Sunrise Thursday and Clara Grandt Santucci glimpses out her window at the Hollywood letters casting across the Santa Monica mountains.
She’s headed out of her hotel for an early training run. Last week’s hamstring tightness has subsided, but then, no one expects a perfect build-up to these Olympic marathon trials. The incessant training required to compete here eliminates some runners before the big moment arrives. She woke up to the news that American record-holder Deena Kastor had withdrawn because of a strained glute.
Four years ago Kastor edged her by six seconds for the final Olympic alternate spot. Four years haven’t dulled the thrill Santucci felt racing alongside her idol, trying not to act starstruck yet catching herself thinking, “She’s awesome!”
Santucci’s time at those 2012 trials, 2:30:46, would have qualified her for the 1996 U.S. team and would have led the trials in 2000 and 2008. That day it was good enough for only seventh.
“It’s still the best race I’ve ever run,” said the two-time Pittsburgh Marathon champion. “It just turned out to be the best Olympic trials there have ever been.”
Only 24 years old and unknown in elite running circles when she missed out on the London Games, Santucci has been running toward Rio de Janeiro ever since. Getting there likely requires running the race of her life Saturday against a stacked field, on a course that twists through L.A landmarks like Staples Center, the University of Southern California campus and the Los Angeles Coliseum, where Joan Benoit Samuelson won the 1984 gold medal.
Santucci, born four years after those LA Games, has watched and rewatched video of the iconic finish when Samuelson waved her painter’s cap to 90,000 fans and became the first women’s marathon champion.
“Now I get chills whenever I see the stadium,” she says.
Just two more sunrises to go.
*****
Her father moved the family from Illinois to rural Doddridge County when Santucci was a child. He found a single-room schoolhouse and put his carpentry skills to work making it a home.
“It was beat-down and looked like it was 100 years old, but my dad had this vision of what it could be,” she said. “It ended up being a good little place to grow up in the country.”
Santucci appreciated how the low-income upbringing shaped the five children—raising chickens, tending garden, baking bread with their mother from grains they ground. They also stockpiled wood for the winter, which saved them during a blizzard that knocked out power for 10 days.
“That meant no water for us,” said Santucci’s mother, Diana Grandt. “So we had to melt snow and we huddled around that wood stove to stay warm.”
“It was a bare-minimum lifestyle and you worked for what you had. Now I think about how I might raise my kids, because there were some things it was good for me not to have. I appreciate things and I’m so grateful for what I have.” — Clara Santucci
Grandt home-schooled the children, and Santucci studied rigorously for spelling tests, knowing the reward for a perfect score would be bullets to shoot from her .22 rifle.
“I loved target practice,” she says.
Without a television the kids also grew infatuated with hiking the forests, swimming in a nearby creek, and when Santucci had more energy to expel, she ran up and down the gravel road in front of her home. Around age 9, after seeing a photo of gymnast Kerri Strug’s one-foot landing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Santucci was sparked. So she went searching for a sport, “something I could be good at.”
That began with a trip to a community library, which was housed in a trailer, where her mom checked out books for home-schooling. Santucci read up on gymnastics, tennis and ice skating—“all the things I saw in the Olympics”—but the family didn’t live near training facilities and couldn’t afford to pay a coach if it did.
Unable to find a sport, a sport eventually found her.
Santucci begged her way to attending public school in fifth grade—“I told my mom I was lonely and I wanted to meet people”—and soon was running a mile-long fitness test in gym class.
“The other kids were doing it because they had to, but I took it seriously,” she said. “I just wanted to see how fast I could go around the little gym 21 times.”
She finished in 7 minutes, and the P.E. teacher summoned her to the bleachers. He produced a newspaper clipping of a runner who had recently broken the school’s 2-mile record. He told Santucci, “This is going to be you someday.”
*****
West Virginia University track and cross country coach Sean Cleary recruits athletes of national and international acclaim, perhaps none so driven as the fragile-looking local girl from Doddridge County High School.
One of 15 cross country All-Americans Cleary has coached, she remains the only one who growls.
He heard it while sauntering up behind Santucci at a practice when fellow All-Americans Keri Bland and Marie-Louise Asselin sprinted past during a speed workout.
“I heard her growling, and I mean growling,” he said. “I went ‘What is that?’ And she says, “It just makes me so mad they can sprint like that.’ That would be Clara. When she puts her shoes on to race, there’s a desire that’s very rare.
“While she’s soft-spoken and gentle and very kind, she’s nasty inside. What’s going on in her head during a race is she wants to destroy you.”
“While she’s soft-spoken and gentle and very kind, she’s nasty inside. What’s going on in her head during a race is she wants to destroy you.” — WVU track coach Sean Cleary
Fresh out of college and lacking endorsements, Santucci was struck by the reality that she might never break even running—much less earn a living. Then, in 2011, she posted a stunning 2:29:54 in her first marathon, which just happened to be the Boston Marathon. She finished 16th on the women’s side, placed third among Americans and earned her first sponsorship.
A 2014 victory at the Pittsburgh Marathon “put her on a whole new level,” Cleary says, though it was her 2015 repeat that showed more of her competitive guts.
Aliphine Tuliamuk-Bolton held a 2-minute edge during the back half, a lead so comfortable race directors were holding the Kenyan flag at the finish line. But when Santucci heard how she had shaved off 33 seconds in the span of one mile, the gap didn’t seem insurmountable.
“Her eyes lit up and you could see another fire,” Cleary said.
Living in nearby Dilliner, Pa., Santucci had trained on the course. Now she kept reminding herself, “These are my hills. These are my hills. They’re mine.”
Upon finally closing within sight of Tuliamuk-Bolton at the 23-mile mark, the comeback gained another surge once Santucci saw the leader glancing back.
“That’s a sign she’s not thinking about the finish line. It means she’s very tired and she’s worried about you. Of course I’m tired, too, but I can’t look tired. You have to pass her with confidence and look like you’re not hurting as much as she is.
“So you straighten yourself up, put on a surge and make sure she can’t attach to you and draft. Basically, you run by and leave no hope.”
Cleary had seen Santucci bypass superior athletes before. He hopes he sees it again Saturday in Los Angeles.
“Clara is not fast. She was one of the slowest kids in our program ever. But Clara has got more stamina than anyone I’ve ever met. If there was a race where they were going to run up Mount Everest, she’d probably win.”
*****
Santucci logged so many miles on her Keds in middle school they became riddled with holes. Eventually she saved enough money mowing lawns, weed-eating, housecleaning and baby-sitting to purchase her first pair of Nikes, shoes that remain a keepsake to this day inside a tote bag.
The kid who came of age making shoes last for years now tears through a pair a month, thanks to incessant six-days-a-week training. There’s a 4- to 5-mile run each morning, another 10 to 12 miles in the afternoon. Extended runs on Sunday cover 20-plus miles.
“On Christmas Day a world-class marathoner probably runs 17 miles,” Cleary says. “There’s no time off. It never ends, regardless of weather.”
Even as Winter Storm Jonas blanketed the East Coast, Santucci ran over the ice and through the snow, just like she envisioned in middle school when her great grandmother splurged for a subscription to Runner’s World.
Saturday, however, will be unseasonably warm in Los Angeles, where temperatures expected to climb into the 80s. That’s a factor Santucci considered when mixing in treadmill work with the thermostat pumped up.
“The heat definitely will slow down the pace,” she says. “People will be more concerned about making it through the whole race without hitting a wall. It depends on who figures out how to be conservative enough and who might go over the edge too early and come crawling in.”
The field features the three Olympic qualifiers from 2012 and a deep batch of new contenders—some of whom have posted tremendous personal-bests but haven’t matched Santucci’s consistency. Cleary projects three or four favorites with Santucci in a close-behind group hoping to capitalize on race-day mistakes.
“That’s why she’s been training for four years—to be ready for a moment when the door opens.”