In 1959, Arlene Pieper ran the Pikes Peak Marathon, the entire thing, up the mountain and then back down, 26 miles altogether. It took more than nine hours. (You can see the results here.) She did it as a sort of publicity stunt for her women's health studio, which should tell you all you need to know about Arlene Pieper, she and her husband moved from Hollywood to Colorado and opened a women's-only health studio in 1959. Let me repeat: 1959*. Women weren't supposed to be doing those sorts of things back then. And a lot didn't, which is why Arlene never got rich. She was maybe a little too far ahead of her time.

*I'm estimating that I spend about two hours of every day contemplating exactly how much the world has changed in the last 40 years. It's incredible. We now have cell phones and computers and the Internet and GPS and bottomless steak fries. It goes on and on, but here's one example: My dad is a corn farmer. Forty years ago, the tractors didn't even have cabs on them, so it was not unheard of for a father to tie his son to the tractor seat with a belt or a rope, so if the son fell asleep while driving he didn't fall out of the tractor backwards and get plowed to death. That's not an exaggeration. Now tractors drive themselves, literally. You'll see tractors driving through a field with the seat turned completely around because the farmers are watching the piece of equipment. The tractor drives itself. They have global positioning with onboard screens that show digital maps of each field. Sprayers can now cover 1,000 acres in a single day, then results are uploaded to a computer, which stores the fertilizer application history going back years.

I realize I've taken this completely so far into the realm of agriculture that you couldn't possibly still be following along. Let's bring it back. In no area, with the possible exception of technology, has our world changed as much as our thinking about the capabilities of women. In several states, high school girls played six-on-six basketball where you could only dribble a couple times before passing or shooting, and no one could cross half court. Three played only offense and three played only defense. Originally, the motivation behind it had been the idea that female bodies couldn't handle that kind of stress or exertion. It would mess up their menstrual cycles. It would tax their uteruses until they were rendered cold and dead and useless. Or is it uteri? Either way, Iowa high school girls were playing six-on-six up until 1993. Oklahoma still had it until 1995. Not to defend the state of Oklahoma in any way, but these sorts of things usually hang on because of tradition more than anything else. Still, though, not so long ago we still had a lot of weird ideas, one of which was that no way could a woman run a marathon. I'll end this sidebar now.

OK, back to Arlene's story. She is now 79 years old and for the last 50 years, had no idea she had become the first woman to officially run a marathon in the United States. The first. The first to run Pikes Peak Marathon, the first to run any marathon. And if you think about it, how could she, or anyone, have known? Marathons weren't a big deal back then. There was no internet where decades of race times and results could be stored and accessed. No one knew. And it was the only marathon she ever ran, so she didn't stay in touch with the running community like so many do. She moved back to California, to Fresno. She got divorced a few times. Her name changed a couple times. She slipped into the fabric of America, not that I know what that means. No one would have ever known her story had the Pikes Peak coordinators and historians not researched it.

It wasn't that women hadn't run that far, because they had. It was that no woman had officially entered a marathon and finished it. It's wild that a woman would break through on the hardest marathon in the world, and even wilder that such an important athletic moment would go unappreciated, unrecognized for five decades.

I didn't really touch on this in my column, but the Pikes Peak Marathon never intended to be a groundbreaking for women. It was first established as a challenge between smokers and non-smokers in the mid-'50s and women were always allowed to compete. Women couldn't enter the Boston Marathon until 1972. As one of the historians for the race told me in an interview, women in the West just did things. There was a groundbreaking spirit that went along with moving out West. Women worked alongside their husbands, did more outdoors activities. They didn't ask permission. They didn't know their place, as they say. They just did things.

Arlene ran the marathon in 1959 and now says she didn't even know she was the first woman to run the full Pikes Peak Marathon. She was doing it for publicity, though, and did say she was interviewed on the news afterward, so I'm sure they were aware at the time that no woman had done it. That brings us to the next amazing part of the story, another aspect I didn't really get to expand on. Kathie ran the first half of the marathon in 1959 and she was only 9 years old. Some recounts have her listed as 10, but according to she and her mother she hadn't turned 10 yet.

Just to clarify, the Pikes Peak half marathon is an 8,000-foot climb, from 6,000 feet altitude to 14,000 feet, way above the treeline. But Kathie had trained with her mom and done a bunch of the climbs along with her mom and the day of the race she decided to see how far she could go. At least that's how she remembers it. It was 50 years ago and she was only 9, so it's hard to know for sure, but Kathie has been told through the years that it was not her original intention to go all the way to the top, that she was simply running with her dad behind her mom to encourage her. She felt so strong, though, she ran all the way to the top, finishing just 20 minutes behind her mom. Her mom had to run all the way back down, though, thus completing the entire marathon. Kathie got to ride back down. From doing interviews and reading a couple online accounts, it seems Kathie's achievement actually took a lot of the spotlight away from her mom. Which was fine. They were getting attention for the health club anyway.

Pikes Peak Marathon flew both Arlene and Kathie back last weekend for this year's running, on the 50th anniversary of Arlene's achievement. "We were both treated like queens," Arlene said.

They were introduced at a ceremony. Arlene spoke. People asked to have their pictures taken with them. They were asked to sign photos and t-shirts and hats. Arlene got to officially start the race, saying, "Runners get ready. Go!"

"I'll never forget that as long as I live," she said.

Arlene held the yellow finishing line tape for the winners of Sunday's marathon. At the award ceremony, she and her daughter gave out the trophies. That was around 5 p.m., and according to Arlene, as they were giving out awards, there were still runners out there making their way down Pikes Peak. I chuckled when she said that. She didn't really laugh. Understandable. She knows how that run feels.