The Lehigh Valley roads are sending a Bethlehem marathoner to the Olympic Trials in 2028.
Alex Price, 32, ran the California International Marathon (CIM) in 2:15:24 in December, 36 seconds under the 2 hours and 16 minutes requirement needed for the Trials.
“I still can’t believe it,” Price, bright blue eyes shining, told lehighvalleylive.com.
Price had been toying with a Trials qualifier for several years, but the required times kept getting faster: 2:19, 2:18, 2:16.
Qualifying for the Trials does not mean Price is going to the Olympics; in order for a runner to make an Olympic team, he has to qualify for the Trials and then finish in the top three at the Trials race.
“The chances are slim to none [that I’d make the team],” Price laughed. The Trials, then, are essentially Price’s Super Bowl. “This is the greatest achievement so far in my running career.”
Price is a Pocono native who skied and played baseball as a kid. He started running in high school because his big brother did. It turned out, Price was pretty good. He was a big fish in a small pond though, he said, and he wasn’t good enough to run at a Division I college. “My phone wasn’t ringing.”
Price followed his big brother to Susquehanna University, a Division III school, where he joined the cross country and track teams. That’s when his running leveled up. He got faster, stronger. Unlike in high school, Price now had guys to chase.
“I improved year over year, and finally, in my greatest college running achievement, I qualified for the NCAA Championships, which was my first exposure to the national stage,” he said.
The Marathon
Price, a financial planner, took a job in Bethlehem after graduation while his high-level running took a backseat. In 2017, his big brother signed up for the New York City Marathon. So, Price did, too.
“I’d never even thought about doing marathons, but I said, ‘Sure, I’ll sign up for it.’” He used a qualifying half marathon time from the Runner’s World Half and Festival (now the Bethlehem Running Festival) as his ticket in.
The 2017 New York City Marathon is one for the history books, and not just because it was Price’s debut at the 26.2-mile distance (2:39:27). Shalane Flanagan, one of the best U.S. marathoners, won the race, making her the first American woman to do so in 40 years. She was also wearing a prototype pair of racing shoes from Nike, which would become the first-ever Super Shoe. It boasted it could make runners 4% faster. Price, after beating his brother—“He didn’t mind”—went out and bought those shoes.
“Things snowballed from there,” he said, speaking like a true marathoner.
Price went on to run New York three more times, Chicago, Boston twice, Vermont twice, Wineglass twice (where Bethlehem native and the Mayor of Running Bart Yasso is a regular face), and then CIM.
A word about marathoning: Often, first-timers shave a lot of time after their first marathon, especially if they’re slower. The faster you are, the harder it is to shave off time. Knocking off a minute or two when you’re already running 2:20 is incredibly difficult because you’re already performing at the upper end.
That said, at the Boston Marathon in 2025, a notoriously challenging course, Price ran a personal record of 2:20. That’s about 5:20 minutes per mile. Less than eight months later, he ran 2:15, knocking his pace down to about 5:12 minutes per mile.
Lehigh Valley roads
A view of the SteelStacks to the right can be seen from the D & L Trail on Oct. 11, 2023, in Bethlehem. (Saed Hindash | For lehighvalleylive.com)Saed Hindash | For lehighvalleylive.com
Price is self-coached, but he runs regularly with other locals, in particular Star Valley Runners, made up of fleet-footed guys, including Trevor Conde, Greg Jaindl, Theo Kahler, Shane Houghton.
“We link up for workouts, long runs and races if we can,” Price said. “We are able to really push each other to higher levels.”
A quick search of race results in the Lehigh Valley will consistently show these guys taking the top spots. Price holds the course record for the Bethlehem Running Festival, 1:07:42, which he set in 2025 while training for CIM (he broke his own record from 2024). The course is infamous for its Bart Yasso design, featuring more than 800 feet of elevation.
And aside from his marathon PR from CIM, Price’s best times are clocked in the Lehigh Valley, and not on easy courses: St. Luke’s Half Marathon: 1:07:16, Superbowl Tailgate 10K: 30:45, and St. Pat’s West End 5K: 14:33.
There’s nothing like sleeping in your own bed before a race, Price said, and competing on your home turf.
Guys who run with Price wonder what he could pull off on flatter, faster courses.
But perhaps hills are one of Price’s strengths. He regularly runs over South Mountain in Bethlehem. “I’m notorious for creating routes that are brutal and hilly and difficult,” he said, his bright red Coros Pace 3 watch peeking out from under his cuff.
“I don’t know if that’s sick, right or wrong,” he laughed. Whatever it is, it’s working. He quotes Olympic marathon gold medalist Frank Shorter: “Hills are speedwork in disguise.”
Before Price knew the lay of the land in the Lehigh Valley, the towpath was his best friend. “You can’t get lost,” he said. He’d run to Easton. To Allentown. “I can’t tell you how many miles I’ve logged on the towpath.”
He’s a regular on the Saucon Rail Trail, Apple Butter Road, Glendon, the “Stacks Track” down by ArtsQuest.
And he’s a frequent flyer of Aardvark Sports Shop and Team Vark in Bethlehem, his adopted city.
“It’s hard to describe the support I’ve had from Bruce and Holly, and now Andy and Sheena,” Price said of the shop’s past and present owners.
In the spring of 2025, the team at Aardvark worked with Price, who races solely in Aardvark singlets, to design the Alex Price singlet. “I’m not a creative person,” he said, setting the record straight, so he and Aimee Kohler, a local graphic designer and Aardvark staff member, put their heads together.
He decided on the mantra “Keep moving forward” for the singlet’s back because it applies to not only any runner of any pace, but to life in general.
“As long as I’m moving forward, I have to finish,” Price said.
It’s worth noting here that although Price regularly breaks the finisher’s tape, sometimes minutes ahead of second place, he’s always game to run a 9-minute pace (that’s a 3:56 marathon, for context) with Team Vark. Aardvark staffers and other local runners talk about how Price is “just the nicest guy” who will cheer on the last runner, long after he’s finished and collected his award.
Next up: The Trials
Alex Price approaches the finish line at the St. Luke’s Half Marathon & 5k race on April 24, 2022.Tim Wynkoop | lehighvalleylive.com contributor
And now, with two years to go until the 2028 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials, the exact location and date of which have not yet been announced, Price can relax. Sort of.
The upside to qualifying for the Trials so early in the window is that “the monkey is off my back,” Price said. He will keep training and filling his time with races, maybe switching up the distances. He might try to break 30 minutes in the 10K; his best is 30:45. Price said he’s feeling confident.
Come race day, in early 2028, Price won’t focus on time. Typically the Marathon Trials are held in warm, often humid conditions (in 2024 they were in Orlando), which aren’t ideal for fast times. Instead, Price said he’ll run as hard as he can to beat as many people as possible, maybe coming in the top 100 or even 50. The Trials field has yet to be determined, but in 2024, there were roughly 200 men, with the top three finishers finishing under 2:10 (4:56 per mile) to make the U.S. Olympic Team.
For Price, like many qualifiers, the Trials race is the icing on the cake. When Price saw the finisher’s clock just ahead of him at CIM, it read 2:15. He’d run the hardest he’d ever run, by more than 5.5 minutes, but felt the best he’d ever felt.
He crossed the finish line in 47th place out of more than 8,000 runners. He saw his wife, Rachel, (“I couldn’t do this without her support”) who was crying, and his toddler son, Bennett.
“It didn’t feel real.”
Six hours after this interview, I was heading to the movies at ArtsQuest. It was dark. Cold. And there goes Alex, running laps around the Steel Stacks campus. Just moving forward.