Image: Shutterstock

This week's Olympic Marathon Trials will feature more than just professional runners toeing the line. There will also be parents, teachers, doctors, dieticians—and lawyers.

More than 700 of the country's fastest marathoners have converged on Atlanta, where they will battle through 26.2 miles for a chance to compete in this summer's Tokyo Olympics. But just qualifying to run in the Feb. 29 trials is an impressive accomplishment. Men and women need to cover the distance in two hours and 19 minutes or two hours and 45 minutes, respectively.

Four women, including Perkins Coie's Sarah David and Miller, Canfield, Paddock and Stone's Ashley Higginson, achieved that feat while juggling the demands of being law firm associates. Another woman in the race is an in-house attorney, and at least three runners on the men's side are law school students.

"Running is a great release from lawyer stuff, so I'm already looking forward to getting back to training after this weekend's race," says David, an M&A associate in Perkins Coie's Chicago office. After running her first marathon in 2017, she qualified for the trials at the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon in November in a blazing 2 hours, 44 minutes and 11 seconds.

Sarah David, an M&A associate at Perkins Coie who is running the Olympic Marathon Trials this weekend, seen here at the Bucktown 5k in 2019. (Courtesy photo)

Just three months later, David has completed another marathon training cycle—some weeks running 75-80 miles—while working full time. She run-commutes to and from Perkins Coie's office, which has a gym in the building, and otherwise runs exclusively in the morning, which she says is crucial for balancing a lawyer's schedule.

"It's easier for me to get into work at 11 a.m. then it is to leave work at 5 p.m.," she says. "I don't answer my phone when I'm running, but luckily there's not that much that would bother me at 6 a.m."

Higginson, a labor and employment associate at Detroit-based Miller Canfield's East Lansing office, qualified for the trials at the Grand Rapids Marathon in October, completing the race in 2 hours, 43 minutes and 49 seconds. She says she has found a similar work-life balance by completing the bulk of her training in the early hours.

"Lawyers are notoriously not awake during the mornings," she says. "In the afternoons, something always comes up."

Higginson is no stranger to elite-level running. Before her law career, she was a professional runner and raced the 3,000-meter steeplechase in the 2013 World Championships. But when it came to running marathons as a law firm associate, she says she had to take on a different mindset and adjust her expectations. She worked with her brother-in-law, a runner and an in-house attorney, to create a training regimen that's flexible enough to accommodate a busy legal career.

"I don't feel consistently guilty for what I can and can't do," she says. "It's critical for someone who wants to be working and has a fitness goal to be balancing the realities of physical demands of work with training."

Ashley Higginson of Miller Canfield. (Courtesy photo)

For her, that looked like a week of easy, five- to seven-mile jogs, workouts on Wednesdays, and hard, long-run workouts—think 20-24 miles at a fast pace—on Saturdays.

"That really helped keep me healthy and mentally not feel so guilty for that week you inevitably can't hit the workout and have to change the schedule," she says. "You can't be successful if you're hurt, so it's all about tempering that expectation with reality."

On Saturday, David and Higginson are aiming to run competitively, both with the field and with themselves. David says her goal is to beat her seed number, which is her ranking in the field based on qualifying time—356 out of 511. Higginson says she's trying to run at least as fast as she did when she qualified for the race, or run a new personal best.

"Lots of people qualified on fast courses, but the [Atlanta] course poses a lot of challenges: it will be warm and hilly, in addition to the stress of it being a big race with high-caliber athletes," she says. "When I qualified for the trials, I was just running to get the qualifying time. It's fair to say this time I should try to roll the dice a little bit at least."

Caroline Veltri, an associate at Chicago-based Frascona, Joiner, Goodman and Greenstein; Jessa Victor, an associate at Wisconsin-based Hawks Quindel; and Veronica Jackson Graziano, an in-house attorney at Partners Healthcare, have also qualified for the women's race.

On the men's side, law school students Quinlan Moll of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law; Patrick Campbell of the University of Wisconsin Law School; and Dan Lennon of Syracuse University College of Law will be competing.

David and Higginson said that while their firms were aware and supportive of their long-distance dreams—David says there's a big road race in Chicago every year for lawyers and she's known as the runner of the Perkins Coie office—they've found a healthy divide between success on the road and at their firms.

"It's motivating and inspiring to be learning in a different space," Higginson says. "I don't want [running] to be a mark on my career, I want my career to be about what I'm doing as a lawyer."