The road to the 2020 Olympic Marathon Trials is long and hard — and for two St. Louis runners, it begins in Forest Park. 

“I run here seven days a week,” says Julia Kohnen, who currently logs between 100 and 110 miles each week, all of them in Forest Park. “The Park just has so many different routes. We have a 4-mile flat loop, a 5-mile loop, a hilly loop–there are so many trails throughout the Park that I don’t think people even realize.”

Molly Culver recalls training for the Indy Marathon exclusively in Forest Park. “I remember doing a 23-miler,” she says. “I think I did the outer loop almost five times because I wanted to do some hills. The last time, I thought Oh my God as I went up that hill by the dinosaur.”

Culver and Kohnen only recently met, but they share a similar story of falling into running rather accidentally.

Kohnen played basketball and soccer in high school, both for clubs and on the school’s varsity teams. When she went to college, she was forced to pick one sport, and so she chose soccer. She played four successful years at Southern Indiana University, but when her team lost the final game during her senior year, the realization that it was over set in. “I was depressed,” she recalls. 

Kohnen started running to stay in shape, thinking her competitive athletic days were behind her. That was until she caught the eye of the cross country coach who asked her why she was running everyday and then invited her to try out for cross country. “My first response was I don’t know a single thing. I’ve never even been to a cross country meet,” she says.

Culver grew up as a competitive swimmer; it’s what brought her to St. Louis. She swam distance in college at Saint Louis University. When her college season was over, she wanted a change. “I was totally burnt out of swimming, so I started running,” she says. “I’ve always been an endurance athlete, so I was running a decent amount–like 100 plus mile weeks without realizing what I was doing.”

It was Culver’s dad — a former swimmer, turned triathlete, and now coach–who told Culver that she was running more miles than one of his athletes who was training for a 50-miles race. When her dad suggested that she also run the race, Culver agreed. She ended up winning the North Face Endurance Challenge in 2013 and began regularly competing as an ultra-marathoner.

Kohnen and Culver dominated their running fields from the start. Kohnen set school records that still stand and was a four-time All-American in track and in cross country. “I played soccer for four years but was never an All-American. I did cross country and track for one year and was a four-time All-American,” she says. “I thought maybe I did the wrong sport for four years.”

After winning her first 50-mile race, Culver continued to race at this distance for the next four years. She decided to switch to marathon running about two years ago. “I wanted to race more than just once a year without tearing up my body,” she says. 

Culver’s first marathon was the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon in Arizona in January 2019. She had just run a 50-mile race in December and decided that she would go out “cold Turkey” to see if she liked the distance. She ended up running a 3:05 pace, which earned her 5th place. “It was amazing,” she says. “I wasn’t completely dead after. I remember being able to go out with friends after. I loved it because I could run faster and race more often.”  

She was hooked.

Kohnen was also setting her eyes on the marathon distance. She was back in St. Louis with a new job, so she wasn’t running the strict miles she was in college, but she decided to run the GO St. Louis Half Marathon. It was her first time racing this distance, and she surprised herself when she ended up winning the race. “I had a couple people come up to me after the race — they are the girls I run with everyday now — but at the time they were like who do you run with,” she recalls.

Kohnen ran her first marathon in 2:47, and she received her qualifying time for the Olympic trials at the 2017 Chicago Marathon, which she ran in 2:39. This fall she ran and won her third marathon, the Twin Cities Marathon in 2:31. She’s currently ranked in the top 30 runners based on this time.

Culver was always aware of the 2:45 cut for the Olympic trials and when she ran a 2:49 in 2018, she knew she could go faster with a couple more years of training. She increased her mileage to 80 to 95 miles a week and began doing a lot more speed work. It paid off. At the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon in November, Culver ran a qualifying time of 2:38.

They are now are in the final weeks of training before the “country’s most exclusive marathon” takes place in Atlanta on February 29.

Only the top three men and women finishers will represent the United States in Japan.

But as Kohnen says, “just competing with some of the best marathoners in the country is awesome.”