Arlene Pieper

Arlene Pieper Stine (born Arlene Val Richter; 18 March 1930 – 11 February 2021) became the first woman to officially finish a marathon in the United States, at 29 years old in 1959, when she finished the Pikes Peak Marathon in Manitou Springs, Colorado. Her daughter Katherine, 9 years old, also ran in 1959 and became the youngest competitor at the time to finish the race to the summit of a mountain that was part of the marathon, and the first female runner to reach the summit that year, but did not finish the whole marathon. During it she did not eat and drank water from a stream. A few days later she lost all her toenails due to the conditions of the race and her shoes. In an interview years later with The Gazette, she stated, "That mountain is something else. Once was enough."

She did the marathon to promote the all-female gym she and her husband owned in Colorado Springs, called Arlene's Health Studio.

After spending four years in Colorado, she and her husband returned to California, where she had lived as a teenager and where they had run gyms for exercise guru Harold Zinkin. They were also acquainted with exercise guru Jack LaLanne and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Arlene died on February 11, 2021, at age 90.

In 2016, she was inducted into the Colorado Springs Sports Hall of Fame.

In 2019, a group of women honored Arlene a week before the Pikes Peak Marathon by running up Pikes Peak while wearing white shorts, white hats and white shirts, which was the same outfit Arlene wore when she ran the marathon in 1959.