Grace Landau knew how to cry. As a toddler, she wouldn’t nap, and it was driving her mother, Kate, a little nuts.
“I’d have to lie down with her if she was going to nap,” she said. “I couldn’t lie down all day, but she was a really colicky baby. Nothing else seemed to make her happy”
With more than 700 runners heading to Atlanta this weekend to take a shot at the U.S. Olympic Marathon team, it’s hard to deny that Trials Fever is in the air.
Runners who spend all day standing up teaching, others who fit in their training around work and grad school, some who are also raising children, they’re all going to be on the starting line with the professionals. With apologies to another sporting venue in Georgia, this is the tradition truly unlike any other.
A warm day for marathoners can be pleasant for spectators, at least. But the weather in Los Angeles for the last Olympic Marathon Trials wasn’t good for anyone: A combo of high temperatures and noontime sun made it hurt just to be outside. My favorite spot to watch the race was in the shade beneath an overpass.
Which is why I’ll never forget the first time I saw my friend Kieran O’Connor pass by me.
Through the sheets of rain, Bonnie Keating embraced the challenges that the 2019 Marine Corps Marathon dished out.
The distance wasn’t a problem, she could easily handle 26 miles, and she finished fifth among women. But while the sunny Southern California weather she has gotten used to over the last 13 years hasn’t necessarily made her soft, she does realize she’s missing a certain edge, something she wanted to regain before her second Olympic Marathon Trials.
As her World Class Athlete Program team stood victorious in winning the 2015 Army Ten-Miler, Kelly Calway lowered her five-month-old daughter, Hattie, into the trophy. She fit perfectly.
Four months later, when Calway came home from Los Angeles with a stress fracture, it was her eight-year-old, Hazel who told her, “Mom, I love you,” and helped ease Calway’s fears that she had let the family down when she dropped out of the 2016 Olympic Trials.
Kyle Stanton was showing us how it’s done. His Strava posts that fall of 2017 revealed a true disciple of Renato Canova marathon training. It was a training log leaving little doubt that a breakthrough was coming.
Like his Nov. 12 post titled 20 Hard. 3 Weeks. Twenty hard, as in 20 miles at the natural surface Dual Ferries loop, solo, averaging 5:25. Three weeks, as in Stanton wouldn’t have to wait much longer before achieving his goal at that year’s California International Marathon.
Kathy Newberry’s running career has spanned nearly 20 years and has included six trips to world championship races and thousands of training miles, starting when she ran at Lake Braddock Secondary School.
Her secret to such a long trip? The same as the transoceanic flights to those races — plenty of fuel.
Shortly before Christmas, Columbia’s Julia Roman-Duval made the decision she had been wrestling with for weeks: Run in the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials on Feb. 29 or roll the dice and attempt to make the French national team for the Half Marathon World Championships by running the Paris Half Marathon the day after?
As a dual U.S.-French citizen, it was a unique quandary for the 37-year-old astrophysicist and mother of three who is still comparably new to the world of competitive road racing.
As she cruised along the Rehoboth Beach Seashore Marathon last December, Callie Betman had a leg up on the rest of the runners.
She had the personal pacing help of a newly-minted Olympic Marathon Trials qualifier — her sister, Hannah Cocchiaro. Famous in their family, the Betman Racing Team, for her ability to keep an even pace, Hannah kept Callie steady on the course, not too far from the water that they would have been found in a few years before when they were primarily swimmers.
On Feb. 29, runners competing in the Olympic Marathon Trials will race a rough, hilly course in downtown Atlanta. Caroline Bauer will feel right at home, having started her journey there on similar terrain.
Four years and one day prior, she took off on the RRCA Club Challenge course in her then-hometown of Columbia, Md. It’s one of the tougher courses in Maryland, one that forces runners to scrap relative time goals and focus on the race’s inter-club competition. That didn’t shake Bauer, though, as she ran 1:01:33, finishing less than one minute behind Julia Roman-Duval, her Howard County Striders teammate who had finished 50th at the Marathon Trials two weeks before.