Holly Clarke

Holly Clarke’s progression has been built around returning to running with a community. At Johns Hopkins, she worked her way from outside the varsity lineup into the team’s top five in her junior and senior years, contributing to two national championship teams. After graduating and taking a break from the sport, she moved to San Francisco and joined the Impala Racing Team. In her D3 Glory Days interview, she described how training around committed teammates helped sustain her ambitions after college. [1]

By the time she prepared for Orlando in 2024, Clarke was approaching her second Olympic Marathon Trials with more experience and a clearer understanding of her own training. Her qualifying mark was 2:34:54 at the 2022 California International Marathon. The arc from college team runner to a repeat Trials qualifier is the central thread of her career: steady development over several years, supported by other runners, rather than a single breakthrough race. [1][2]