The Run To The Rising Sun: Episode 1

Just in general, to make the US team is just so hard. A lot of athletes, it's like you have it in the back of your mind, but you can't just be thinking about it all the time. They're gonna give it a good try. My name is Kathy Butler. I'm head coach of Run Boulder AC. Run Boulder is primarily post-collegiate competitive track club based out of Boulder, Colorado. We have athletes in everything from 800 to marathon with the odd ultra marathoner. Some have already qualified for the Olympic trials and a whole bunch trying to qualify for the Olympic trials. We'll start half marathon, work down to 10K. You're doing everything you can to get there, but you don't know until like a month before that you've actually made the team. US Olympic trials and the marathon will be February 29th in Atlanta, Georgia. And we already have three athletes qualified. And then we have, I would say 15 aiming to qualify this fall between November and December. Sorry, dog problem. The main difference for them is that as soon as they leave here, they're not going to have a nice breakfast and a massage. They're going straight to work. I was a professional athlete in the running world. I could sleep till I needed to get up or work out and get massage and recover as much as I wanted to and train as much as I needed to. You know, professional athlete, most of those things are covered. They all work full time. A lot of them have pretty big careers. You know, we have lawyers and architects. So they're fitting this in between 40 to 70 hour work weeks. They're actually paying out of their pocket to go to races, to pay to go to the gym. Pretty cool that if you can still be doing all those things and then potentially have a chance to make the Olympic team. It's pretty amazing.