ON A COUNTRY ROAD A FEW MILES NORTH of Rochester Hills, Michigan, just past where the pavement turns to dirt, a young couple runs left out of their driveway. As they approach a small but violently steep hill, they pass a sign warning “Limited View Distance.” For a few seconds, all the couple can see is the incline, and then the dirt road unrolls itself under their feet once more, revealing the miles ahead. Despite the September sun streaming through the trees, the chill has yet to lift, and over the course of a half hour, neither Desiree Linden nor her husband, Ryan, will break a sweat. “Easy days aren’t very fun,” she confesses. “If I could do a workout every day I would.”

In five months Linden will be in Los Angeles, clipping off miles at the Olympic Marathon Trials at a pace approximately two and a half minutes faster than she’s going right now. (You can see how she picked up a second-place finish in our recap of the trials here.) And yet she has approached today’s challenge—taking it slow—with the same kind of unwavering focus with which she races. A tweaked calf muscle—a souvenir from her track season—has been just enough of a nuisance that she recently decided to take a full week off from running. “For the type of personality that succeeds in endurance sports,” chiropractic sports physician John Ball will say after Linden visits his practice in Phoenix later this week, “doing the work isn’t the hard part. Everyone goes to bed early, they get the core work in. It’s Des’s self-control—her ability to back off when she needs to—that really sets her apart.”

An introvert, the 32-year-old Linden is more comfortable talking about books than talking about herself. With a sense of humor as dry as her home state of California, not to mention her predilection for sunglasses, she takes after her favorite writer, Joan Didion. The 5-foot tall Didion argued that her greatest advantage as a journalist came from being “so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive…that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.” Likewise, the 5-foot-1, 98-pound Linden has, despite a series of top finishes in major marathons, continued to flourish under the radar. An unofficial poll of the checkout line at the grocery store nearest her home reveals that not a single person within earshot has heard of her.

Linden shrugs at the suggestion that she deserves to be ranked alongside Shalane Flanagan as America’s top marathoner. “You want to be so good that people can’t forget,” she says with typical humility. “That’s kind of the point of the whole thing. Shalane is constantly reminding you that she is freaking good. I just want to have a performance that’s memorable.”

Ryan keeps their kitchen “on point,” according to Desiree’s sister. David W. Johnson

HER HUSBAND HAS SEEN—OR, IN THE CASE of 2011, not seen—his wife play a starring role in two of the most thrilling conclusions in Boston Marathon history, and he knows that for her to dismiss her second-and fourth-place finishes as “unmemorable” simply because she didn’t break the tape is more than a little misleading. In that 2011 race, Ryan Linden was struggling a few miles up the road, blood beginning to seep through his shoe, when he got wind that an American woman had taken second. “Who was the top American?” he pleaded with the crowd lining the streets. “Does anyone know the top American?” Desiree Davila, he eventually heard. Did the news of his then-fiancee’s duel down Boylston make the final stretch of his own race any easier? “If anything, it made it last longer,” he says, groaning at the memory. “I just wanted to be celebrating with her.”

He finished in 2:34:11 that day, 11 and a half minutes behind his fiancee. The Rochester native fell in with the Hansons-Brooks team more than a decade ago. Despite never achieving the standard to become an official team member, his charm and optimism were a welcome presence, not only on training runs, but also at the team house on Tienken Road that his future wife shared with two other women. “I didn’t make the team,” he says, before adding, with a wide-eyed sense of wonder, “but I got the trophy.” They married in 2013, the same year Ryan turned his attention to triathlons.

“Desiree is very reserved, focused, competitive, witty, disciplined,” her sister, Natalie Davila, observes, “and Ryan knows how to be complementary to that. I love that they’re able to train together and have fun together, but that he also knows when to take a backseat and let her do her thing. Also, he is an amazing cook. Their kitchen is really on point because of him.”

KEVIN HANSON DRIVES LIKE SOMEONE WHO has spent his whole life within shouting distance of the Motor City, which means about 10 miles per hour faster than seems necessary. Over a panoply of country roads, he interrupts himself periodically to point out landmarks—Eminem’s house, Kevorkian’s cottages, his own running shoe store in Lake Orion—but keeps circling back to the matter at hand: attempting to explain how, three-plus years after the catastrophe of the London Olympics, Desiree Linden is positioned to put it all behind her in 2016.

“The biggest thing that drives my wife crazy,” Hanson says, “and my wife has run under three hours in the marathon, is that I really do get emotionally invested. When an athlete’s hurt, I am hurt. I have to walk away because I want to cry, too. Sometimes athletes misinterpret that, because they think I’m mad at them. When someone runs a dumb race, we can sit down and fix it. When someone’s not working hard enough, we can sit down and fix it. When somebody’s hurt, I can’t fix it.”

Hanson couldn’t fix it in July 2012, when, with less than a month until London, Linden developed such excruciating pain in her right hip that, despite a clean MRI and a diagnosis of tendinitis, she was forced to drop out of the Olympic marathon a little more than two miles into the race. The timing of the injury made it extra cruel: She was coming off a breakthrough year which saw her run the then-third-fastest marathon ever by an American woman, 2:22:38, along with a speedy 15:08 in the 5,000 meters. She had taken a conservative approach at the Olympic Trials in Houston, placing second to Flanagan, and felt ready to make a splash in London. Then came the injury, which a follow-up MRI after the Olympics revealed to be a femoral stress fracture. “There was probably some degree of relief when she found out why it hurt,” Ball says. “And for the rest of us, it was like, Holy s--- she’s tough. For her to be swallowing it back, going to the line, determined to run? Wow.”

But Hanson could tell that the Olympic setback for his star runner was more than physical. A DNF on the world’s biggest stage was a huge blow, psychologically. “At the time,” he says, “she didn’t know if she’d still be doing it in 2016. How could she know?”

Sixteen years have passed since Kevin and his younger brother, Keith Hanson, launched the Hansons-Brooks Original Distance Project, a grassroots effort to bring U.S. distance running—particularly marathoning—back into global contention. Their philosophy of “accumulated fatigue” training paid off: Hansons-Brooks placed seven men in the top 22 at the 2006 Boston Marathon and Brian Sell made the 2008 Olympic Marathon squad, capturing the imagination of self-identified blue-collar runners everywhere.

And yet, for all the Hansons’ domestic success, Linden is only their second Olympian. It should also be noted that she recruited them, instead of the other way around. Her 16:17 PR in the 5,000 while at Arizona State was two seconds slower than the team standard at the time, and it took, in her words, “being annoying enough” via phone and email to catch the brothers’ attention. Also helpful was the fact that her college coach, Walt Drenth, ran with Keith Hanson at Michigan State. Eventually she convinced them to bring her on as sort of an associate member. Those first couple of years she funded it all herself, paying $200 rent for a room in the Tienken House and landing a job working retail at the internet warehouse for Moosejaw, a local outdoor gear company. She answered customer service emails until 2011, when her near-victory at Boston abruptly changed her financial situation.

Natalie Davila didn’t think it would be a good long-term fit for her sister the first time she visited Michigan, in February 2006. “There was a storm,” Davila recalls, “and with the wind chill it dropped to like 14 degrees. One day Desiree actually took me out for a run—gave me all the clothes, everything I needed to be prepared—and I only lasted like 10 minutes. My feet were almost numb, and I didn’t want to fall on my face or break anything. As I turned around I remember thinking, ‘How is she gonna do this? How can you train out here?’”

But Linden’s coach is pretty convincing when it comes to defending his stomping grounds. “I know the stereotypes,” Hanson says. “We’re buried in snow half the year, and it’s a concrete jungle because of Detroit.” He shows off the rolling hills, the soft surfaces, and the six-mile bike path around Stony Creek Lake where the hardest work gets done. “They plow it before they plow the road,” he says, pointing out the trail he and his coaches have worn in the tall grass between the road and one of the mile markers where they deliver splits. “We don’t actually get any lake effect snow around here,” he explains, then goes on to acknowledge that winter does pose certain challenges when it comes to the pace-specific workouts the team swears by. And so, as usual, he’ll bring the entire team down to central Florida in late December, where they will spend six weeks drilling pace in the orange groves, once again readying themselves for a shot at the Olympics.

AT TIMES, RIO MUST HAVE FELT IMPOSSIBLY far away to Linden, but she maintained her confidence even at the beginning of what turned out to be a year away from racing. “It never left,” Hanson says. “When she went to London, she was like, ‘Even if I can’t produce the race I want here, I can get an idea of the whole Olympic thing. I’ll know what it’s like to live in the village. I’ll learn how to do all the little things so that when I’m ready to do this right, I’ll do it right.’“

But it wasn’t easy for her to embrace that mindset. She was so torn up about the mysterious injury that she considered not marching in the opening ceremonies. It took a heartfelt letter from Magdalena Boulet, who expressed the regret she felt about skipping the closing ceremonies four years earlier in Beijing, to convince Linden of the value of celebrating her achievement. At the same time, as her coach reminded her, this was a unique opportunity to practice being at the Olympics. Her total nightmare became, in a sense, a kind of mental cross-training.

The stress fracture healed, and she slowly returned to running over the early months of 2013. She decided to run the Berlin Marathon that fall but was quickly forced to rein in her ambitions. “I had to step back and remind myself,” she says, “that this is a four-year process. It’s okay if this one isn’t your greatest marathon. Still, at the start of it, I was like, I can run 2:26, let’s train for 2:26. But as we got into it, I just couldn’t hit a workout, and struggled through everything.”

Hanson convinced her to adjust her goals, and she ended up with the 2:29 they planned for in Berlin, and then a 2:23 10th-place finish in Boston the following spring, a race in which Shalane Flanagan set an incredibly hard early pace (going through the half in under 70 minutes) before drug cheat Rita Jeptoo decimated the field over the final 10K en route to a too-good-to-be-true 2:18.

By the time she was building up to the 2014 New York City Marathon, Linden finally felt ready to throw herself in there and contend for a win again. Then came a postrun encounter with a chair, resulting in a broken toe. “What some might consider a crisis,” she jokes. At the time, she wrote in her journal:

If the shoe fits, go run. It took six days but the swelling in my foot/toe is finally down enough to get my shoe on and run relatively pain free. The trick will be getting back on track at the right pace and not causing the whole thing to balloon up again. Good news is this is the first segment since The Games where I feel normal, like I’m running and moving like myself again. I’ve put in some good work so far and know 2:24 shape is just around the corner. I can’t decide if it’s hilarious or f—-ing horrible that my body handled 5 x 2 fine, but I broke a toe on the way to the couch to have my post-workout recovery drink—happy to learn that the little toe is purely ornamental. Six weeks to the marathon, time to get fit.

She would go on to finish fifth on a windswept day in New York. This year in Boston she pushed the pace for mile after mile, inexorably breaking up the field, before settling for a very competitive fourth place, just 44 seconds back in 2:25:39. In both races, she was the top American by a sizable margin.

Frank Browne, her coach at Hilltop High in Chula Vista, California, recalls the moment when, 15 years ago, Linden told him she wanted to make the Olympics. At the time she fancied herself a miler, but he knew that her greatest chance to succeed was going to come in the marathon. Despite her youth, he decided not to mince words when responding. “She liked that direct answer,” he says. “Don’t mistake her quietness for a lack of passion. She’s super intense. She wants to win.”

David W. Johnson

IN AUGUST, THE LINDENS BOUGHT A COTTAGE “up north” on Lake Charlevoix. Desiree Linden excitedly describes the terrain as “Hemingway country,” and goes on to explain there is no cell service, but there are plenty of dirt roads, trails, and water—and it’s where she’s going to be doing a lot of her base work over the next few months.

At the beginning of her buildups for the past two Boston marathons, she went to Iten, Kenya, for month-plus stints of distraction-free altitude training. There won’t be enough time to fit a trip overseas into her schedule before the trials this winter, but her experiences in Kenya have fundamentally changed the way she looks at noncompetitive running. “It’s social time,” she says. “Everyone goes out running together. Before going there, I couldn’t imagine myself continuing to run after I retire.”

She has loosened up in her approach to training as well. For her first few years as a professional—and even including Boston 2011—she was dead set on hitting every workout, every split, and every mile. “I wouldn’t say I’ve gotten lazy,” she says, “but I’ve become far more relaxed about the things that go in the training log. And at the same time, I have become more meticulous about the details outside of the miles: I’m better about eating right, getting rest, stretching, and so on.”

As usual, she and her coaches won’t set a time goal for the trials until the first few weeks of the marathon training segment, or 10 to 12 weeks out from race day. But it’s no secret that they hope to keep the pace honest. “We want to make sure that it’s 2:25 or faster,” Hanson says, “because that would be into a range that no one has run recently other than Desi and Shalane.”

Most of the workouts during the first half of the segment will be done at marathon pace, which usually feels so comfortable for Linden that she’ll find herself holding back. Around six weeks into it, just as the fatigue is setting in, the workouts will shift down to 10 seconds faster than marathon pace. “This is one of the areas that has changed as I’ve gotten better at the marathon,” she says. “I’m much less concerned with hitting exactly 10 seconds faster than pace. I’m more focused on running at an effort that seems appropriate.”

During peak mileage, Linden tackles two vital workouts: a 26.2K tempo run (the Hansons’ notorious “marathon simulator”), which is run at marathon pace, and 2 x 6 miles, usually run five seconds faster than marathon pace. At this point she’ll have an acute sense of her fitness.

“If you had asked me what my goal was at any point during my buildup,” she says about her 2011 race in Boston, “I would have said, ‘To win the Boston Marathon.’ You know? You act as if that’s what you expect to happen, and then you go and execute. I visualized it, mapped it out in my mind, that I was going to win the Boston Marathon. And I know that sounds absurd. And I know if I’d told anybody beforehand, they’d have patted me on the back and gone, ‘Okay, sweetie.’”

She isn’t going to get any condescending back pats for talking big these days, but then again, there is perhaps no professional athlete less likely to talk big than Desiree Linden. She has proven herself to be a relentless force in big races, and nobody with any awareness of her body of work would be shocked if she placed highly in Rio next year. She has consistently shown the kind of savvy gutsiness that carried Deena Kastor and Meb Keflezighi to Olympic medals in 2004. But first things first: make the team, and get to the line healthy. “I just want to finish this time,” she says, totally deadpan.

“She’s not a robot,” Ball says. “Some people, their highs are so high, and their lows are so low. And Des is just straight down the middle. It’s just a different way of processing adversity.”

Even though the tweaked calf muscle has held her back, she’s glad to have concentrated on improving her speed this past summer. “To back off the heavy strength work and freshen up was important,” she says. Having run four increasingly successful marathons over the past 24 months, Linden has learned how to peak twice a year. Now she’ll rely on all that hard-won knowledge to get her through the ups and downs of what might end up being the most important year of her career.

“I don’t know how to verbalize this,” Hanson says, “but some athletes will do everything right, and then they want to believe in their training. Desi believes in her training. There are no doubts on race day about what she’s capable of doing, because she knows. She makes it happen because that’s what’s supposed to happen. It sounds so easy, but so few people can do it.”

ON THE OPENING AFTERNOON OF THE NFL season, the Lindens meet up with some of their closest friends to watch Detroit take on San Diego. With only a few minutes left, Danny Woodhead squirts into the end zone, turning it into a two-possession game. Elsewhere in the pub, long-suffering Lions fans grumble about the blown lead—How typical!—while Linden, a lifelong Chargers fan, puts down her pint of stout and silently pumps her fist. If she ever finds herself breaking the tape at a major marathon, she will probably do so in similarly understated fashion.

Later on, she puts both elbows on the table and admits, “I don’t win a lot of races, ever.” She hesitates for several seconds, as if there’s nothing more to say, then laughs quietly. “I know I did everything I could, but sometimes I look back at Boston like, What if it was just me getting soft? What if the thought crept in that maybe I shouldn’t win the Boston Marathon? I need to get over that hump and just win a race. To know what it feels like to break someone.”

It’s true: She’s never won a big race. But a marathoner’s schedule—one or two a year—doesn’t offer many chances. In hopes of “breaking someone,” she threw herself into the 10,000 meters at the Pan-American Games over the summer, grabbing the lead seven laps from the finish, only to be outkicked by Mexico’s Brenda Flores. It was a gutsy performance in an event she rarely runs. But we’re left to wonder what a Desiree Linden victory will look like.

Whether or not it ever happens, there remains a fascinating kind of marathon that perhaps she alone can run: the kind in which she appears to take zero interest in what her competitors are doing until about mile 20. Sometimes it’s meant she’s been at the front (Boston, 2015), other times she’s run from behind (Boston, 2011), and sometimes a combination of the two (New York, 2014).

“A lot of people feel that it’s mentally easier to run in a group,” she says. “If they feel like they’re losing the group, they panic. Oh, they’re running away from me, I’m out of it. I just look at it a different way. They’re doing their thing, I’m doing my thing, eventually it’s gonna come back together. And if it doesn’t, I can’t do that thing anyway—5:15s are out of my wheelhouse.”

The people closest to her marvel at what it’s like to watch her go about her business on race day.

“It’s sort of a serene experience,” Ball says. “Wherever she is, I just have to assume that’s exactly where she plans to be, and wants to be. Even if she were five minutes behind, I would assume that Desi plans to be five minutes behind right now. That’s just the way she does it.”

“We’ll see what the other guy does,” Hanson says. “Desi will never show up to a marathon with that frame of mind. As if that’ll make a change in her race plan. Not in a marathon. And I think it actually helps her relax. If you show up wondering, Is so-and-so gonna go crazy from the gun? Is she gonna relax? Am I gonna have to respond? you won’t know what’s going to happen. No matter what anyone else does, Desi knows her race plan. And has every time.”

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