You get her on the phone as she comes north out of Florida, and then suddenly she’s gone. Dead air across the fiber optic-sphere, where Alissa McKaig’s voice was just a second or two before.

And then you redial, and there she is again.

“Sorry,” she says. “Just crossed the river into Alabama.”

And so she has miles to go, before Nashville and friends. Miles to go, too, between where she is and where she wants to be, because it’s miles that have always defined her ambitions in one way or another. Miles or meters or yards or mere footsteps.

Once upon a time those footsteps added up to 1600 meters, where McKaig won a state championship at Concordia.

Then it was on to 5,000 meters and 10,000 meters, where she won a national cross country title at Indiana Tech and finished 10th in the NCAA championships at Michigan State, and then wound up running for an Olympic development program, Zap Fitness, out of Blowing Rock, N.C.

And now she’s 25 years old and headed north out Florida three days after finishing eighth in the U.S. Olympic marathon trials, and the miles and meters and footsteps are nowhere near done.

They still define McKaig’s ambitions, and the ambitions are, to say the least, louder than ever.

Someday you’re going to hear her name. That’s the goal now.

“I think that could be me in the front and making myself known,” she says.

This is no cotton-candy dream, understand. Until November 2010, when she ran New York, McKaig had never run a marathon. She still considered herself a 5K/10K specialist until last summer, when two runners declined marathon spots on the world championship team and McKaig was selected to fill one of the places. And at the trials in Houston on Saturday, she was the second-youngest top 10 finisher; 24-year-old Clara Grandt of Morgantown, W.Va., finished just ahead of McKaig in seventh.

So, onward.

“I’m excited maybe to get a chance to be a contender,” says McKaig, who generally put in 110 to 115 miles a week in training. “Saturday, my race had no bearing on anyone else’s. I want to get to where I can make some moves and shake up some things at the front.”

For now, the front belongs to the usual suspects: Shalane Flanagan, who won in a trials-record 2 hours, 25 minutes, 38 seconds, runner-up Desiree Davila and third-place Kara Goucher. They’ll represent the U.S. in London come summer.

But McKaig finished just six minutes behind Flanagan, in 2:31:56. She fought off a stitch in her side and tried to remember what veteran marathoners said about that (“I’ve always heard you can come in and out in a marathon, so you try not to get too down on yourself,” she says), and all the while she had no real idea how far up or far back she was.

“Place, place, place,” she shouted to her brother as she finished the second of three loops.

“I don’t know, you’re at about an hour and 40,” he replied, thinking she’d said “pace.”

Eventually she spotted the wife of her coach around the 18-mile mark, who informed McKaig she was 13th.

“I could see people coming back to me, so that was definitely what I needed coming into the last eight miles,” said McKaig, who’d been passing people steadily since about the seven-mile mark. “I had no idea before then.”

And now?

More ideas than you can imagine, of course. More ideas than you can imagine.