My guest for today’s episode is Turner Wiley. If you’re looking for one of the most relatable stories in American marathoning right now, he might be it. Turner didn’t come through the sport the traditional way. No NCAA titles, no national team buzz. He was a Division II runner at Seattle Pacific who never qualified for nationals. He was the kind of athlete most people assume fades out of the sport after college. But he didn’t. He kept showing up, kept building, and kept believing that the marathon might eventually unlock something bigger.

Fast forward a few years and he’s now a 2:09 marathoner, the runner-up at last December’s Marathon Project, and a Brooks sponsored athlete heading into Boston — all while working a full-time job at Seattle Children’s Hospital and raising a newborn at home.

Turner is the guy waking up at 5 a.m. to get his first run in before work. He’s logging 130–140 mile weeks, mostly solo, pushing a stroller on second runs, and stacking years of consistent, unflashy training until it finally clicked.

In this conversation, we talk about that slow burn of development — from blowing up in his debut marathon in Paris, grinding through the club system in Seattle, to breaking through with a 2:09 at The Marathon Project. We get into what it looks like to chase elite performance without making running your entire identity, how fatherhood has reshaped his perspective, and why he genuinely believes his best racing might still be ahead of him.

This is the next episode in a series of interviews that we’re doing with Brooks marathoners in the leadup to the Boston Marathon. Stay tuned as we announce our schedule of events with Brooks out of the Hyperion House. We’ll have a shakeout run on Saturday morning at 8 a.m., a live chat with Jess McClain, and more.

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Host: Chris Chavez | ⁠⁠@chris_j_chavez

Guest: Turner Wiley | @turner_wiley93

Produced by: Jasmine Fehr | ⁠⁠⁠@jasminefehr