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July 31, 2007

Going the distance

Lewisburg’s Baylor striving to make U.S. Olympic Trials

By Todd Stanford

LEWISBURG — This is the story of how a soccer player became a sprinter, how a sprinter became a distance runner, and how that distance runner is now within striking distance of a trip to the Olympic Trials in the marathon.

This story is about Aimee Baylor (formerly Gerlinski).

The former Lewisburg High track star (Class of 1990), now an assistant coach for the girls track team at her alma mater, is shooting for an invite to the U.S. Olympic Trials next April in Boston.

The top three there advance to the Beijing Games in August.

Baylor doesn’t entertain notions of traveling to Asia next summer, but just making the trials has become an allconsuming focus.

“I haven’t even thought past (the trials),” she says.

“That’s the only (running) goal I have: making the trials.”

Baylor, who lives in Lewisburg with her husband, Chris, and their two children, needs a time of 2:47 to make the Olympic Trials. She’s been accepted for the Chicago Marathon in October.

If she doesn’t get the time she needs there, she can still qualify at the Houston Marathon in January, among others.

But the window is closing fast. Baylor is excited about making the Chicago Marathon since it’s a flat course conducive to fast times.

However, the same was said about Grandma’s Marathon in Minnesota, which Baylor ran back in June. But it was extremely hot the day of the race and Baylor had to settle for a 3:02.

“It’s a fast course,” she says. “But I got there and it was 80 degrees by the halfway mark. My luck of the draw,” she adds with a laugh.

To think that Baylor would be running marathons is probably worth a chuckle to the people who knew her when she first moved to Lewisburg prior to the start of her junior year of high school. Baylor was born in California and lived for a time in upstate New York and Philadelphia. And though she always loved running track, she never cared for cross country because it interfered with her first love: soccer. But Lewisburg didn’t have a girls soccer program in the late ’80s.

“(I thought), ‘I guess I’ll run cross country, that will help me with track,’ ” she says.

But that doesn’t mean she was prepared to like it.

Originally, Baylor thought of herself as a sprinter.

“I didn’t want to accept that I could be good at distance,” she says. “I had it in my head that I was a sprinter.

... I really didn’t try — I hate to say it. But I really didn’t try as much as I should have.

And I don’t think that I was pushed that hard. Now, coaches are pushing girls to the level that they can. And I really think that in the late ’80s and ’90s, coaches didn’t push females as much as they do now.”

Baylor was more in her element on the track. She never made states in cross country, but she twice went to the PIAA Championships for track: once for the 400 and twice for both the 4x400 and 4x800 relays.

But she couldn’t just run track at Bloomsburg University, which she entered in the fall of 1990. Her coaches insisted that she run cross country, too. That’s when Baylor started to reach her potential as a distance runner.

“My coach (Tom Martucci) was the wrestling coach,” she says. “He was very demanding; he really worked us hard. ... So I really ran.

I think my first 5K race in college was an 18:50.” (Her previous best was in the 21:00 range.) Baylor continued to run middle distance, eventually earning the school record in the 1,500. She still runs 5K’s today, but something clicked when she ran her first marathon last November.

“I came to the finish line thinking, ‘That was too easy,’ ” she says.

With the help of her coach, Susquehanna track and cross country coach Marty Owens, and her training partner, Bucknell assistant track coach Rob Guissanie, she’s training to run a 2:46 marathon.

Baylor runs every day, rising at 5:30 a.m. for her training.

She runs 50-60 miles a week, and goes through a new pair of running sneakers every other month. She’s hoping it all pays off with a trip to Boston next year.

“It just baffles me, because all through college I hated cross country,” she says. “I thought it was the longest distance ever.”

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