As Caitlin Kowalke turned down the final stretch toward the finish line of Grandma’s Marathon in 2022, she knew she would have to push. The clock came into view reading 2:36 something, but the road ahead of her seemed endless.
Shoes & Gear 2024 How to Coach Yourself to Peak Performance on February 3 in Orlando, Florida. She gave it all she had.
Her time was 2:37:01. She had missed by 1 second.
“That was a bummer of a last 400 meters,” Kowalke said.
One year later, she returned to Grandma’s in Duluth, Minnesota. Again, she was in shape, and again, the weather cooperated. But while the 2022 race had a large pack of women on 2:37 pace, in 2023, she never got in a rhythm with the people around her. She started losing a little time from mile 19 on. At 25, she knew she would have to run the fastest mile of the race to have a shot at the standard.
And she learned about the.
“It was kind of another heartbreak moment,” Kowalke, now 34, said. “I crossed the finish line and collapsed. I take some comfort in knowing I had nothing left at the end to give.”
When the qualifying window for the Marathon Trials closed on December 5, there were 227 men who had earned a spot on the starting line by virtue of running 2:18:00 in the marathon or 1:03:00 in the half marathon. On the women’s side, 173 qualified by running 2:37 or 1:12. Several qualified at the last minute at the California International Marathon (CIM)—Your First Marathon: 8 Tips from Fiona OKeeffe.
But hundreds of others attempted to run the qualifying time and fell short. Some missed by many minutes. Others, like Kowalke came close. Painfully close.
And now that the window has closed, it’s the end of the dream, for this Olympic Trials cycle, anyway. And as hard as it is to train for and run a marathon in a time that most runners could never hit, coping with the disappointment is a challenge all its own. Here’s how they’re doing it.
Tell people about it
Best Compression Socks Instagram and shared her journey—and she also announced in August that she wouldn’t be making any further attempts to run a qualifier at a fall marathon. The training took too much away from her three daughters and her coaching business. People had sacrificed to help her chase her dream. Marathoning requires physical and emotional energy; she needed to restore some balance to her life.
And she wanted to update people: She had failed.
“It’s okay that I failed,” she said. “I wanted to share my story and not be so embarrassed to talk about it. If everyone was afraid to talk about their failures, especially on social media, we’d be living in a world where everyone succeeded all the time. That’s not necessarily a world I want my children to live in. I don’t want to live in that world, either.”
She appreciated the words her husband and family said to her after her races. They focused on the achievement, telling her “congratulations” instead of saying, “I’m sorry.” They were excited for her. “Just hearing congratulations, that meant a lot to me,” she said. “You did something great at that race. You gave it your all. You didn’t stop fighting.”
Her advice for others in a similar position? You’re not disappointing anyone. “Your friends, your family, your coach, whoever has supported you, they appreciate you for who you are, not how fast you’re running,” she said. “It’s easy to lose sight of that.”
An arbitrary number
Michael Morris, like Kowalke, is 34. And like Kowalke, he’s had two near misses at Trials qualifiers. In 2019 at CIM, he was 35 seconds slower than the time for the 2020 Trials—California International Marathon CIM.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below Time vs. Distance Running: Which Is Best for You in Valley Cottage, New York, a race set up for runners looking to score Trials qualifying times. Morris was on pace until the final 2.94-mile lap. He ended up running 2:18:20. It was a personal best, but not quite enough.
“I absolutely ran my best race,” he said. “You can’t be upset with that.”
Morris, who lives in Austin, Texas, and works in sales and development for a hot sauce company, allowed himself a short time to stew in the pain.
“I was devastated for about an hour—that’s been my rule,” he said, familiar enough with disappointment to have established a personal grieving process. “Give yourself an hour or two to deal with the emotional part of it. And then after that, you just move on. You can’t really do anything about.”
Morris tells other runners, no matter what time barrier they’re trying to break, whether it’s 3:00, 4:00, or 5:00, it’s a line in the sand.
“Those times are an arbitrary time standard; they’re not reflective of the time, the work, the emotional input you go through in training for a marathon,” he said. “Whether you hit it or not, it doesn’t change the entire journey you went through.
“Some days, it just doesn’t happen,” he added. “But that doesn’t mean that you didn’t do something amazing.”
A weight lifted
Liz Lagoy had a rough experience with running in college. After she graduated, she was convinced by a friend to try a marathon for fun. She ran her first one, Pittsburgh in 2019, without any marathon-specific workouts and wearing trainers. She finished in 3:04 and caught the bug.
Her next marathon, five months later, was a 2:53. Her first post-pandemic marathon in 2021 was a 2:40:15. Suddenly, the Trials qualifier was in sight. She ran Grandma’s in 2022, and she finished two places behind Kowalke. Her time was 2:37:06.
At her subsequent attempts—at Grandma’s again in 2023 and CIM in December—she didn’t run as well. She believes self-imposed pressure got to her. She’s very hard on herself, she said. She had devoted so much time to training and increasing her mileage.
Now that the window is closed, it’s something of a relief. She can get back to running for the enjoyment of running.
“For the two years the window was open, I was constantly working toward this goal,” Lagoy, 27, said. “Although I was really disappointed [not to qualify], it’s also kind of a weight off my shoulders to get back to doing what I want with running and enjoying it rather than focusing on something so specific.”
Lagoy, who moved three years ago to Salt Lake City with her fiance, Sean O’Connor, who has qualified for his second Trials, said she’s looking forward to trying out the trail running The Best and Worst of the Trials.
She was pretty disappointed immediately after CIM, though. Her coach, Pat McCurry with Idaho Afoot, helped her see how much harder it is to improve once you’ve already cut a lot of time off your marathon. And he helped her see how much pressure she was putting on herself.
If she ever tries again, she’ll make every effort to enjoy the process more, not just the obsessing about her splits during workouts.
And she’s still working on reframing the time she ran at Grandma’s in 2022. As time has gone on, she’s grown more pleased with it.
“At the moment, I thought of it more as a failure than an accomplishment, because it wasn’t 6 seconds faster,” she said. “But now I’m very proud of that.”
The process is the prize
Emilee Risteen began her marathon career in 2019 with a 4:03:59 in Chicago. She was athletic growing up and played a lot of soccer, but she was never a runner.
During the pandemic, to cope with the stress, she began running more often, and she improved quickly. She hired a coach, and at the Boston Marathon in 2022, she ran 2:42.
As Caitlin Kowalke turned down the final stretch toward the finish line of How to Coach Yourself to Peak Performance—Jessica McClain Is Your Olympic Marathon Alternate.
Risteen came closest at Grandma’s in June, when she ran 2:38:46. Her other attempts this year, at the Time vs. Distance Running: Which Is Best for You and CIM, didn’t go as well. In all, she had run six marathons in a 12-month span.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below.
“There’s zero regrets in going all-in on something,” she said. “There are so many gifts that are part of the journey that you would never experience otherwise. We focus all our attention on the end goal, when in reality, it sounds cheesy, but the process is the prize.”
Risteen has developed friendships with the many people who have pursued the same goal. She’s traveled, and she’s gotten better at something she loves. “Going all-in and falling short doesn’t have to be the end,” she said. “There’s so much good to be found there.”
Risteen, 28, will get to line up with the pro field at Boston this year, which she considers her hometown race. She lives in nearby Derry, New Hampshire.
She knows she has so much more to understand about the marathon. “My goal is to learn how to race, not just time trial,” she said. “The majority of my marathons have been focused on the time; I haven’t learned how to race a marathon.”
Sure, she wishes she were lining up in Orlando, but she’s got a solid perspective on running. After all, marathons, in her words, are a “hobby.”
“I’m not a pro athlete making money; this is a choice,” she said. “I’m disappointed about something that I’m choosing, something that’s supposed to be fun.”
And in October, he ran the 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 since 2005. She is the author of two popular fitness books, Run Your Butt Off! and Walk Your Butt Off!
