History
The history of the race dates to 1956 when three smokers challenged ten non-smokers to compete the over-26-mile (42 km) race. None of the three smokers completed the course. In 1966 a well-organized marathon was initiated, making the race the third-oldest marathon in the United States.
In 1959, Arlene Pieper became the first woman to enter and complete a marathon in the United States when she finished the Pikes Peak Marathon.
The most successful athletes in the history of the marathon are Matt Carpenter, outright record holder and winner of the marathon on eleven occasions, and Erica Larson, who has won the women's race five times.
The Pikes Peak Ascent race has twice incorporated the World Long Distance Mountain Running Challenge competition, first in 2006 then again in 2010.
Read more about this topic: Pikes Peak Marathon
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The whole history of civilisation is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)