LEWISBURG — This is the story of how a soccer player became a sprinter, how a sprinter became a distance runner, and how that distance runner is now within striking distance of a trip to the Olympic Trials in the marathon.

This story is about Aimee Baylor (formerly Gerlinski).

The former Lewisburg High track star (Class of 1990), now an assistant coach for the girls track team at her alma mater, is shooting for an invite to the U.S. Olympic Trials next April in Boston.

The top three there advance to the Beijing Games in August.

Baylor doesn’t entertain notions of traveling to Asia next summer, but just making the trials has become an allconsuming focus.

“I haven’t even thought past (the trials),” she says.

“That’s the only (running) goal I have: making the trials.”

Baylor, who lives in Lewisburg with her husband, Chris, and their two children, needs a time of 2:47 to make the Olympic Trials. She’s been accepted for the Chicago Marathon in October.

If she doesn’t get the time she needs there, she can still qualify at the Houston Marathon in January, among others.

But the window is closing fast. Baylor is excited about making the Chicago Marathon since it’s a flat course conducive to fast times.

However, the same was said about Grandma’s Marathon in Minnesota, which Baylor ran back in June. But it was extremely hot the day of the race and Baylor had to settle for a 3:02.

“It’s a fast course,” she says. “But I got there and it was 80 degrees by the halfway mark. My luck of the draw,” she adds with a laugh.

To think that Baylor would be running marathons is probably worth a chuckle to the people who knew her when she first moved to Lewisburg prior to the start of her junior year of high school. Baylor was born in California and lived for a time in upstate New York and Philadelphia. And though she always loved running track, she never cared for cross country because it interfered with her first love: soccer. But Lewisburg didn’t have a girls soccer program in the late ’80s.

“(I thought), ‘I guess I’ll run cross country, that will help me with track,’ ” she says.

But that doesn’t mean she was prepared to like it.