Arlene Pieper Stine
In this episode, you will hear an interview with Arlene Pieper Stine done by Amy Begley as part of the Road Runners Club of America oral history project. It was recorded by phone in 2013. Stine passed away in 2021
Long before Roberta Gibb and Sara Mae Berman unofficially ran the Boston Marathon (1966 and 1969 respectively), Arlene Pieper Stine became the first woman to officially finish a sanctioned marathon in 1959, when she ran the Pikes Peak Marathon—ascent and descent—in 9:50:20 when she was 29. She was accompanied by twelve men and a horse. Pieper Stine ran in the men's category and was not given a special category or fanfare for her historic finish.
She never ran another marathon and her pioneering accomplishment fell into obscurity until 2009.
Arlene was born in 1930 in Studio City, California. She was always into fitness, lifted weights, threw the javelin and discus. She married a bodybuilder while they were both still in their teens and set their sights on opening a women’s fitness studio, inspired by trailblazing women in the fitness business such as Elaine LaLanne and Lotte Berk (The Barre Method). In 1957 they moved to Colorado Springs and opened Arlene’s Health Studio. Facing the adversity of the time against women in sports or exercise—where sweating was considered unladylike, exercise was blamed for infertility, and restrictive clothing limited movement—they needed a promotional hook for women to join the studio.
Her hook was to run the 1958 Pikes Peak Marathon, but she stopped after reaching the summit and was disqualified. With more training and determination, she came back in 1959 and finished the descent.
In 2013 Runner’s World named her a Hero of Running. In an interview for the article, she reported that she trained for a year to run the round-trip route from Manitou Springs, Colorado, to the top of 14,115-foot Pikes Peak. She built speed on a local track, her three kids parked in the center with a picnic lunch, and on Sundays ran several miles up the mountain and back. “I had my short shorts on that we used to wear back then, and a white blouse tied in a knot — that’s how we did things back in the ’50s. And my tennis shoes from the dime store, and off I went,” she recalled. She was accompanied by her nine-year-old daughter Katie, who stopped at the summit.
The start of the 1959 Pike Peak Marathon
After the marathon, she returned to her fitness studio and her iconic run was all but forgotten. Always a fitness advocate, she would stroll through town in tight, gold stretch pants and a purple blouse with her husband, "Mr. Arlene," in tow. Her slogan back then was: "You can be a wonderful mother and a wonderful wife to your husband, but if there's anything you want to do for yourself, just get out and go for it."
It wasn’t until preparations for the 50th anniversary of the Pikes Peak Marathon were in the planning stages that a historian read about her marathon and tried to find her to no avail. She had moved often and remarried with a different name than Pieper. He placed an advertisement in the paper asking for her whereabouts and offering a $300 reward to anyone who could find her. When he was finally able to locate her, Stine was shocked to learn that she had been the first woman to complete a marathon in the United States.
At the 50th anniversary, mother and daughter were treated like queens, and she was the official starter. Ten years later, for the 60th anniversary, 30 women gathered to pay her tribute. They dressed in white shorts and a blouse tied at the waist just as she had in 1959. Some of the women were experienced marathoners, and some were doing the ascent for the first time. But they were all there to acknowledge Pieper Stine and the impact she had on women’s running. “Arlene had a cavalier attitude that she could do it,” said one of the women. “Her marathon mattered in 1959, and it still matters today. She gave women permission to run.”
She died in 2021 at the age of 90, a testament to her lifelong pursuit of fitness and positive attitude. And encouraging women to sweat!
Note about the author: Gail Waesche Kislevitz is an award-winning journalist and the author of six books on running and sports. She was a columnist for Runner’s World for fifteen years and her freelance work has appeared in Shape, Marathon and Beyond, and New York Runner.
