Two Jacksonville runners will compete in the US Olympic Marathon trials
Kesley Potius, Sem Sultanov among Olympic hopefuls
The Paris Olympics are nearly six months away but on Saturday in Orlando, six marathoners will earn spots on the the US Olympic team.
Among the competitors are two local runners: Kelsey Potius and Sem Sultanov.
Pontius, 32, is competing in the trials for the second time. She qualified with a time of 2:34:24 at the 2022 Houston Marathon. Having qualified so early, she was able to set her training schedule very precisely.
“I punched the OTQ clock early so I’ve had all year to regroup and I played with other distances and had some fun without the pressure of picking a good race to try to qualify,” Pontius said.
Pontius, a Fletcher High School grad, was a soccer player in college at Campbell but when her career came to a premature end, she transferred to UNF and needed an athletic outlet. She found running mostly by accident. She was invited to run a 50K, unaware of exactly how long the race was (31 miles). She fell in love with the sport on the spot.
Pontius finished 18th at the USATF half marathon championship in 2022 and has finished as high as 12th at the Gate River Run, which serves as the 15k national championship. She scored another top-20 finish at the Gate River Run in 2023.
As a registered sports dietician who runs her own nutrition company, Meteor Nutrition, Pontius has also dialed in her nutrition plan.
“My definition of locking down on nutrition is making sure that I’m eating enough and a good timing around my workouts,” Pontius said. “I’m big into meal composition. The biggest thing you can do for the volume of training you’re doing as a high-performing athlete is to not get into big deficits. When you get into big deficits, that’s when you get hurt and your body isn’t going to handle the training. I’m pretty serious about that all of the time. It’s such a balancing act.”
Sultanov, who was the First Coast Cup winner at the Gate River Run in 2021 as the fastest local finisher will compete in his first U.S. Olympic Trials. He comes from a strong running family. His mother ran the Marathon at the 1996 Olympics for Russia. His father was a top runner who competed in European events.
Sultanov, 26, didn’t start running marathons until the past two years. He qualified on his third attempt, running 2:17:09 at the Bakline's McKirdy Micro Marathon in New York, qualifying with 51 seconds to spare.
“The difference was I didn’t get injured and I stayed really consistent,” Sultanov said. “I had some great workouts. I was averaging 100 miles a week.”
Sultanov won the 2022 AmerisBank Jacksonville marathon in his hometown.
The trials were originally scheduled to start at noon, but concerns over the potential heat moved the start of the race to 10 a.m. ET. The race will be broadcast live on Peacock and replayed at noon on NBC.
