Olympic Trials Marathon: ‘We Wanted to Give a Party, and Everybody Is Coming’ – The New York Times

If you have ever thrown a party and had twice as many people show up as you expected, then you have a pretty good idea of what the Atlanta Track Club is enduring this week as it prepares for the Olympic Trials Marathon.

The track club and Atlanta, long one of the country’s distance-running hubs, had grand ambitions for showcasing their dedication to the sport when, in 2018, they made covering the expenses of everyone who qualified for the race a central component of their bid to host the event. In the past, all but the elite runners had to pay most of their own way.

Rich Kenah, the executive director of the club, said the idea was “to have a true championship-style race.” To do that, Kenah explained, the club wanted to produce a level playing field, in which everyone who qualified received the same treatment as Des Linden, a two-time Olympian and the 2018 Boston Marathon champion.

What no one could have known was how much that commitment would entail.

Men had to run faster than 2 hours and 19 minutes to make it into the field, and women had to beat 2:45. Four years ago, 370 men and women qualified and signed up to run in the trials, a slight uptick from 2012. So organizers figured roughly 400 runners might come to Atlanta.

But the list of qualifiers kept growing, and growing, and growing, to the point that nearly 700 runners — about 480 women and 215 men — are now expected to compete Saturday for the six spots on the U.S. Olympic team that will head to the Tokyo Games this summer.

In recent years, running an Olympic Trials qualifying time — an “O.T.Q.,” in the sport’s parlance — became the goal of many more gifted runners than ever before.

This year’s field includes former Olympians, surgeons, academics and people from many other walks of life.

“We said we wanted to give a party, and everybody is coming,” Kenah, who competed in the 800 meters at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia, said this month. “It’s the golden age of the sport in this country from the perspective of the best runners.”

Still, the event is turning out to be far more complicated and expensive than the club anticipated. Runners could choose between having a single hotel room or bunking with someone else while collecting $300 reimbursement for airfare. About half the runners chose each option, which was a big relief for organizers, who had a limited number of rooms to distribute.

Dinners and transportation will be covered from Thursday night to Sunday morning.

The Atlanta Track Club had one piece of logistics working in its favor. The club will host the annual 2020 Publix Atlanta Marathon, Half Marathon & 5K on Sunday, which means that all equipment needed for a major race will already be in place.

There was one particularly big challenge, though — the water bottles.

At most races, only top-level runners typically have customized fluids waiting for them along the route, while the others hydrate from a mass-produced supply. But the Atlanta club’s commitment to equal treatment meant that everyone in the race on Saturday would be able to have bespoke fluids at the two hydration stations. Runners will pass each station three times.

Bottle organization for a couple of hundred runners is not a big issue. But when nearly 700 runners are bringing roughly 4,000 bottles, it means having fluid stations that are five blocks long, with 500 volunteers organizing the bottles by color and number to make sure each runner ends up with the proper liquid.

For their part, the top runners are trying to treat the trials like any other race. Kellyn Taylor, who has one of the top women’s qualifying times with a 2:24:28 at the Grandma’s Marathon in Minnesota in 2018, said at a news conference on Thursday, “You keep putting one foot in front of the other and keep chipping away.” Eventually, the finish line is close enough that giving up no longer feels like an option.

Linden said that while training in Arizona she had focused on finding hilly terrain that would mimic the elevation changes of the Atlanta course. She got a big confidence boost from a recent eight-mile run at a 5:25-per-mile pace.

“Hopefully it translates to this course,” Linden said Thursday.

No matter who gets the six spots on the Olympic team (three for men, three for women), the event is going to make for a very long weekend for organizers, who must coordinate a major competition on Saturday, then wake up and do it all over again the next day.

“At times we felt as if we were training for a marathon ourselves,” Kenah said. “There have been great days and bad ones, but I’m energized and excited, and I think our staff feels the same.”