American Marathon Record Holder Emily Sisson Is Expecting a Baby

Emily Sisson has held the American women’s marathon record since she ran 2:18:29 in Chicago four years ago this week, and now she and her husband, Shane Quinn, are expecting a baby. The couple announced it in a joint post on Instagram on Tuesday, with the baby due at the end of March.

The couple called it a “change of fall training plans” and wrote, “We are thrilled to be growing our family next spring.” Sisson had not named a fall marathon, and she was not part of the pro fields that Chicago and New York released over the summer.

She raced Boston for the first time in April and finished ninth in 2:22:39, the third American home on a day when Jess McClain ran 2:20:49 for fifth and a new American course record, with Annie Frisbie eighth in 2:22:00. That came just five months after she finally got to run the New York City Marathon, clocking 2:25:05 last November. She had first been entered in 2020, only for the pandemic to cancel the race, and a knee injury kept her out the following year.

The 2:18:29 she ran in Chicago in October 2022 was only her second marathon finish. She finished second behind Ruth Chepngetich that day and took 43 seconds off the 2:19:12 Keira D’Amato had run in Houston nine months earlier, and the record still stands. Sisson, who turns 35 on Monday, is also a two-time Olympian, placing 10th in the 10,000m in Tokyo and 22nd in the marathon in Paris after finishing second at the 2024 Olympic Trials in Orlando.

A due date at the end of March leaves almost exactly a year before the next Trials. The 2028 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials will be held in St. Louis on March 25, 2028, picking the first members of the team for the Los Angeles Games, and the women’s qualifying standard stays at 2:37:00.

Calli Hauger-Thackery, the British Olympian, ran that same Boston race at 22 weeks pregnant and finished in 2:43:58, with her first child expected in late August. Kylie Mantz, whose husband, Conner, holds the American men’s marathon record, was 38 weeks along when she clocked 5:26 for the mile at BYU in July, and her son, William, arrived about 10 days later.

The post opened with a line for the baby: “Baby Quinn, we can’t wait to meet you little one.”