The overall number of participants isn’t necessarily growing, as it did in the 1970s and 1980s and the early 2000s, but the fastest women are getting faster.ĭecades ago, running was the ultimate individual pursuit, an activity immortalized in the 1959 short story “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.” Not anymore.Įach runner we talked to pointed to some form of the adage “you can’t be what you can’t see.” About two-thirds of the women said they used social media apps like Instagram to connect with and follow other runners. They will compete with a high school student from Minnesota an Air Force first lieutenant from Colorado Springs a college senior in Raleigh, N.C., who qualified on her first try and a 48-year-old teacher from Northern Virginia.Īll of them are part of a boomlet in female distance running that is distinct from the running booms of the past. She’ll be racing in Atlanta six months after giving birth to her daughter.
She decided to try qualifying for the 2020 trials, and ran a 2:43 marathon in 2018. Distance running has helped her overcome depression, she said.Ĭailtin Kowalke of Cross Plains, Wis., hung up her running shoes after the 2016 Olympic trials.
Now she trains alone, mostly on a treadmill at a nearby Y.M.C.A., while her children are at school.Ĭourtney Olsen of Bellingham, Wash., presides over a local running club, using apps like Strava, Instagram and Facebook to keep her team connected and share workouts and training plans.
She switched to the marathon because it was too hard to find track time after she and her family moved to the Dallas suburbs. Rena Elmer, a stay-at-home mother of nine children ages 14 months to 12 years, was once a standout in the steeplechase. Other qualifiers described their own paths to a qualification time. At the Houston Marathon last month, her last chance to qualify, she ran a 2:43:55 to make it to Atlanta. She then entered the California International Marathon in December, but did not finish. She first ran Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, Minn., in June 2019, and finished two minutes short of the qualifying standard. It took her three marathons – and countless miles – to qualify. Then she heard another runner, Carly Gill, who ran 2:42 in Berlin in September, on the “ Ali on the Run” podcast, and thought: “Why am I selling myself short? Why can’t I believe in myself that much, too?” She figured that was about as fast as she could go. Starla Garcia, a 30-year-old registered dietician in Houston, set a personal best at the California International Marathon in Sacramento in 2018, finishing in 2:53 – more than 20 minutes faster than her previous time. Samantha Jane Beatty for the New York Times Allie Schaich, Starla Garcia, and Melissa Fairey warm up to train for the Women’s Olympic Marathon Trials.
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