How does one describe the run-walk-wobble that Caroline Williams employed to get across the finish line of the California International Marathon? Is it part toddler, part race walker…part duck, perhaps?
(You can judge for yourself with video from the bottom of her results page, and two different spectator videos.)
To qualify for the 2024 Olympic Marathon Trials, Williams needed to run 2:37:00 or faster.
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At the race on December 4, everything was going according to plan. She and her training partner, Katie Kellner, had been doing all their marathon pace training at 5:55 per mile pace, which would give them a 2:35 marathon.
Williams, 30, works long hours—she’s in human resources for a venture-creation fund in Boston that incubates biotech startups. Kellner owns a coaching service and has more flexible hours, but she gamely goes along with Williams’s early meetup times to have a compatible training partner for their 80- to 90-mile weeks.
On race day, the plan was to go out conservatively for about the first 16 miles and pick it up in the latter stages of the race.
And at first, all was going well. Kellner hit halfway in 1:18:00, Williams in 1:18:06. Kellner felt great, gradually sped up the second half, and ran 2:35:20, a PR of more than 5 minutes.
Williams felt fine—but not spectacular. She stuck to the pace she was on.
The last 6 miles turned into a struggle, although she maintained her pace for 25 miles, and she still had a 50-second buffer with a mile to go.
Then her quads seized up.
“I was surprised at how quickly they shut down the final mile,” Williams told Runner’s World by phone from Maui, where she was vacationing with her boyfriend, Eddie Mulder, also a 2024 trials qualifier, after the race. “I literally just lost control of my legs.”
The finish of CIM has two quick left turns. Williams’s brain was fine—she was fully aware of what was happening to her and she could see diagonally from the first turn how close she was. But when she made the final turn, the clock read 2:36:30. Time was running out.
“My legs were buckling,” she said. “I had never felt that type of muscle deterioration before. No amount of willpower would help my legs work any better. That last straightaway, it was a gamble with myself. I said, ‘Caroline, if you turn your legs over faster, you might fall.’ That was a risk. The other risk, if I keep the same [pace] and stay upright, I might run out of time. That’s the option I went with.”
For her coach, Jamie Norton of the Green Racing Project, it was excruciating. “Super agonizing and helpless feeling watching those seconds click away,” was how he described it.
Just beyond the finish line, Kellner waited, as did many of the other women who had finished ahead of her. That’s a perk of running CIM, where hordes of runners try to hit their marathon trials qualifying times. Race organizers let men hang out to cheer until the clock reads 2:18 and let the women wait until the clock turns to 2:37.
Kellner waited. And waited. “Where the heck is Caroline?” she thought to herself. Finally she saw her friend make the final turn.
“Those last five meters, I wanted to so badly reach out and pull her across,” she said.
Williams crossed the first timing mat, and her legs gave way. She fell onto the second timing mat. Above her, the clock read 2:37:01.
But all was not lost: For women attempting to qualify for the trials, USATF accepts chip times this year.
Kellner immediately ran over to her friend, grabbed Williams by the armpits, and pulled her up and over to lean on a fence. “You definitely have it. You got it,” Kellner said she told Williams, but she later wondered why she was so confident. “It really was questionable,” she said. “I personally wanted to believe it so badly. I think I wanted to convince myself.”
A minute later, they heard the PA announcer update the assembled crowd: Williams’s chip time was 2:36:57. She was in. It was also a 5-minute PR for her.
The journey was all the sweeter because Williams had come within seconds of qualifying for the marathon trials twice before.
In 2016, the half marathon time women needed was 1:15. Williams ran 1:15:37 at a race in 2015, and then had an injury, so she couldn’t try again.
She ran her first marathon in 2018, with an eye on making the 2020 trials. The time to beat was 2:45. Williams ran 2:45:28 at Grandma’s Marathon, missing by essentially a second per mile. Again, injuries and illness thwarted further attempts, and then the standard was tightened to its current 2:37.
Williams’s father, Skip, who was at CIM watching his daughter, had a sense this one would be dramatic, too. In the early miles, he said to her cheering section, “Caroline always likes to cut it close.”
Despite the worry, Kellner just appreciates that they both qualified, after countless mornings of predawn 18-milers along the Charles River in Boston.
“When you work hard with a friend towards a goal, that’s a unique experience,” Kellner said. “When you both achieve it—it’s really special. I don’t think many people experience those things with their friends.”
Williams has been fielding messages from contacts from all over, amused that her finish-line dramatics have garnered so many views.
“It’s a hilarious thing to go viral for,” she said. “I can’t stop laughing at myself in that video. People are saying they’re crying and so inspired by it. I just think it’s funny. Because after this whole seven-year journey, of me trying to qualify, that’s the way I qualify? A stumble to the finish and falling over the line? It’s such a great ending.”
Sarah Lorge Butler 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!
