Age: 26.Height/weight: 5-feet-2, 98 pounds.
Training town: Rochester Hills.
QUICK HITS
• Davila leaves today for Berlin, Germany, for the IAAF World Track and Field Championships, where she'll race in the women's marathon next Sunday. She qualified for the U.S. team after running a personal-best 2 hours, 31:33 minutes in taking fifth at the Chicago Marathon last fall. That event followed her 13th-place showing at the U.S. Olympic trials in Boston, where she was within 8 seconds of third place at Mile 20 before fading.
Davila says: "The experience at Boston taught me how to close a marathon. Right now, my workouts have been going quite a bit better than my Chicago training."
• Davila took a sneak peek at the worlds' course this summer when she traveled to Germany with Kevin Hanson, one of her coaches with the Hansons-Brooks Distance Project -- a program that produced 2008 Olympic marathoner Brian Sell. If the weather's good, she believes she could post 2:28 -- a time Davila believes would put her in the top 15.
Davila says: "It's a criterium course, a 10K loop. It's very flat, much like Chicago. ... Unfortunately, the race won't be finishing inside the Olympic Stadium -- it would have been exciting to finish with a big crowd."
• Davila is a California native and 2005 graduate of Arizona State. She answers customer-service e-mails at moosejaw.com. She also owns an 11-week-old puppy: a Chesapeake Bay retriever named Atlas.
Davila says: "He's a great dog, but sometimes I call him 'Bratlas' or 'Ratlas' because he goes a little nuts for about 2 hours each day, when his ears go back and his eyes go crazy."
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