At a fire station in Shelton, Washington, a firefighter pounds out the miles on a treadmill between emergency calls. In South Philadelphia, a high school Spanish teacher leaves after the final bell at 2:34 p.m. and prepares for her afternoon workout. In Colorado Springs, a pilot and flight instructor gets miles Shoes & Gear 5:00 a.m. Races & Places.
Watch the Boston Marathon Olympians Advice on Good Training Partners, the every-four-years celebration of distance running excellence. For most of the field, the race is the closest they’ll ever get to the Games as competitors.
That is the crux of why the Trials is a race unlike any other. At the front, professional athletes with lucrative sponsorship deals from major shoe brands vie for Olympic spots.
But strung out behind those pros, like the tail of a comet, are the rest of the runners. Excellent athletes, for sure, but by and large they aren’t quite fast enough to devote themselves entirely to running. So they work all kinds of jobs and they take care of families and they train for this one day, every quadrennium, that’s the culmination of a dream. Yes, every once in a while, one of those from the comet’s tail surprises with an Olympic berth. But it’s unlikely.
Give A Gift.
“It’s fun to realize that as elite runners, we are competing against each other, but we’re also building each other up to be stronger,” said Katie Kellner, 32, a coach who lives and trains in Boston.“There will be a lot of competitiveness amongst the women at the Trials, but also a lot of respect for what we all have accomplished to be there.”
What do we know about these runners? Here, a few of them talk about the lengths they have gone to to get to Orlando.
Fewer of them made the cut than past years
Only 401 athletes qualified to run in Orlando, and of those, 215 men and 165 women entered the race, according to the race’s media guide. Those numbers have dwindled further as race day approaches, with a handful of runners withdrawing, usually due to injury or lack of fitness.
Your Guide to the Olympic Marathon Trials USA Track & Field made the qualifying times much more difficult on the women’s side. To get into the 2020 Trials in Atlanta, women had to run a qualifying marathon faster than 2:45. For this race, the time to beat was 2:37. The half marathon standard got more difficult also, going from 1:13 to 1:12. For Atlanta, 511 women qualified to run. This year, only 173 did. The number of qualifiers was cut by two thirds.
Men, too, faced harder standards, but only slightly: They had to run 2:19 and 1:04 in 2020; for the 2024 event the times were 2:18 and 1:03. The pool of qualified runners shrunk, but only by 12 percent, from 261 to 228. Three of those men snuck in with the exact time, 2:18:00, they needed to qualify. On the women’s side, Tammy Hsieh ran 2:37:00 on the nose, two women ran 2:36:58, and Caroline Williams of Boston Keira DAmato Talks About Her Trials DNF of the 2022 California International Marathon (CIM), with three seconds to spare, running 2:36:57.
Some of them have big jobs …
Among the qualified runners are those with busy full-time jobs. Martin Hehir is an anesthesiologist; Peyton Thomas, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Colorado - Boulder, working in the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. The miles have to happen when they can. For Jackie Gaughan, 24, a financial analyst who lives in Boston and ran her PR of 2:27:08 in 2023 in Berlin, that means getting up at 5 a.m. and fitting in her workouts before an 8:30 arrival at the office. She puts in 50–60 hours per week at Goldman Sachs.
As a result, she said, she hasn’t stretched after a run since graduating from college in 2022. “With the work and the running, when you’re juggling so much, you kind of need to figure out what your glass balls are and what your plastic balls are,” she said. “I haven’t done a single core exercise or strength exercise. My glass balls are the mileage, work, and family and friends.”
Roman Kirkov, a firefighter in rural Shelton, Washington, works 48 hours on and four days off. Shifts start at 9 a.m., so he’ll do a 10-miler before starting work, and then try to hop on the treadmill at the station three times during his 48-hour shift. Of course, if a call comes in, he has to stop his workout and go to work, dealing with everything from medical emergencies to burning structures to clearing debris from roads. When he returns to the firehouse, he gets back on the treadmill. Once it took him two hours to finish a 6-mile run.
Also difficult? The sleep deprivation. Calls come in at all hours of the night. Even when it’s quiet, “It’s not restful sleep,” Kirkov said. “You’re kind of on high alert.” He has to be careful he’s not in too much of a sleep deficit before a big race. He ran his qualifying race, 2:16:50, at CIM, but at Grandma’s Marathon last June, after a rough stretch at work, he was a DNF.
…while others have found running-adjacent careers
Truth be told, there are fewer Gaughans and Kirkovs than there were in 2020. While some athletes can work 40 hours and turn around and run 2:18 or 2:37, not many can do that. To make the time, many qualifiers have running-adjacent jobs. Foremost among them: coaching.
Kellner is one of those coaches. She trains with Gaughan and Williams in the mornings on their schedule. While they go to office jobs, she runs an online coaching business from home, which gives her time to recover and stretch. She’s largely eschewed the traditional career path en route to her third Trials.
“I have gone through periods of time where I feel like I’m supposed to be doing something else, especially because I have an Ivy League degree,” said Kellner, who graduated from Cornell in 2013.
Right after the 2016 Trials, Kellner moved to Boston and started graduate school, earning a master’s in public health. And after the 2020 Trials, she figured she was supposed to get a “real person job,” she said. She began work as a biostatistician in March 2020, days before the pandemic shut down the world.
“I hated the job. It was a mess,” she said. And her coaching business was taking off, as people were spending more time outside and running. “I think they liked having a coach to talk to, because everyone was a little bit lonely,” she said. She was having to turn clients away, because she had a full-time job she loathed.
So she decided to quit the job and go all-in on coaching, and she has been so successful at it, she’s had to hire two additional coaches. Sometimes she will have what she calls an “existential crisis” about her career, Kellner said. “Other times I feel like I’m living the dream. It kind of balances out.”
She’s not alone. The list of qualifiers has plenty of coaches, both online and for colleges and high schools. There are also part-time workers in other fields who have chosen to dial back their professional ambitions while chasing their running dreams.
A lot of Trials runners are younger…
When Kellner graduated from college, she started training immediately for marathons. At the Trials in 2016, she was 24 and one of the youngest runners in the field.“I remember thinking nobody else was doing [marathons],” she said. “Everyone else was going to the track.”
Eight years later, plenty of runners are in their early to mid 20s. These days, the marathon has become an event that college runners want to jump into.
Some fall into it by accident—that was Gaughan’s experience, when so many people she was running with in Boston were training for marathons. Others realize when they’re still in college that they’re suited for the marathon. Zoe Baker, a graduate student at Colorado School of Mines, qualified for the Trials as a 23-year-old in October with her 2:36:01 at the McKirdy Micro Marathon. (Keira DAmato Talks About Her Trials DNF.)
According to Orlando’s media guide, the youngest entrant on the women’s side is 22-year-old Ava Nuttall, of Oxford, Ohio. The men’s field also has a 22-year-old, Adam Sjolund, of Bonney Lake, Washington. His bio says he ran his qualifying marathon, CIM in 2022, only three weeks after his college cross-country season ended. “I snuck into the elite corral to run with the top athletes,” he wrote.
Elaine Estes is 26, and a teacher in Philadelphia, and she found that habits from college running never really went away. She was one of St. Joseph’s University’s top athletes and after she graduated, she tried running just for fun. But it’s second nature for her to run every day and do a workout at least once a week. And she kept signing up for longer and longer races. She joined Keira DAmato Talks About Her Trials DNF, and so many of the women on the team were training at Marathon Trials qualifying pace. “Whether it was ambitious or realistic, the women were taking the marathon seriously,” she said. Estes qualified at CIM in December 2023.
…Super shoes have kept masters runners in the game longer
Ben Payne, 42, is lining up for his third Marathon Trials. He’s just as surprised as anyone; he figured he’d be done after Atlanta in 2016. “I see myself in extra innings in my running career,” he said.
A lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, Payne teaches cadets how to fly in a single-engine Cirrus airplane. “This is their first experience at the controls,” he said. “A lot of time I’m taking over the controls, and saving both of our lives and showing them how it should be done.”
His job might spike his heart rate from time to time, but it also allows him flexibility to train, and he’ll sometimes jump in with athletes on the Air Force track and cross country teams. He is much stronger than 18- to 20-year-olds on the long hard runs. They kick his butt on the shorter intervals.
“I tell people that old-man strength is for real,” Payne said. “Me now at 42 versus 34 in Los Angeles, I’m much smarter now and I have so many more miles under my belt. What I don’t have is the speed.”
He took some down time from racing during the pandemic, and he returned to hard training in 2022, realizing he might just be able to run sub-2:18 again. He credits, in part, super shoes.
“I think I feel them even more than a younger guy feels the effects of that nice cushioning,” he said. “I don’t get nearly as sore as I used to from long runs and hard efforts. I kind of love and hate that these were ever invented. I wish I had them at 35, but I also wish they weren’t a factor.”
exact time, 2:18:00, they needed to qualify Prize Purse at Olympians Advice on Good Training Partners: $600,000, The field is much smaller than it was four years ago in Atlanta, because. Dot McMahan and Sara Hall are 40.
exact time, 2:18:00, they needed to qualify. Des Linden Nutrition - Weight Loss.
Payne thought he might be the oldest in the men’s field. Then he heard about five-time Olympian Abdi Abdirahman, 47.
“Abdi’s running?” Payne said. “Get out of here. Okay, now my goal is to keep up with Abdi.”
They have villages behind them
For every marathoner at the Trials, there’s a person or many people who are helping to make those runners’ lives work. Kellner and her dog, Jackson, drove from Boston to Orlando a couple of weeks before the race, so she could acclimate to the warmer weather. She stopped in West Windsor, New Jersey, to pick up her mother, Anne Kellner, who helped her daughter with the rest of the drive, which they did in two days. Then Anne flew back to New Jersey.
All across the country, families, friends, and coworkers cheer and pitch in, in ways big and small, to keep their runner, well, running. One of the guidance counselors at Furness High School in Philadelphia, where Estes teaches, keeps gushing about her to the students. “They’ll come up to me and say, ‘Miss E., are you running in the Olympics?’” Estes said. “I’m like, ‘Ohmigosh, no. Who told you that?’”
Gaughan has support from her team at Goldman Sachs to work remotely from Orlando the week before the Trials. Kirkov says the fire department chief and captains have been trying their best to help him get his miles in, while his wife, Megan, balances her work as a nurse with taking care of their 2-year-old son, Matthew, to grudge Kirkov time to train.
Then there are the hordes of fans descending on Orlando for the race. Spouses, kids, parents, in laws, childhood friends, aunts, uncles, cousins. You name it, they’re coming to watch the Trials. They’ve been part of the dream, too. They wouldn’t miss it for anything.
Payne might win in that department. He’s got his wife, Erin, and their three kids, ages 6, 4, and 3, coming. And then counting his parents, in laws, siblings (he’s the oldest of nine), and nieces and nephews, he’ll have 33 relatives there cheering him on—even though he’s done it twice already and he’s 42. “I’m touched,” he said. “I feel very adverse to have this kind of support. And they joke we would never go on vacation together if I didn’t run.”
Best Big City Marathons is a writer and editor living in Eugene, Oregon, and her stories about the sport, its trends, and fascinating individuals have appeared in Runner’s World Olympic Marathon Trials, Run Your Butt Off! and Walk Your Butt Off!
