07/28/2026
A powerful story of grit, courage, and the determination to keep going when the world says you can’t.
In 1959, Arlene Pieper became the first woman to officially complete a marathon in the United States—conquering Pikes Peak in dime-store tennis shoes and making history without even realizing it.
An inspiring reminder that pioneers do not always set out to be remembered. Sometimes, they simply refuse to quit.
On August 7, 1959, a twenty-nine-year-old mother of three stood at the starting line of the Pikes Peak Marathon wearing white shorts, a white blouse tied at the stomach, and tennis shoes she had bought at the dime store.
She looked, by several accounts, more like Marilyn Monroe than a distance runner.
Nobody at that starting line — not the race officials, not the other competitors, not Arlene Pieper herself — understood what was about to happen.
She had been born in California in 1930, and she had always been drawn to physical challenge in an era that actively discouraged women from pursuing it. In the 1950s, sweating was considered unladylike. Exercise was blamed, in certain circles, for infertility. Restrictive clothing limited what women's bodies were even allowed to do in public. The prevailing message was clear: women were not supposed to push themselves, and they were certainly not supposed to run marathons.
Arlene and her husband Wallen had moved to Colorado Springs in 1957 and opened a women's fitness studio called Arlene's Health Studio. They needed something to draw attention to the business. Something to get women through the door.
Arlene decided to run the Pikes Peak Marathon.
The race was brutal by any measure — 13.3 miles straight up to a 14,115-foot summit, then 13.3 miles back down. More than 8,000 feet of vertical gain. Thin air and rocky trails and the kind of course that tests people who have spent their entire lives preparing for exactly this.
In 1958, she ran the ascent and reached the summit and stopped. She was disqualified for not completing the full race.
Her daughter Kathie would later recall her response with simple clarity. That got her upset, Kathie said. And she said she was going back next year.
So she trained for a year.
She built speed on a local track with her three children parked in the center with a picnic lunch, watching their mother run circles around them. On Sundays, she went up the mountain and back, week after week, learning the terrain and the altitude and the particular demands of a course that showed no mercy to anyone who arrived unprepared.
Her philosophy about all of it was practical and direct. You can be a wonderful mother and a wonderful wife, she said, but if there is anything you want to do for yourself, just get out and go for it.
On race day, there were twelve runners at the starting line. Arlene. Her nine-year-old daughter Kathie, who would run the ascent. Another woman running only the uphill portion. And nine men, several of whom had traveled from out of state.
The men who came from elsewhere had not trained on the mountain. Arlene had trained on almost nothing else.
She didn't run much on the way up — it was more of a sustained, focused hike. But her altitude conditioning was quietly doing its work. She began passing the men who had underestimated what the thin air at elevation would cost them. Each time she went by one, she would smile and say — with the cheerful precision of someone who knew exactly what she was doing — Isn't it a beautiful day for a race? Then she would pick up the pace and run past.
When she reached the summit, she waved over her shoulder at the crowd without breaking stride.
That was where Kathie's race ended. The nine-year-old had reached the top in five hours, forty-four minutes, and fifty-two seconds, becoming the youngest competitor ever to finish the ascent. The local newspaper devoted considerable attention to the little girl's achievement.
Arlene kept going.
Down the mountain. Back to the starting line.
She finished in nine hours and sixteen minutes.
At the finish line, she said later, she felt pretty good. A little tired, but not completely exhausted. She lost all her toenails a few days after.
The newspaper noted that she had completed the marathon. No one said what that meant. No one stood at the finish line and announced that a woman had just done something that had never officially been done before in the United States. Life continued. Arlene went back to work at the studio. She never ran another marathon.
Seven years later, Roberta Gibb hid in the bushes near the Boston Marathon course and ran it unofficially, becoming the first woman to complete Boston without a number. Eight years after that, in 1967, Kathrine Switzer registered using her initials to obscure her gender, received an official bib, and became the first woman to run Boston as a registered competitor. A race official attempted to physically remove her from the course mid-race. The photographs traveled around the world. Switzer became known as the first woman to officially run a sanctioned marathon.
Except she wasn't.
Arlene Pieper had done it eight years before Switzer, on a mountain in Colorado, in dime-store shoes, while smiling at the men she passed.
But by then, Arlene had moved away from Colorado Springs. She had remarried. She had moved again. She had changed her name from Pieper to Stine. She had disappeared, not dramatically but in the ordinary way that lives disappear — through relocation and remarriage and the accumulation of years spent doing something other than being famous.
Decades passed.
When people at Pikes Peak began to realize what Arlene had done, they tried to find her. Nobody knew where she had gone. Nobody knew if she was still alive.
In 2002, the race's new director, Ron Ilgen, made it his personal mission. He hired a private detective. The detective came back empty-handed.
In 2009, planning the fiftieth anniversary of the race, Ron tried once more. He placed an advertisement in a local newspaper offering a three-hundred-dollar reward for information about Arlene's whereabouts.
A genealogist named Linda Vixie saw it. She took on the search with the particular tenacity of someone who had decided this mattered. She went through library records and public documents and followed every thread she could find.
She found her — an unassuming woman living quietly near Fresno, California.
When Ron called to tell Arlene that she had been the first woman to officially complete a marathon in the United States, she was stunned.
It just blew me away, she said. I said, I'm the first?
She had carried a place in history for fifty years without knowing it was hers.
In 2009, Arlene returned to Manitou Springs for the fiftieth anniversary celebration. She and Kathie were received like royalty. Arlene was made the official race starter, standing on a ladder to send hundreds of runners off with a simple command: Runners, ready. Go.
She became, in the final years of her life, a folk hero to the running community. People lined up to shake her hand and ask for her autograph and request a photograph and — in the particular way that athletes seek connection with greatness they can feel but not fully explain — simply to touch her hand for luck.
In 2014, Runner's World named her a Hero of Running. In 2016, she was inducted into the Colorado Springs Sports Hall of Fame. In 2019, on the sixtieth anniversary, thirty women dressed exactly as Arlene had dressed in 1959 — white shorts, white blouses, hats — and ran up Pikes Peak in her honor. Arlene, then eighty-nine, attended the celebration.
One of those women said what many of them were thinking. Arlene had a cavalier attitude that she could do it, she said. Her marathon mattered in 1959, and it still matters today. She gave women permission to run.
Arlene Pieper Stine died on February 11, 2021, at the age of ninety.
She had spent most of her life not knowing she had been first. She spent her final twelve years celebrated as a pioneer. And by every account, she received that recognition with the same uncomplicated directness she had brought to everything else — not false modesty, not overwhelming surprise, just the quiet satisfaction of someone who had always believed that women should do things for themselves and had simply gone ahead and proved it.
She did not run that mountain in 1959 to make history. She did not set out to break barriers or deliver a statement or give future generations a story to tell.
She did it because she wanted to. Because she had trained for it and showed up and was not the kind of person who stopped before the finish line.
She climbed to 14,115 feet in shoes that cost almost nothing, came back down smiling, and then went back to work.
Fifty years later, the world caught up to what she had done.
She was just as surprised as everyone else.
For those raised to believe that doing something for yourself — not for recognition, not for history, just because you wanted to and you could — is reason enough: when was the last time you gave yourself that kind of permission?
