the King family moved to Staten Island, New York where her Olympic quest began. Upon graduating from Tottenville High in 1967 Marilyn enrolled in San Fernando Valley State College where she was the only woman working out in the weight room. Attracted by the numerous track clubs in the Los Angeles area, non were near the college so King started the track team by recruiting a faculty member to sponsor the first women’s team at SFVS and marilyn enlisted a private coach for the pentathlon training until she could transfer to Cal State University at Hayward, Callifornia and join the Millbrae Lions Track Club under the guidance of Ed Parker who had groomed Olympian and Pentathlete Pat Daniels. Marilyn attracted other aspiring Olympians Hayward, including Lucia Vaamonde from Venezuela, who were contributors to the national collegiate championship track team from under Jim Santos. Under Ed Parker, Marilyn went on to win her first National Pentathlon Championship in 1971 and made the Pan American Team to Cali, Columbia and her first Olympic Team to Munich Germany in 1972. International teams to the Soviet Union and international dual meets proceeded placing 16th in Montreal in 1976 Olympics. Marilyn vowed to return for one final Olympic team and designed her final four years to include a one year leave of absence from her UC Berkeley head coaching position to have 24/7 to train for the 1980 Moscow Games. While at Berkeley, she singlehandedly conceived of, lobbied for, designed and coordinated three departments use of the first weight room for women athletes at Cal.
However, her plans to have the Olympics as her only focus in 1979/1980 were quickly scuttled when an automobile accident produced a bulging disc which was misdiagnosed and rendered her unable to train physically. Assuming it was a temporary setback Marilyn trained mentally in the five events for what she thought would be weeks but instead became seven months. With no physical track training, marilyn received a Novocain injection in her spine in June of 1980 and placed second at the Olympic Trials. This extraordinary experience prompted her to quit her head coaching position at UC Berkeley to explore the field of exceptional human performance.
Business
Marilyn founded Beyond Sports in 1981 ‘to extend the skills of imagery and visualization in the areas of business, education and peace.” The early years witnessed a string of new creations including, ‘Beyond Weightlifting” a course in free weight lifting and visualization for previously non-athletic women at Sante Women’s Fittness Center, a track clinic with Sports Village Institute with fellow Olympian, Bruce Jenner, The Northern California Olympian Outreach Program with international leadership consultant Kent Boesdorfer,
Her speaking career began in earnest with a standing ovation at a Women in Sports Medicine conference in Monterrey in 1983, and a life changing opportunity to speak at the International Day of Peace event at the Civic Center in San Francisco. What followed was a continuous flow of opportunities to present with and learn from pioneers and experts in business, education and peace. Throughout the 1980’s Marilyn presented at over one hundred international, state and local education conferences and programs in the field of accelerated learning and peak performance including the prestigious “Master’s Course for Creative Thinkers” in Vancouver Canada with Edward DeBono and Tony Buzan hosted by the Vancouver Learning Center. In 1989 she returned to Oakland to work directly with youth beginning with the Police Athletics League and then partnered with The Good Samaratian Center in creating the Dare to Imagine Club, teaching Olympian Thinking to inner city youth.
In the 1990’s Marilyn’s corporate work took off, initially working with Apple Computer, Southwestern Bell, Bath and Body Works and leadership development programs at IBM and Sun Microsystems. The late 1990’s found her at the Haas School of Business where she garnered the second highest ratings ever received from international executives attending a summer institute. Clients at this time included XBS, Swiss Reinsurance, L M Erriccson, Hewlett Packard, Sybex and Nokia, traveling and working with executives in Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean. More recent clients include Sodexo, Starbucks, Wells Fargo, the Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago and global leadership teams at IKEA and Oracle.
Along with the education work and early corporate work, beginning in 1983 Marilyn began receiving opportunities to work with and learn from people thinking globally and systemically on issues focused on world peace including population, hunger, education, governance and economics. Marilyn partnered with the Institute of Noetic Science to explore the business structure for a joint Russian American venture called “The Peace Team”, a co-creation with Elena Petushkova at The Citizen’s Summit” , a Ted Turner hosted event which brought 100 Soviet professionals together with professionals from the USA to create joint projects. Marilyn subsequently created “Peace is the Only Gold”, a global education initiative to inspire and support people worldwide to apply their best thinking to peace and is a project of Pathways to Peace, 501-C3 organization and internationally recognized as a pioneer in peacebuilding. Marilyn has spoken twice at the United Nations and in 2013 was asked to create a subcommittee on sports for the IDP/NGO Committee at the UN. (International Day of Peace/Non-Governmental Organizations Committee at the United Nations).
Personal Life
Marilyn’s penchant for high aspirations came from the role modeling of her maternal grandmother Marceline (Ouelette) Gillis and her hardworking, working class parents who were children of the depression. Marilyn became a swim teacher’s assistant in junior high and an entrepreneur in high school, washing cars and babysitting to earn money to fly to British Honduras to visit Rita Feldmeier, who had been influential in her junior high school years. She worked odd jobs throughout college as she trained for the Olympics and graduated for Cal State University Hayward in 1973. Marilyn has served on the board of the Northern California Olympians for over two decades and was a board member of Visions of a Better World Foundation in the 1990’s.