Cool Runnings

It makes you wonder. How many of us have missed our athletic calling just because we didn’t know?

Erika Aklufi ran her first marathon in December 2000. The former swimmer was in law school at UC Davis when she ran the marathon as a lark, without training.

Aklufi said she hit the wall at the 23-mile mark. “I staggered to the finish line,” said Aklufi, 26, “and it was the most miserable experience of my life.”

Aklufi’s time was 3 hours 47 minutes. In her first marathon. Qualifying time for the Boston Marathon is 3:40. The women’s U.S. Olympic trials qualifying standard is 2:48.

“Unbelievable,” said Pat Connelly, coach of the L.A. Roadrunners. “To run your first marathon in under four hours? Incredible.”

Even more incredible was what happened when Aklufi ran her second marathon in Huntington Beach in January. She still hadn’t trained as a marathoner. Aklufi had been running with the Roadrunners for fun more than anything. Her times had been dropping -- 20 minutes came off her half marathon in 18 months -- and people at the club began to know her name -- “That’s Erika in the first group.”

But she still was a nobody, one of thousands of runners at the Pacific Shoreline Marathon on Jan. 26. As Aklufi ran, through miles 10, 11, 12, other runners and spectators were calling to her -- “You’re the No. 5 woman, No. 4, No. 3.”

By the time Aklufi hit mile 15, Connelly said, “she passed the last woman ahead of her. She put her head down, opened her arms up and ran right by that woman, really easy. At the finish, I saw her time. It was amazing. Erika had a 41-minute improvement and she did it on a very hot, sunny day. Bad conditions, great run.”

Aklufi ran her second marathon in 3:06:59, just about 19 minutes away from Olympic trials time.

She will run her third marathon Sunday, the Los Angeles Marathon. Now everybody knows her name at the Roadrunners. Suddenly, unexpectedly, Aklufi has discovered her athletic calling.

“It’s funny how things happen,” Aklufi said. “Go figure.”

From the time Aklufi was 5 and her parents saw a newspaper advertisement for the Canyon Crest Country Club Swim Team -- join the team, swim free at the club all summer -- Aklufi was a swimmer. Through high school at Riverside Poly and college at Yale, Aklufi swam.

She was good. Very good, even. But not quite good enough to fulfill her dreams.

“I was on the Olympic team in my dreams,” Aklufi said. “I’d even have water wings in my dreams and I’d win the gold.”

In real life, though, Aklufi never qualified for the NCAA finals or the Olympic trials.

So she moved on to law school, graduated, moved to Santa Monica and got a job at the Los Angeles firm of Burke, Williams & Sorensen.

And she ran. “I’d heard about the Roadrunners from some friends in Riverside,” Aklufi said. “If you signed up for the Roadrunners and the L.A. Marathon at the same time, you got a discount for the marathon. So I signed up.”

In all the years Aklufi was swimming the 100 freestyle and 100 butterfly, she had never done any running. She had no idea that, as Connelly said, her 5-foot-7, 110-pound body was perfect for long distance.

“She has light bones, not heavy bones,” Connelly said. “She has great lung and heart capacity. Her parents gave her good genes and she gives herself a great competitive instinct.”

Those genes are interesting. Aklufi’s paternal grandfather was a Yemenite Jew who fled the country in 1917 when Jews were being evicted from Yemen. People see her last name, Aklufi said, “and I know they are looking for somebody from Kenya or Morocco, not Riverside.”

Aklufi decided to run that first marathon in Sacramento because, she said, “It’s my Mt. Everest story. It was just there. How would I do? I had no idea. I had no training, I was in the middle of law school, I thought I’d just go run.”

Just go run. For 26 miles. When she hit the wall, Aklufi said, “My legs felt like they weighed 800 pounds, everything in my body hurt, my brain was yelling at me to stop and I just wanted to sit down by the side of the road and have someone carry me home.”

But Aklufi kept running and when she finished, she said, “I don’t think I understood what that time meant.”

To Connelly it means that Aklufi, still a rookie, can think legitimately about qualifying for the 2004 Olympic trials in February. Connelly plans to have Aklufi run marathons in San Diego in June and Chicago in October and is confident she can make it.

It might even happen Sunday in Los Angeles. Aklufi has been invited to start with the elite runners, in the front of the pack.

“I’m nervous,” she said. “I’m afraid I’ll embarrass myself and trip some runner from Kenya or Guatemala who’s come all the way here for this race.”

That seems unlikely. More likely would be Aklufi running 2:48 or under.

“The conditions are supposed to be perfect,” Connelly said. “Temperature in the 60s, cloudy. She ran 3:06 in 80 degrees in January and took 41 minutes off her time. Who knows?”

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com.