A Fourth Trials for Knowles
By Ally Brewton
For a runner In a 12-week training cycle, losing five weeks sounds detrimental to the process. But not for someone as experienced as Laurie Knowles.
In 2018, Knowles was training for the California International Marathon, when her father was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia, and required a bone-marrow transplant. Post-transplant, her father would need 24-hour care, a responsibility that would be left to Knowles and her mother.
That cut out CIM, but with the support of her coaches and family, she decided to move up her race and compete at the CNO Financial Indianapolis Monumental Marathon, five weeks earlier.
It worked. Her time of 2 hours, 37 minutes and 52 seconds at the 2018 Indianapolis Monumental broke the course record.
Knowles started seriously running in ninth grade. She enjoyed it, and she continued to run through four years of high school in Ohio and college at the University of Arkansas.
Shortly after graduating Knowles ran her first marathon--at the Boston Marathon, with its early downhill miles and punishing late climbs.
It was not much fun. “My legs felt like glass for the last three or four miles,” she said. After the race, she thought, “I’m never running another marathon again.”
But those feelings did not last long. She was highly motivated to improve and wanted to run a marathon without feeling bad afterwards.
She went on to qualify for four Olympic Trials while also being a mother to two.
Her college coach, Lance Harter, said he is “not surprised at all” by Knowles’s success because she “never stopped having the desire of wanting to compete.”
The 2016 Olympic Trials in Los Angeles was going to be Knowles’s last. However, she left the race feeling like she could have done better after dropping out at 16 miles.
“I am not ending on that,” she said.
This competitive spirit pushed her to qualify for the 2020 Olympic Trials, which would be held in Atlanta, where she and her family live.
Knowles doesn’t think that the trials will be a race for setting personal records, but she expects it to be an exciting time with her family there to support her.
Knowles knows the significance of her career. She also knows that she has more things, like family, that will always be more important. So, when she was feeling fatigued at Indianapolis, she thought, “[My] dad is about to go through this huge trial. [I] can suck it up for two miles.
“You realize the running is important, and you really love it,” she said, “but at the end of the day all it is, is a race.”
Leading up to the 2020 U.S. Olympic Team Trials – Marathon, Atlanta Track Club partnered with the Grady Sports Media program at the University of Georgia to profile some of the competitors in the 2020 Olympic Marathon Trials. The authors of these stories are undergraduate students enrolled in the program and have been lightly edited by the Club. See all of the stories at https://www.atlanta2020trials.com/news/uga-trials-project.