Nina Kuscsik, women's marathoning pioneer from Long Island, dies at age 86

Nina Kuscsik, who was the first celebrity of women’s marathoning and used her clout to agitate for the first women's Olympic race at that distance in 1984, died June 8 of respiratory failure at her Huntington Station home after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease. She was 86.

Kuscsik was the only woman to compete in the inaugural New York City Marathon in 1970 and its first repeat female champion in 1972 and 1973, and the first official women’s champion in the Boston Marathon in 1972. Before Kuscsik, women were banned from such long-distance efforts.

It took her New York victories, her barrier-breaking first official Boston women's title in 1972 (she had first run it, unofficially, three years earlier) and her being the first woman to go under three hours for change to happen. When women at last were allowed to run the Olympic 26-mile, 385-yard race that had been in the men’s Olympic program since 1896, Kuscsik qualified — at age 45 — for the 1984 Olympic Trials, but an injury suffered when she had experimented with tennis kept her from qualifying for the '84 Los Angeles Games.

Kuscsik once held the record for the 50-mile (80 kilometer) run and was the first woman to finish the gimmicky (but challenging) Empire State Building Run-Up in 1979, 1980 and 1981.

"People thought I was crazy," she said. "When I won Boston in '72, now they understood what I was doing. It was just something I wanted to do all those years and, it turns out, it made a difference, especially for women. Now the world is more educated on how good exercise is.”

The Boston Athletic Association, which organizes the Boston Marathon, praised Kuscsik's impact on women's marathoning in a social media post on Monday.

"The B.A.A. is saddened to learn of the passing of Nina Kuscsik, the Boston Marathon’s first Women’s Division champion," the post said. "Nina was more than a pioneer, determined women’s running advocate, and celebrated icon within the sport. To us, she was a friend who will always be remembered for her kindness. Nina held the distinct honor of winning the 1972 Boston Marathon, & recognized the platform that came with that moment, inspiring thousands of women to reach their own goals & finish lines in decades since."

On her way to running more than 80 marathons, she became such a presence in the growing running community that she once recalled how “people started calling my house for training advice, and if I wasn't home, they'd ask my kids.”

Nina Louise Marmorino was born Jan. 2, 1939, in Brooklyn, one of four children of George Marmorino, a salesman, and Louise (Tischer) Marmorino, a nurse. Nina became a nurse and patient’s representative for more than four decades at Mount Sinai Hospital.

As a child, she had been a rollerskater, ice speedskater, basketball player, and biker. After nursing school at Brooklyn College, she married Dick Kuscsik. They had three children but divorced, she once said, in part because of her passion for running. She had bought a $1 book about jogging and began running, originally with her husband and his friends at the beginning of the late 1960s running boom.

In 2012, Kuscsik was inducted into the New York City Marathon Hall of Fame and designated to fire the starter’s cannon for that year’s race on the Verrazano Bridge. By then, her daily runs had been curtailed because of knee replacement surgery, the result of a skiing accident, so she merely biked — seven times participating in the annual bicycle ride across the state of Iowa — and went on long, brisk walks.

"More than running the marathon," she said then, "was the training, going out on the streets by myself and just getting into the rhythm of a long run. My mind would be so free, looking at the clouds, thinking of my kids.

“I miss the challenge” of still running marathons, she said then, "the challenge of training and seeing the results. But I can do my own individual challenges weekly."

Her legacy includes the thousands and thousands of female marathoners who have come after her. She long called herself “the person to blame for there being “no finisher” among women in New York's original 1970 race. As the only female entrant that year, dealing with a fever, she dropped out before the finish.

As running — and marathon running — became a fashionable activity, Kuscsik, attired in dress clothes when not in competition, noticed that “you can tell the real runners because they aren’t wearing running shoes” as casual wear.

Kuscsik is survived by her three children — Christina, Stephen and Timothy.