It was hard to miss the shock in Larry's Rawson's voice. The veteran running analyst was working the 2011 Boston Marathon television broadcast for NBC/Universal last April. As the leading women made their way through the Newton hills, just past mile 20, Rawson spotted something unusual.
"On the left of your screen," he said, "that is Desiree Davila."
It was the sound of a man not believing his eyes. Where the hell did she come from?
Though she started with the elite women, Davila, a 27-year-old American from the Detroit suburb of Rochester, didn't get a lot of media buildup prior to the 115th running of the Boston Marathon. Few outside of hard-core marathon circles knew her name. But by lunchtime on Patriot's Day, the entire running world was buzzing about her 2:22:38 performance.
By finishing just two seconds behind the winner, Kenya's Caroline Kilel, Davila broke the women's American course record and vaulted into the league of leading contenders for the 2012 U.S. Olympic team—and possibly a medal in London.
The first test of that newfound status will come January 14 in Houston. When Davila and her competitors toe the line at the Olympic Marathon Trials, they will compose the deepest, fastest, most competitive women's marathon field in American history. In past trials, a sub-2:30 time has guaranteed a spot on the team. (The top three finishers go on to the London Games.) This year, no fewer than seven women have posted sub-2:30 marks. The 2004 bronze medalist, Deena Kastor, now 38, will be vying to make her fourth Olympic team. Hard on Kastor's heels are Kara Goucher, 33, and Shalane Flanagan, 30, world-class 10,000-meter runners who've turned themselves into world-class marathoners. Magdalena Lewy Boulet, 38, has experience on her side (she came in second to Kastor in the '08 Olympic Trials) and is running consistently in the 2:26 to 2:28 range. Stephanie Rothstein, 28, and Clara Grandt, 24, announced themselves last year with sub-2:30 times in Houston and Boston, respectively.
And then there's Desi.
With her performance in Boston and a 2:26:20 finish in the 2010 Chicago Marathon, Davila has posted two of the three fastest marathon times among American women over the past two years. She continues to sharpen her game on the toughest competition. In September, she heard that Boston winner Caroline Kilel and world half-marathon record holder Mary Keitany would run in the Lisbon Half-Marathon. So she flew to Portugal, bibbed up, and finished as the only non-Kenyan in the top five.
Though she's no longer an unknown, the question in Larry Rawson's voice remains: Who is she? Where did she come from?
The answer can be found on the trails and dirt roads that wind through the northern suburbs of Detroit. She was raised in Southern California, the youngest daughter in a soccer-mad family. In college she carved out a solid, if unspectacular, mid-distance resume. She was always in the hunt but never won the laurels. Then she moved near the Motor City. And Desiree Davila was reborn as a runner.
ROCHESTER, MICHIGAN, IS A QUIET LEAFY TOWN about 25 miles north of Detroit. It's one of the prosperous suburbs where America's automobile executives lay their heads at night. It's also one of America's most unlikely distance-running hothouses. Most mornings along the Paint Creek Trail, a wide nine-mile crushed-limestone path that winds through Rochester's hardwood forests, you'll hear the soft crunch of runners putting in their dailies. And sooner or later, if you run the trail, you'll be passed by a small clutch of athletes in their 20s. These are members of the Hansons-Brooks Distance Project. They will be thinner than you. They will be faster than you. And one of them will be Desiree Davila.
On a blustery September morning, Davila can be found running on an empty track at Stoney Creek High School. As her coach, Keith Hanson, calls out splits—"76 flat! Perfect!"—Davila rips through ten 800-meter intervals.
There's a core contradiction to Davila. She's tiny—5'2", 98 pounds—but she runs with the power of a linebacker. Watching her rekindles a memory of the Boston Marathon. As she runs next to the willowy Kenyans in the final mile, you worry that Davila might flatten them if they cross her lane.
Halfway through her workout, when rain begins pelting the track, Hanson's older brother Kevin pulls up in his red Hummer H2. "Kevin's still on South Korean time," says Keith. The two brothers share coaching duties on their 21-member squad. Kevin has just returned from Daegu, South Korea, where he coached Mike Morgan in the World Championships Marathon.
At the end of her workout, Davila admits she felt a little rusty. After the USA Track & Field Championships in late June, she took a few weeks off. Now she is paying for it. "I keep forgetting how recent the downtime was," she says.
Kevin Hanson shrugs off her concern. "I don't really care if you look like crap the first week of September," he tells her.
"Yeah, I'd rather do this now," she says, referring to the short, sharp shock of the track workout, "than go into the first month of Trials workouts and still feel like I'm recuperating."
quot;Whos the lucky guy?" I ask.
It's a small running joke. Having lived through six Michigan winters, Davila is as well adapted to the Upper Midwest climate as any of the Hansons runners, but her Southwestern pedigree gives the native Michiganders an opportunity for some good-natured ribbing when the mercury drops.
In truth, it's an unlikely match, Desi and Detroit. She grew up in Chula Vista, California, the San Diego suburb that's as far south as you can go without being in Mexico. Soccer was the family game; her older sister played, her father coached, and Desi was torn between the family sport and her burgeoning love for running. As a ninth-grader, she placed second in California's state cross-country meet, which was no surprise to her.
"I was kind of naive," she tells me over coffee after her workout. "I'd always won races as a kid, so I expected to be there at the end. Winning was normal." That changed in high school. She won handily at conference meets, but the top spot in state always eluded her. In state championships she was always in the top 10 but never in the winner's circle. That glory fell to a California rival, Sara Bei (now Sara Hall, a top middle-distance runner who's married to Ryan Hall), who took the state cross-country title four years running.
During Davila's senior year, she considered scholarships from the University of California, Berkeley and Arizona State University. "It was a tough choice," she says. "Are you going for your education, or to run? Because obviously the two schools are pretty far apart on the academic spectrum."
Davila's a different cat. She's not another generically pretty white girl on the track. With her olive skin and arresting doe eyes, it's tough to pin her ethnic background. (She's Hispanic.) Her intellectual tastes run to the dark and complicated. Donnie Darko and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are two of her favorite films. Her prerace psych song is "I'm Ready," an old, rumbly Muddy Waters number. When she talks about Cal and Arizona State, she gives the sense that she's stifling a sarcastic remark. Berkeley: one of the nation's most rigorous public universities. ASU: one of the nation's top party schools. Pretty far apart on the academic spectrum. Yeah, you could say that.
Friends talk about her preternatural calm and her sly under-the-breath sense of humor. She's the co-worker who'll crack you up with a raised eyebrow when the office blowhard takes over a meeting. "Des is one of the quickest, wittiest people I've ever met," says Amy Hastings, an American distance runner who has been one of Davila's closest friends since they ran together in the mid-2000s at ASU.
Case in point: During prerace festivities in Boston, Davila fell into conversation with Blake Russell, the American marathoner and 2008 Olympian. They got to laughing about roommates, boyfriends, husbands, and household chores. "I don't think my husband even knows where our vacuum cleaner is," Russell said.
A few days later, as Davila navigated the post-Boston media storm, she took the time to e-mail a photo to Russell. It was a picture of Davila's boyfriend vacuuming their living room in Rochester. "Cruel," says Russell, chuckling.
"Most people don't get my sense of humor," Davila confesses. "People who know me get it—or at least they put up with it."
Despite the, um, gap in the academic spectrum, Davila enrolled at Arizona State. "It came down to the coach," she says. "I really liked [ASU coach] Walt Drenth. I looked at the athletes he'd brought in. They weren't superstars in high school, but he ended up producing national champions."
Though she didn't know it, joining Drenth in Tempe was Davila's first step toward Detroit. The Drenth family holds a special place in Michigan running culture. Walt and his younger brother Jeff were both standout cross-country athletes—and popular figures—at Central Michigan University in the late '70s and early '80s. After college, Jeff Drenth joined the Nike-sponsored Athletics West team in Eugene, Oregon. The promise of a brilliant career lay ahead of him when, inexplicably, he collapsed and died after a workout in 1986. Drenth's great spirit, running style, and tragic early death turned him into a local Prefontaine-style hero. Central Michigan's Jeff Drenth Memorial now marks the kickoff of the cross-country season in the Upper Midwest.
Walt carved out his own legend as coach at Arizona State. Prior to his 1996 arrival, ASU owned the Pac-10 cellar. The Sun Devil women had never been nationally ranked, never appeared at the NCAA Cross-Country Championships, and had produced just two All-Americans. Drenth changed all that. During his eight-year run in Tempe, his teams became fixtures at the NCAA Championships (every year from 1998 to 2003), attained top-five national rankings, and produced eight All-Americans.
He did it with a tough work ethic. "Coach Drenth, he's a mellow guy, but when it's time to work, you'd better show up," says Davila. "He has high expectations for his runners, and a high volume of work to go along with it. You either get that or you don't, and if you don't, you're not going to be around too long."
Drenth puts it as tactfully as a coach can: "We help them understand the work necessary to reach their goals," he says. "We'd tell them, 'If you like the idea of being Pac-10 champion, here's the work that needs to be done to get there.'"
Amy Hastings came to ASU one year after Davila. She recalls the bond between teammates—and a certain sharp, hip older girl. "Des hosted me on my recruiting trip during my senior year of high school," she says. "She was a little shy, but very cool and funny. And I could tell immediately that those athletes were different. A lot of places I looked at, the runners were more teammates than friends. At ASU it was the opposite."
Davila made steady progress at ASU, earning All-American honors in track and cross-country during her junior year. With future NCAA champions Hastings and Victoria Jackson pushing her on training runs, her fitness rose. But her old high school pattern reasserted itself: Always among the top contenders, never atop the podium. In high school she watched Sara Bei hoist the trophies. In college, it was her friend Amy Hastings.
"By the end of college, I felt like I still had more in me," Davila recalls. "I could do workouts with these people who were doing really big things. I didn't want to finish my career and wonder if it would've clicked if I'd just given it more time."
Published: Dec 28, 2011 12:00 AM EST.
THE HANSONS-BROOKS DISTANCE PROJECT IS THE kind of heartwarming little-guys-make-good story a screenwriter might cook up. In 1999, Kevin and Keith Hanson, two brothers who owned a couple of small running-shoe shops in suburban Detroit, got fed up with the dispirited state of American distance running. "We're track geeks, basically," Kevin Hanson, 51, tells me recently during an interview in the brothers' Utica, Michigan, store, one of four they now own. "There weren't enough successful American runners in the 1990s. We figured we should do something about it. Our whole idea was to get back to group training."
The Hansons remembered the great track clubs of the 1980s—the Greater Boston Track Club with Bill Rodgers, Greg Meyer, and coach Bill Squires; and Athletics West, a team that included Alberto Salazar, Joan Benoit Samuelson, and Mary Decker Slaney—and decided to resurrect the idea. They bought a house and invited promising local athletes to live there and train fulltime. "It worked great, because if they needed some food and gas money, we'd offer them hours working in the store," says Kevin.
Postcollegiate running programs now thrive in small pockets around the country: the Mammoth Track Club in California's Eastern Sierras, ZAP Fitness in rural North Carolina, Nike's Oregon Project on the outskirts of Portland. But when the Hanson brothers started, they were all alone, using cash from their own pockets. Brooks signed on as a cosponsor in 2003, but it's still a shoestring operation. "I get other store owners all the time asking, 'How do you make money on this?'" says Kevin Hanson. "The answer is, you don't."
By 2005, the Hansons had earned a national reputation for turning second-tier college runners into national contenders. "The top four or five athletes coming out of college, the ones getting $60,000 shoe contracts—those are not our athletes," says Kevin. "Our people have a different starting point."
With her strong-not-stellar resume, Desiree Davila looked to be the quintessential Hansons team candidate. Her options after college were few. Her highest podium was a third-place finish in the 5000 at the Pac-10 conference championships—not exactly a shoe-deal credential. An online search turned up the Hansons program. She asked Walt Drenth about it.
"Are you crazy?" Drenth told her. "I grew up there. You have no idea what the winters are like."
She persisted. Davila sent an e-mail to Keith Hanson. No reply. She left a phone message. It was never returned. "I knew my credentials weren't incredible," she recalls, "but when I looked at who was on the team, I was kind of like, 'I fit in fine there—what's the deal?'" Finally she tracked down Kevin on the phone in the Royal Oak store. He was noncommittal. If you want to come out and visit, he said, that would be fine.
"We negatively recruited her," explains Keith Hanson. "She's coming out of California and Arizona. She has no idea what the weather's like in Michigan. We don't get snowdrifts like Buffalo—actually the winters are pretty mild here—but it's not the desert Southwest. To have success here, you've got to deal with obstacles. It may take six years of ups and downs, and the people we bring out have to be motivated enough to deal with that."
They vetted Davila with their fellow Michigander Walt Drenth. Could she be better than her college record?
"I think she can," he told them. "She could be exceptional. Don't misinterpret her easygoing, quiet demeanor, though. She's independent. She's tough."
When Davila flew out to Detroit in 2005, the Hanson brothers talked up the hardships. The winters will be tough. Your parents will wonder if you're wasting your life. "You're going to have a lot of years of putting in mileage that nobody sees," Keith told her. "People won't know your name. It can take five or six years. This is what it is."
Davila didn't flinch. "I know what it is," she said. "I still want to be a part of it."
"Okay," Kevin told her. "We'll give it a try. We'll see."
Races - Places about running, and they'll give you an earful anytime you want. Just drop by the shops in Utica or Royal Oak. They're simple storefront operations, nothing fancy: running shoes stocked on plain white shelving, posters of Desiree Davila, Brian Sell, and other Hansons-Brooks runners decorate the endcaps and the walls. There's no high-markup Detroit Tigers, Lions, or Pistons jerseys, nothing that can't be actually used on an eight-mile run. On most days a couple team athletes will be working the counter, and Kevin or Keith will be on the floor, holding court like it's a neighborhood barber shop.
"Hey! I saw your niece's time last weekend," Kevin calls out to a customer on a recent afternoon. The man smiles proudly.
A rumpled man comes through the door—coach of a local cross-country team. "How are your girls doing?" Kevin asks. And so it goes. Hansons Running Shops aren't selling shoes. They're selling the fun of running. Marathon clinics, group runs, middle school camps—something's always going on. "Sometimes other shop owners will complain to me that running's down in their area," Keith Hanson tells me. "And I think, You do know you're in charge of that, right?"
In between the steady flow of customer meet-and-greets, Kevin lays out his coaching philosophy. "If you look at the top 10 marathon times for American men, eight were set by athletes who set those times when they were over 30 years of age," he explains to me. "So if you graduate from college at age 22 or 23, how do you get there? What do you do in those six or seven years to rise to that top level?"
The Hansons' formula can be boiled down to a sentence: Grind, and live with grinders. It's simple group psychology. "If you're living with other runners, all devoted to the same thing, then this life you're leading becomes acceptable behavior," says Kevin Hanson. "You're not out there all alone, second-guessing all the time you're committing, trying to justify your life choices to others who might not understand."
In late 2005, Desiree Davila moved into the Hansons team's Tienken Road house, a classic '70s one-story rambler. On the Paint Creek Trail, the Michigan mafia gave her a hard time. "So you're from out West, huh?" said Ryan Linden, a local runner who often trained with the team. "I hear it's pretty easy to make nationals from the West Region." ("Condescending jerk," recalls Davila. "I hated him.")
Davila ate, drank, and slept running. It became so consuming, in fact, that she declined the work at the Hansons shop in favor of a part-time job at Moosejaw, the outdoor retailer south of Rochester. She dug the company's irreverent corporate culture. (Moosejaw proudly refuses to take itself too seriously. The company once offered a limited-edition jacket called "The Mc Lovin'." It sold out.) She answered customers' e-mail inquiries and complaints. "Low stress," she says. "It was a fun place to work, and it gave me a chance to not think about running for a while."
Davila trained all that winter for the 10,000 but failed to qualify for the 2006 USA Track & Field Championships. Kevin and Keith asked her to join the team at the Indianapolis meet anyway. She sat in the stands with her coaches. "That was eye-opening," Davila recalls. "People ran well in those races, especially the 10-K, but nobody ran completely out of their minds. There was nothing they were doing that I couldn't do."
She returned to Detroit determined to prove she could run with the top dogs. "I needed evidence," she says. Davila found it in the ticks of a stopwatch. "I'd hit a 33:20 during a 10-K workout," she recalls. "And all of a sudden running at a 5:35 pace didn't seem all that frightening."
Training with Dot McMahan, Melissa White, and other Hansons marathoners, Davila gradually built up her distance. At the USATF 20-K Championships, the top five runners would go on to compete at the World Championships in Debrecen, Hungary. Davila came in 13th. Then fate intervened. One by one, other top-five qualifiers dropped out of the Hungary race. A spot opened up. Davila grabbed it.
That's when the Hansons discovered Davila's big-race gene. "Her best time was about three minutes slower than any American on that 20-K team," Kevin Hanson says. "But when it came race time, she came in as the third American."
The Best 1 Mile Races to Add to Your Calendar marathon. Two weeks after returning from Hungary, Davila drove to Chicago to support her teammates running the Chicago Marathon. "I went there to watch the rest of the team run it, and I saw what the marathon does to people. It's an incredibly emotional experience. That was the first time I really considered running it myself."
Davila wanted to make her 26.2-mile debut on a big stage—the 2007 Boston Marathon—and go fast. The Hansons had other ideas. They agreed to Boston, but they argued with Davila about her race plan. They wanted to slow her down. "With the marathon, you don't swing for the fences on your first try," Keith Hanson says. "It's a race you've got to learn. It takes time to master the feeling of a marathon."
"That's the only time Kevin, Keith, and I weren't on the same page," Davila recalls. "I didn't want to train for three months and then race at a level that was less than what I was capable of." Weather mooted the argument. A nor'easter moved through Boston in '07—the BAA nearly canceled the race—and Davila was happy to finish 19th in her marathon debut.
Her time of 2:44:56 on the rain-lashed course qualified her for the 2008 Olympic Marathon Trials, so the next April, she returned to Boston and lined up with America's best. The Women's Trials were held on Sunday, April 20, 2008, the day before the regularly scheduled Boston Marathon. "I thought I'd be 2:32 or quicker," Davila recalls.
Davila ran her plan, clocking 5:48 mile splits. At mile 21, she was eight seconds behind eventual third-place finisher, Blake Russell. "And then I just completely fell apart," Davila says.
It was a fueling issue. As a track runner, competing in the 1500, the 5000, and the 10,000, Davila never had to take fluids. More to the point, she couldn't. When she tried, everything came up. "I thought, Well, I don't want to lose breakfast, too, so I'll just stop drinking fluids on the course."
That doesn't work over 26.2 miles. Or at least not for her. She struggled to cross in 2:37:50, for 13th place.
The fueling issue would be addressed—directly. During long workouts, Davila would force herself to drink. Her system, well, rejected it. "It was actually kind of disgusting," she says. But week after week, her body eventually adapted. "Gross," she says, "but necessary."
THE HANSON BROTHERS HAVE A LOT OF THEORIES the Chicago Marathon determined to lay down a time that would qualify her for the IAAF World Championships Marathon in Berlin. Keeping fluids and breakfast down, Davila recorded a 2:31:33, the top time for an American and fifth woman overall. That was just the prelude, though.
The 2009 IAAF World Championships wasn't the strongest field ever assembled. A number of the world's top marathoners, having given their all at the Beijing Olympics, were taking the year off. Davila saw a chance to turn a few heads.
Before every big race, Kevin Hanson sits down with each of his athletes to plot strategy. With Davila, he wanted her to quote him a time. "What do you want to shoot for in Berlin?" he asked.
"I'd like to aim for the top 15," she said. "I think I'm ready to run 2:28." Davila expected her coach to ratchet her back. She'd never been considered a sub-2:30 marathoner.
"Perfect," said Kevin Hanson. "That's just what I'd been thinking myself."
In Berlin she finally brought it all together. She ran a 2:27:53 marathon, five seconds behind Kara Goucher. Davila was the second American and 11th overall.
After toiling in the obscurity of the Detroit suburbs for five years, Davila was finally making a name for herself in the running world. "I think that was shocking for a lot of people," she says. "I broke 2:30, not by a little but by a lot. It was a big surprise to everybody but us. It was exactly what we were shooting for."
quot;Thats the guy," she says years, not months. A typical world-class marathoner may compete in two races a year. Two. Most can't handle more than that because the training is so demanding. The regimen leading up to those races may stretch for weeks, months, and literally thousands of miles. Before she starts her taper, Desiree Davila will run 120 miles a week to prep for a 26.2.
When you only run one or two a year, you pick your races carefully. So when Davila sat down with Kevin and Keith Hanson in the summer of 2010, the three of them looked over the big five: Berlin, Boston, Chicago, London, and New York, the marathon "majors." London was enticing. The course was flat, fast, and offered a taste of the next Olympic venue. Davila could easily lay down a new PR in London. But Boston loomed large.
"At the end of the day," Davila says, "Boston is Boston. That's the big race. If you're an American and you win there, it's a big deal."
They talked about times. "We figured I'd run 5:30s for the first 20 miles," Davila recalls, "then cut it down to 5:20s or 5:15s. Get into that uncomfortable range. One thing I've learned is the race really starts at the last 10-K. I want to get to that point as comfortably as possible. Then you've got to do something to force the race to go your way."
In that meeting, Kevin Hanson laid some splits on the table. "This is what Margaret Okayo did in her course record run in 2002," he told Davila. Okayo, a Kenyan marathoner who rose to the top of the sport in the early 2000s, still holds the women's course record in both the Boston and New York marathons. "She ran the last 10-K in 33:17. So running fast, that final section is right around 33:20."
Want to know who else you should be watching at the Trials in Houston? Check out our.
The Hansons-Brooks team showed up at prerace events in Boston in full tracksuit splendor. When they started the team 12 years ago, the brothers wanted uniforms that would get their athletes noticed. "So I sat down and started sketching," Kevin recalls. He came up with a brick-and-yellow semaphore pattern. Some might call it?ugly. Many did. "People would come up to me and say, 'Man, you guys are doing great, but you gotta do something about those ugly uniforms.' And I'd say: 'So you noticed the uniforms.' Because if you notice them, I won."
Davila laughs. "He grew on me.".
"Kara [Goucher] was being talked about as a major factor in the race, a potential winner," says Kevin Hanson. "But we knew the kind of year Desi had been having, and we knew what kind of year Kara had been having. Eighteen months earlier in Berlin, Desi had been five seconds slower than Kara. And then Kara took a year off to have a baby. With no disrespect to Kara—she's a factor in any race—that year off made a difference." During that year, Davila had shaved a half-minute off her 5-K, a full minute off her 10-K, and nearly 90 seconds off her marathon time. "With all those improvements, are you telling me Desi isn't better than she was in Berlin? Of course she is.
"It was baffling to us that people had Kara as a potential winner and Desi as a cute side story. We knew better."
As if to drive home the point, Desi asked the Hanson brothers who'd be there to greet her at the finish line: Kevin or Keith. "We talk with our runners on the course, not at the finish," Keith says. "By that time the race is over." And it's a bit presumptuous to assume your runner will be snapping the tape.
Desi had no problem with that. "I'm going to contend for this win," she told them.
"There was something in Des's voice when I talked to her on the phone before Boston," recalls Amy Hastings. "Something different." Hastings wasn't running Boston, but she flew out anyway. She had a feeling Davila might do something special.
Goucher, Davila, and the elite women started in Hopkinton 28 minutes ahead of the elite men and the 26,000-plus field.
Kim Smith, the New Zealand distance specialist, bolted out of the gate. Smith's plan was to blow the field away early, pull ahead, and dishearten the pack. Through Framingham and Natick, the pack following Smith surged forward, energized by the crowds, before falling back into a more normal pace.
Davila hung about 20 seconds behind, running her steady 5:30-per-mile race. She focused on getting to the 20-mile mark as efficiently as possible. On the TV broadcast, Davila was mentioned once near the start and then forgotten for the next two hours.
Keith Hanson trotted alongside her at the 10-K mark. "They're running a bunch of stupid surges," Davila told him with a smile. As if to say, I was hoping they'd do that.
This is another key component to the Hanson brothers' philosophy: Run your own marathon. "People used to talk about Brian Sell 'running from behind,'" says Keith Hanson. Sell, the former Hansons-Brooks runner (he retired in 2009), competed in the marathon at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. "Brian didn't run from behind. He ran his own pace and let the race come back to him."
Leg cramps took Kim Smith out of the race at mile 18. As the road sloped toward Boston, Davila fell into rhythm with a group that included the best of East Africa: 2008 Boston Marathon winner Dire Tune of Ethiopia, and four world-class Kenyan runners, Caroline Kilel, Sharon Cherop, Caroline Rotich, and Alice Timbilili. This is where the race really starts, Davila thought.
Then Davila, before God, Larry Rawson, and half the town of Newton, did the astonishing. She ran in front of them.
"Davila, formerly at Arizona State, now running for Hansons-Brooks in Michigan," Rawson said. "And that is her pushing the pace a little bit. Wow."
Health - Injuries.
Two miles later, Davila had dropped all but two of her competitors, Kilel and Cherop. On the broadcast, you could almost hear the clackety-clack of production assistants Googling data on the frontrunner. "Davila was a 4:53 miler in Chula Vista, California, ran well, got a scholarship to Arizona State, continued to improve," said Rawson.
Al Trautwig, Rawson's partner in the booth, asked him to fess up.
&CA Notice at Collection
"This is the first time I've seen her in a marathon," said Rawson. "I've read about her exploits, but this is the first I've seen her."
At mile 24, Davila pushed the pace to a 5:14 mile. Kilel kept up. Cherop could not. And then there were two.
"Over the final miles, it was all about keeping the pressure on," Davila says. "You're worried about a final kick, who's got one in them. Sometimes people look at 10-K specialists running marathons and think, She's so fast, she'll kick down anybody. But it's not what you can run in the 10-K. It's what you can kick off 26 miles. The speed isn't the same as in a track race. You want to take the others through on dead legs, hope the marathon takes the kick out of the kickers."
She pauses and smiles. "It worked on one," she says. "Not on the other."
The one was Sharon Cherop. At mile 25 she fell back and, tellingly, began looking behind her. Out of gas, she was more concerned with who was charging from behind.
Davila and Kilel traded the lead a half-dozen times. Davila is not a large woman, and years of 120-mile weeks have winnowed every ounce of fat from her frame. But next to the string-thin Kilel, Davila looked positively robust. Her wraparound sunglasses pushed the effect from intimidating to the edge of menace. Shouts went up from the crowd. U-S-A! U-S-A! They didn't seem to know who Davila was, but they sure knew where she came from.
As Davila dueled with Kilel down the stretch, her coaches scrambled to get to the finish line. Keith fast-talked his way past the credential cops. Kevin careened through the Boston streets in a rental van. One of Davila's Hanson teammates sat shotgun relaying play-by-play from Mike Morgan, who watched the streaming Internet feed back in Detroit and barked updates into his phone. "She's got it! No, wait. No, she doesn't. Now? now?she's back in the lead! No, she lost it again. Wait a minute?"
With 200 yards to go, Davila retook the lead. Twenty seconds later Kilel grabbed it back and found an extra gear, opening up a two-second gap. Davila had nothing left in her legs. Caroline Kilel snapped the blue tape in 2:22:36, the fourth fastest time ever posted in Boston. Desiree Davila followed two seconds behind. It was the fastest an American woman had ever run at Boston, breaking a record set by Joan Benoit Samuelson in 1983. Only two American women, Samuelson and Deena Kastor, It was the sound of a man not believing his eyes. Where the hell did she come from.
Their race plan had Desi running the last 10-K in 33:20, three seconds behind Margaret Okayo's kick in her 2002 Boston record. When the dust cleared, the Hansons realized Davila had run it in 33:19. And she lost the race by two seconds.
quot;Whos the lucky guy?" I ask from the third-fastest runner on a Pac-10 team to the third fastest American female marathoner of all time. That's no miracle. It's a transformation that came about through thousands of mornings and 10,000 miles on a creek-side trail north of Detroit.
Walt Drenth, Davila's college coach, has an explanation for her success. "Are you familiar with the hedgehog theory?" he says. "It's pretty appropriate for distance runners. The idea is, you put your head down and do the same thing consistently for a long period of time. Eventually you become successful at it. For runners, the key thing is to do that and remain healthy."
For Davila, it's a confirmation of her faith in the simple rewards of her sport. "Running is just you, the work you put in, and the clock," she says. "You can't cheat yourself. If you don't put in the miles, you can't go to the starting line thinking you're going to pull a miracle out of nowhere. You get out exactly as much as you put in."
Later this month in Houston, Davila is hoping to get an Olympic bid out of her years of hard work in Detroit. She's in an enviable position coming into the race, having posted two of the three fastest marathon times for an American woman in the past two years. There are plenty of others who could outduel her: Goucher, Flanagan, Kastor, Lewy Boulet, even her friend Amy Hastings. And there's the course itself, the sheer distance. Mary Keitany's performance in last November's New York City Marathon, in which she sprinted to an early course-record pace only to be caught and passed in Central Park, reminded Davila of the toll that 26.2 miles can take on the body. "Everyone looked to Mary Keitany as the best in the world, capable of handling 2:20," Davila says. Keitany's letdown at the end, she says, was a warning that "it's not the competitors that will do you in. It's the distance."
However things turn out in Houston, and possibly in London, there is a sense that Desiree Davila will do just fine regardless of the results. After Boston, she enjoyed the spoils of her performance for a few weeks. The Brooks-Hansons team gave her a nice bonus. (Her contract is a pay-for-performance deal. The faster she runs, the bigger her paychecks.) She appeared on TV shows, gave radio interviews, and threw out the first pitch at a Detroit Tigers game. She has her options open. A lucrative shoe contract with a bigger company is hers for the asking, but she's staying with the Brooks-Hansons team for now. Her roots in Detroit are about to get a lot deeper. Late last summer she and her boyfriend, a hometown Rochester boy, got engaged. They will marry next year.
"Who's the lucky guy?" I ask.
&CA Notice at Collection.
"The same 'condescending jerk' from five years ago?" I say.
"That's the guy," she says.
"What happened?"
Davila laughs. "He grew on me."
This is the constant lesson of Desiree Davila's life. People can improve. They just have to work at it.
Want to know who else you should be watching at the Trials in Houston? Check out our 10 Women to Watch and 11 Men to Watch articles.
She Can Do It!
Glamour girls (and training partners) Kara Goucher and Shalane Flanagan are among the favorites at the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials. But don't bet against Desi Davila, who's bringing her Boston-tested, blue-collar work ethic to Houston on January 14.
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Davila laughs. "He grew on me."
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