Coatesville's Dawson aiming for the Olympic marathon

Kyle Dawson's first marathon will be a big one. On Feb. 13, he is to run in the Olympic Marathon Trials in Los Angeles. The top three male and female runners are to go on to represent the United States this summer in the Rio 2016 Olympics.

"I've been working towards this goal for a while and to finally achieve it is pretty incredible," he said of qualifying for the opportunity to try out for an Olympic team.

Dawson, 27, is from Coatesville and ran for Penn State. Since graduating in 2012, he's run for the Bryn Mawr Running Company, but he didn't set his sights on the marathon. He figured he'd try to qualify in the 10,000-meter distance, but his coach, David Lapp, wanted him to run a half marathon. He finished in 1 hour, 6 minutes, 11 seconds in the Philadelphia Half Marathon in November, 1:11 over the time he'd need to qualify for the trials. Runners can get into the trials through a half marathon or marathon time.

Because of that performance, Dawson was invited to the run the Jacksonville Half Marathon, which was putting together a group of elite runners who would all go after the half marathon qualifying time. It was just about a last chance, too. Runners need to post such a time by Sunday, and the race was held on Jan. 3.

"All of the guys who wanted to qualify ran right with the rabbit, and we all finished hard together and got the job done," Dawson said. He finished in 1:04:35, 25 seconds under the half marathon qualifying requirement.

Now he's working on two things: recovering from the race and then moving to longer workouts to prepare him for the marathon. That means long runs of 20 instead of 15 or 16 miles and weekly mileage up around 105 instead of the 90s.

And then see how he does. He's one of 200 men who qualified for the trials.

"It's a lot to think about not having done a marathon yet, and there are a lot of guys who have run marathons before who are also really good at it," Dawson said. "I'm going to run it hard and go after it. It's really all I can do."

If not, he'll try to make it onto the team as he originally hoped.

"I'll take some time to recover and then start focusing on the 10,000 meters, which would be more speed-orientated work," Dawson said.

Those trials are to be held in early July.

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