Amber Green became a runner in the way that many people do these days. She wanted to run a marathon, just to see if she could. She ran the 2000 St. George Marathon, shortly before her 20th birthday, in 4:23:37, and she figured that would be the end of her running career.

Green played volleyball in high school, but she did not have a running background, and didn’t consider herself to be particularly active.

“As I got to the end of [the 2000 St. George Marathon], I was like, ‘No, I’ll never do this again. It hurts too bad,’” Green told Runner’s World Newswire.

But like many marathoners, she enjoyed the feeling of accomplishment, and eventually came around to the idea of doing another one. As part of her honeymoon in 2002, she ran the San Diego Marathon with her husband, Matt Green, in 4:14:51. It was an improvement, but nothing that hinted at her potential in the sport.

On her fifth try and 31st marathon, Green qualified for the 2016 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials, by running 2:41:19 at the Grandma’s Marathon on June 20. She’ll compete against the country’s best marathoners at the Olympic Trials on February 13, 2016, in Los Angeles.

But it took Green, now 34, a long time and a lot of work to realize her potential. She ran one more marathon in 2002, a 4:02:29, before she began having children. She now has three boys—Daxton, 11; Konrad, 9; and Jace, 7. Though balancing parenthood with training was a challenge, Green found that, with each child she had, her love of running and dedication to the sport grew.

“Running is honestly my sanity and therapy,” Green, a resident of St. George, Utah, said. “[Running] kept me from being depressed, but more than that, if I was following a running schedule, then the rest of my life was really structured and scheduled, too. As far as having children and going through raising them and being committed to them all day, it really helped me give more to them instead of going crazy.”

By the time Green had Jace in 2008, she had lowered her personal best in the marathon to just over 3:00. Several months after giving birth to Jace, she ran 3:29:55 at the St. George Marathon, and then she decided to get really serious.

“I never planned on being now where I am, but I’m so grateful because, honestly, it’s just like anything you do that you love, you’re going to get better at it,” Green said. “It was a gradual process. Every marathon, I would gradually get a little faster. But really, once I started devoting my time to following a schedule more and doing a little more speedwork, [and having] a little more consistency, that’s when I started seeing more significant drops.”

Green began logging her running on a website called fastrunningblog.com, which provided her with a running community and support she hadn’t previously had.

“It was super helpful for me, just to have that community support. I felt like I was still a new runner and I just gained a lot of tips from other runners,” Green said. “It was a huge motivator to me.”

At one point, before Jace was born, someone on the site commented about Green’s potential. It caused her to wonder if she had what it would take to qualify for the Olympic Marathon Trials someday.

To qualify for the Olympic Trials, Green would have to run an eligible marathon in 2:43:00 or faster between August 1, 2013, and January 17, 2016. She had run 2:43:00 and 2:40:04 at the 2012 and 2013 St. George Marathons, but the first performance was outside of the qualifying window, and the St. George course is too downhill to count as a Trials qualifying race.

In the end, qualifying for the Trials took five attempts. During a low point in her training, Green considered giving up, after her first three attempts did not work out and she was struggling with injuries.

“I thought, ‘I don’t know if I want to do this anymore,’” Green said. “I just wanted to give up and move on with my life. I [felt] like I invested so much time and energy and so many runs, even though I love it and I’ll always run, I just didn’t know if I wanted to be that high intensity still.”

But Green recognized her situation as an important teaching moment for her children.

“My kids [were] watching me and they [wanted] me to succeed, too. I just couldn’t give up. I just wanted to show them that it doesn’t matter—you’re going to fall down, you’re going to have some heartbreaks, and you’re going to have to have some hard times. You just have to get back and try again. So they really, truly were my motivation.”

In her first attempt, the 2014 Boston Marathon, because of a mathematical error, Green thought she was on pace to run 2:43:00 or faster and qualify for the Olympic Trials. When she realized her math was wrong with three miles to go, she tried to make up time, but it was too late. She ran 2:43:27.

Green tried again two months later, at the 2014 Grandma’s Marathon. She found that she had not recovered from Boston, and ran 2:45:59. In October, she ran 2:43:28 in winning the St. George Marathon for her second time, but because the course isn’t a Trials qualifier, she knew that qualifying there would not be an option. She tried again in December 2014, at the California International Marathon, and ran 2:43:42, another narrow miss.

After a couple of injuries and a little time off, Green ran the cold and rainy 2015 Boston Marathon. By mile 17, she realized it wasn’t going to be her day. She backed off to save herself for her next Trials attempt, and ran 2:48:07.

On June 20, Green finally had her day, running 2:41:19, and safely getting under the Trials standard.

“I can’t even begin to describe the feeling of crossing that finish line and being like, ‘Oh, yes, finally I did it,’” Green said. “It took me five attempts to do it, but it made it that much sweeter.”

While Green’s children were happy for her, they were far more excited about the family trip to Disneyland that will come along with their mother’s run at the Trials.

Since Grandma’s, Green has been doing less structured running, which works out well with her children’s schedules. As a stay-at-home mother, summer training is more challenging for Green, because her kids aren't in school. She’ll get back into structured training soon, which coincides nicely with her children’s return to school.

At the peak of her training, Green likes to run about 125 miles a week. In keeping with her Mormon faith, she takes Sundays off from running, which means squeezing those miles into a six-day block. Green does the bulk of her training before her children go to school, but uses part of their school day to do a second run or supplemental training, on top of her household responsibilities. She runs with others about three mornings a week.

Though Green has been mostly self-coached and has relied on the book Advanced Marathoning for her training in the past, Iain Hunter, a professor at Brigham Young University, helped her time her peak for Grandma’s. Hunter will coach Green through her next marathon, the St. George Marathon in October. If that goes well, they’ll continue the relationship through the Trials.

Green says it’s not just her training that has changed since her 4:23 marathon debut in 2000, but also the way she lives the nontraining hours of her days. She does supplemental training, including yoga, swimming, and strength training, and has focused on eating well. She follows a whole foods plant-based diet, and says she has derived “huge benefits” from that.

As she gears up for the Trials, Green says she is most excited about talking to and racing against Kara Goucher and Shalane Flanagan.

“I’m a huge fan of both of them. That’s what excites me, is to be in a race that’s so exciting for them also and just for the United States, for whoever is going to represent [the U.S. at the Olympic Games],” Green said. “I’m just so excited to be around that level of competition and that level of athleticism and just to see how that race unfolds.”

She hopes that her story will inspire others to go after their dreams.

“I’m honestly just like a normal, average, everyday girl. I’m nothing special. But if I can [qualify for the Olympic Trials], then anybody could, if that’s what they want,” Green said. “I hope it helps people to want to do things they might not have thought were possible.”

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