A Lifetime of Miles Before the Trials
“They say they want to go to the Olympics,” Riley Cook shares when asked about his four daughters, ages 13, 11, eight and seven, “but I’m not sure they know what that means.”
Cook knows. He’s been chasing the dream of Olympic qualification for the better part of 14 years, since his first marathon in 2009 at the age of 28. That day, he thought he was capable of running around 2:30; but he finished in 2:47 and landed in the medical tent with terrible cramping. Rather than saying what most people say when they suffer a painful physical comeuppance – “I’m never doing that again” – Cook turned to his wife in the med tent and said, “I’ve got to run another marathon.”
Marathoning runs in the family. Cook is the middle child of five. Each of his siblings has finished a marathon. His parents are marathoners, too – his mom the faster of the two much to the delight of Cook and his siblings. But the penchant for marathoning stretches beyond genetics: Cook's wife Amy is an accomplished runner with a 2:55 marathon PR to her credit. The two met as student-athletes at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, where they now live, work, train and raise their daughters.
After that first ill-fated attempt at the 26.2-mile distance, it took Cook two years to get to the start line of that next marathon, but nausea and cramps stalled his progress and he never made it to the finish. He ended up having to call his Mom for a ride home. Marathon number three served up some demoralizing headwinds and more GI issues, causing Cook to bonk and black out on the side of the course. That time he called Amy to come and fetch him roadside.
A runner made of lesser stuff might have thrown in the towel at that point, declared himself too short or too tall, too delicate or too rigid, or just plain not built for the specific endurance puzzle of the marathon. But Cook saw the difficulty as the challenge. And the challenge was the point.
“The marathon was the first distance that didn’t come easy at all. Running had always come naturally to me and I’d always been able to do somewhat well at other distances even with minimal training. But the marathon was the first one that was like, ‘you’re really going to have to earn it,’” Cook explains.
Marathon after marathon throughout his thirties, as his family expanded and he continued his work as a cost estimator at the Hill Air Force Base, Cook chiseled away at the project of marathon mastery. Each 26.2-mile test was an opportunity to do it better than the time before. Sometimes he was successful, like his first sub-2:30 race – a 2:29 at the Ogden Marathon in 2012 – and sometimes he wound up injured and sidelined, like the year he inexplicably presented with rhabdomyolysis, a dangerous muscular condition most commonly found in CrossFit athletes who have pushed themselves too far too fast. But Cook was motivated by success and failure alike; one was the carrot, the other the stick.
Unwilling to leave any stone unturned in the search for untapped marathon speed, Cook hired Irish coach John Starrett in 2016. He credits Starrett with “helping me understand not only what workouts I should be running, but also how to progress those workouts,” Cook explains. “He got me to change my mindset from fast intervals to more marathon-specific work.”
Under Starrett’s guidance, Cook moved from a college-esque diet of short, fast reps to longer workouts at slower paces with shorter rest. Starrett might assign eight by a mile with a float recovery early in a build and progress the weekly workout to seven by 2k, then six by 3k and, finally, five by 4k with a kilometer float. Within a few months of implementing the new approach, Cook won the Ogden Marathon for the first time and followed that up with a blazing 2:16:09 victory at the St. George Marathon in the fall. Because of the course’s 2,500-foot net elevation drop, the time didn’t count as an Olympic Trials Qualifier (OTQ), but it was a clear indication that Cook was on the right path.
It’s hard to say whether the marathon is, for Cook, a nut he’s trying to crack or if it’s the pearl he’s making in the oyster: that bit of grit that, over time and with patience and persistence and refinement, yields something valuable. One speaks to a performance, the other to a process.
The two came together in a moment of marathon apotheosis at the 2022 California International Marathon (CIM) when Cook found himself in the later stages of the race, running ahead of the US Olympic Trials standard of 2:18 and with a legitimate shot at earning himself the qualifier he’d been hunting for over a decade.
He’d gone out a little hot, hitting halfway at 1:07:59, and he’d felt strong until mile 20 when he began to slip off the back of the pack he’d been running with since the start. He fought his way back on, fell off again, recovered, and yo-yo’ed like that for another mile or two until he had to resign himself to doing the grim math of calculating just how much he could afford to slow down without letting the prize of the OTQ slip through his fingers.
It was a moment that his graveyard of prior marathon attempts had prepared him for: “I’ve learned to grind and fight for every second even when it’s not going great. I’ve learned through experience that you can grind more than you think you can at the end. You just learn through those terrible experiences that you’re tougher than you think, tougher than you give yourself credit for,” Cook recalls. “A mental strategy that I try to use – and that I definitely used in that race – was [to say]: ‘You’ve earned this for 20 miles. Don’t you dare give it up now for a little bit of comfort. Just go out and suffer for another 10k and don’t give up what you’ve already earned.’”
Cook says he wasn’t confident about hitting the standard until he passed his father with 400 meters to go. His Dad yelled encouragement and Cook pointed to him and pumped his fist in the air. At 200 meters to go Cook spotted his Mom and gave her the same exuberant gesture. When he crossed the finish line, the clock read 2:17:18: an OTQ with 42 seconds to spare and a hard-fought PR on a level course. Within minutes Cook found his mother in the crowd, her head bent over her phone, no doubt texting the news to family. He put a hand on her shoulder and said simply, “We did it.”
Cook cites the race as the result he’s most proud of in his career. “In my entire life it’s the only race I’ve ever cried tears of joy after,” he says. It took him the better part of his adult life and thousands upon thousands more miles after that inauspicious beginning in 2009, but Riley Cook, now 42 years old, will line up to race his first US Olympic Marathon Trials in Orlando, Florida on February 3rd.
It will be his 28th marathon.
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For Tracksmith’s Journal
photo cred: Spenser Heaps