Houston, We Have A Record ⏱️

Sponsored by PUMA

Lap 204: Sponsored by PUMA

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Compiled by David Melly and Paul Snyder

The New School Is In Session In Houston 📝

Photo by Kevin Morris / @kevmofoto

Last weekend was a dramatic one down in H-Town.

Hell didn’t quite freeze over, but it did snow in Texas shortly after both the men’s and women’s American records were broken on the same day, in the same race, at the Aramco Houston Half Marathon. Perhaps Conner Mantz (59:17) and Weini Kelati (1:06:09) ran so dang fast because they were worried about getting back to the airport before a slew of weather-related travel delays kicked in.

Despite chilly temperatures and gusty winds, all four elite races were all won in pretty quick fashion. Neither Mantz nor Kelati won their respective races—although Mantz tried his very best to win the battle of elbows at the finish line—and their history-making performances were surely aided by strong pacing and deep fields. Addisu Gobena, last year’s Dubai Marathon champion, ended up getting the best of the photo finish in the men’s race, and was also credited with 59:17. Meanwhile 19-year-old Senayet Getachew, who this time last year was running track races indoors in Boston but has a half marathoning resume dating back to 2022, braved the cold to break the tape in 1:06:09.

In the men’s full, Ethiopian-born Israeli Haimro Alame took the title in 2:08:17, his fourth sub-2:10 performance in the last fourteen months. Women’s champ Kumeshi Sichala took a big step forward with her 2:20:42 win. It was both a five-minute improvement on her lifetime best and her first marathon victory in over five years. The top American on the men’s side, Utah’s Christian Allen, managed to cash in on some of Mantz’s Provo Magic as well, finishing seventh overall in a nearly five-minute PB of his own, 2:10:32. Allen played it smart, hitting halfway forty seconds behind Daniel Mesfun, only to catch and blow past him in the final mile of the race to claim top U.S. honors.

But it was American Erika Kemp who enjoyed perhaps the biggest leap forward, running 2:22:56 for second in the women’s race. Kemp, a stalwart 5000m/10,000m runner on the track, has seen a good deal of success on the roads, with two U.S. titles and a 1:09:10 half marathon PB (from this race last year), but until this weekend her potential in the marathon hadn’t quite materialized into performance. Kemp, then running for the Boston Athletic Association, made her debut at the 2023 Boston Marathon with a 2:33:57 27th-place finish, getting through all 26 miles but not exactly living up to what her strong resume might otherwise suggest she could do. Then she DNFed the Marathon Trials after a little more than 12 miles and spent the rest of last year jumping back and forth between the track and shorter road races. It would be understandable for the outside observer to assume Kemp had jumped into the boiling pot of the marathon and been burned.

Photo by Justin Britton / @justinbritton

Fast-forward to Houston and an audacious 1:10:59 first half, and it quickly became clear that Erika Kemp: Marathoner, is here to stay. Kemp now has the 2025 World Championship qualifying standard, the fifth-fastest mark by a U.S. marathoner in the window, and lands at #12 on the U.S. all-time list (record-eligible marks) with her 11-minute personal best. Nothing says “a new contender has arrived” like kicking off the new year—and Olympic cycle—with a big statement race.

And yet, despite the crowded competition for headlines out of Houston, the casual fan’s takeaway will surely be that both half marathon American records went down. Here, we have a tale of two races…and two athletes.. and two narratives about the direction of the sport.

First, there’s the irrepressible Conner Mantz. Everything about the Mantz persona is effortful: his crazy workout splits, his ability to cross-train through buildup-derailing injuries, his constant-struggle running form, and his dogged refusal to get dropped from a pack. All were on display in Houston and its leadup. No one could ever accuse the BYU alum and star Ed Eyestone pupil of holding back, either in intention or execution, when it comes to racing. And for the better part of the last three years, we’ve come to expect a similar formula: Mantz sets (or gets saddled with) high expectations, trains like an animal to get there, and grinds his way to success.

It’s fitting that Ryan Hall’s 18-year-old record was broken at the same race by a runner who perfectly encapsulates his legacy. The conventional wisdom in American distance running was, once upon a time, a very linear and predictable pattern: you try and make teams on the track, and as you age and start to shed fast-twitch muscles, you steadily move up to longer and slower distances. Hall’s marathon debut, at 24 years old, was something of an exception to the rule at the time, but in the latter half of the 2010s, more and more Americans skipped or shortened their track careers to seek glory (and bigger paydays) on the roads. Neither Hall nor Mantz can claim sole ownership of this trend (just ask Scott Fauble, Emma Bates, or Molly Seidel), but Mantz truly represents the best case scenario for many collegiate 10,000m guys that may or may not trust their finishing kick: go all-in on the marathon and reap the rewards.

(Mantz, to be fair, hasn’t entirely abandoned the track. He ran the 10,000m at the most recent Olympic Trials and is less than two years removed from his last 1500m, but it’s safe to say that his main focus is on the roads.)

This particular gamble was already paying off, to the tune of an Olympic Marathon Trials title, a top-10 finish in Paris, and a 2:07:47 personal best. But Mantz’s run in Houston suggests that we might just be getting started. Among the U.S. men, the last true international podium contender was Galen Rupp, the Olympic bronze medalist in Rio and 2017 champion in Chicago. But although he’s still going as he approaches 40, injuries robbed Rupp of critical marathoning years in his mid-30s and, while at one point he surely had 2:04 capability, he is likely to retire without capturing Khalid Khannouchi’s 2:05:38 American record from 2002.

Mantz, on the other hand, just showed the world again that he’s capable of 2:05 or faster. The updated World Athletics scoring tables equate his 59:17 to a 2:05:23 marathon. The gut feeling one got from watching his 2:08:12 run in Paris or 2:09:00 run in New York last year has to be that he could run at least two minutes faster on a course like London or Chicago. And at 28 years old, he’s got hopefully a decade or more left in his legs to test that theory.

This means great things for his continuing onslaught on the record books, but perhaps more importantly, it means that Mantz is showing all the signs of genuinely being able to compete for the win in major international races. Whether or not the race is a rabbited affair or a championship-style duel, the reality is that any aspirant hoping to contend for more than “top American” honors has to have 2:04 ability, whether or not the course and conditions require a 2:04 winning time.

Weini Kelati is a different story entirely. Although a strong marathon debut feels like an inevitability for the diminutive Flagstaffer, it remains the domain of speculation and hypotheticals, since Kelati hasn’t shared any specific plans for a future at 26.2. And why would she? Kelati is coming off the best year of her career on the track, clocking personal bests of 14:35.43 and 30:33.82 (both U.S. #6 all-time). She just made her first U.S. team on the track, a full-circle American dream story for the Eritrean-born athlete who came to the U.S. seeking asylum in 2014 and became a U.S. citizen in 2021. Kelati is no stranger to the roads—at a certain point it feels like they’re going to have to rename the Manchester Road Race after her given her run of dominance—but her ability to thrive on virtually every surface, from twice representing Team USA at World XC to claiming U.S. titles over 5km in Central Park, means she has a wide range of opportunities to thrive.

Photo by Kevin Morris / @kevmofoto

As Kelati, at 28 years old, ponders the next phase of her career, it feels like she’s a candidate for popularizing a totally different kind of approach in American distance running: the Sifan Hassan Way. Hassan’s habit of championship triples might remain unique to the Dutch superstar and her generational talents, but it’s entirely possible that Kelati is well-suited to embracing the idea that the marathon can be a focus but not the focus of a race schedule. She’s already done something similar in the half marathon, where in two efforts over the 13.1 distance she’s set two American records but still covered a wide range of other distances in between.

Now, the half marathon is fundamentally different from its double-stuffed counterpart: you don’t have to master fueling, it’s closer in training format to the 10k, and recovery time is much shorter. But that doesn’t change the fact that, in the one calendar year between Houstons, Kelati competed in Diamond League 5000ms, a road mile, U.S. championships on the track and grass, and of course, the Olympics. She’s a jill-of-all-trades who can grind out a hard pace, win in a finishing sprint, or both. And while the temptation to pick a narrow lane for the next year or four will be strong, Kelati has already shown that, for a special few, success on the track and on the road are not mutually exclusive.

What Kelati and Mantz have in common is that it’s highly likely we’re going to see a lot more of them near the front of big races for the next few years. In their own ways, they’re starting to test deeper and more uncertain waters, and so far, they’ve done a heckuva lot more swimming than sinking. They each defy some conventional wisdom and confirm others, proving that the only universal truth is there’s no one true path on the many-miles-long-road to success.

Basketball’s New “Unrivaled” League Is A Positive Sign For Track And Field 🏀

Photo by Johnny Zhang / @jzsnapz

Time for another section where we talk about basketball, structurally. Only now, instead of blathering on about NBA ratings and anti-3-point-shot mudslinging, we’re going to point in the direction of something unambiguously good and encouraging: the new Unrivaled 3-on-3 league.

Professional women’s basketball in America is in many ways a solid analog to track and field. They share modest, but passionate, fan bases, a desire to expand, a pay structure that isn’t robust enough to prevent competition, and a crop of ascendant superstars that the mainstream sports media has finally started to—often clumsily—engage with.

It’s not a perfect one-to-one comparison by any stretch of the imagination, but if there’s one sport out there we can measure our growth and successes by, it’s women’s hoops. So the early success of Unrivaled can be taken as a good omen for other up-and-coming leagues in the track and field space.

Here’s what they’re doing right that the GSTs and Athloses of the world can take into consideration:

Start small but aim high.

Unrivaled isn’t trying to usurp the well-established WNBA. Its goal is to complement what exists and offer more basketball to cheer for. Besides, they’re giving a small but mighty group of players money-making opportunities during the long offseason. There are just six teams, each roster carrying only six players—that’s 36 athletes total, 22 of which are WNBA all-stars. 

There are notable superstars absent from Unrivaled (no A’ja Wilson or Caitlin Clark). But the quality of basketball has been incredibly high, and the fan experience—both in-person and on-broadcast—has been stellar.

Athlos’s first foray into meet hosting seemed to take a page from the same playbook: get top talent, treat them like royalty, and present a premium product to fans at a quiet time in the yearly schedule.

Adapt the product to fit the package.

Unrivaled is a 3-on-3 basketball league, which is an increasingly popular format internationally. To go along with the smaller team sizes, the league has shrunk the court, as well as the stadium—games are currently all played in a custom-built, 850-person-capacity arena outside of Miami. The season is just 10 weeks long. These decisions were all deliberately made for one reason: distill basketball down to its most thrilling, fast-paced, competitive form. It’s meant to be novel—not a true replacement for conventional WNBA basketball.

There’s a clear parallel here for professional track – even though it’s often criticized for making similar choices. No field events? No long distance? It’s not ideal, but it’s necessary. Pro track, out of the Olympic context and when beholden to a full slate of events can feel a bit bloated, particularly by the standards of today’s viewer, who is accustomed to consuming entertainment in five-second doses.

Money talks, but it’s secondary to action.

Unrivaled claims to be the highest-paying women’s professional sports league in history. The average salary is over $200,000. This is possible thanks to a range of apparently lucrative sponsorships and a six-year, $100 million media rights deal. Man. How can you complain about that? Good for the players, a step in the right direction gender-parity-wise, and good news for the long term viability of the league.

But you can’t buy an identity – or a legacy. Obsessing over paydays and business dealings ultimately detracts from the real reason sports fans tune in: the competition, the players’ personalities, the rivalries, the beauty of the sport itself. 

Unrivaled isn’t constantly reminding fans of how much money is exchanging hands, and hopefully, even after an influx of cash, track and field can do the same. It’s good to know the athletes are being well-compensated, but if the names are big enough, the money is self-evident. At the end of the day, people don’t love sports because they’re a business, and focusing on the behind-the-scenes machinations that prop up the spectacle is a losing concept.

Athlete buy-in is critical.

Founded by two of its players, Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier, Unrivaled is also rolling out athlete ownership stakes in the league. It’s hard to think of a better way to ensure your league’s stars are invested in its success than to get them literally invested.

It’s also a big opportunity for athletes to grow personal brands and another avenue for sponsorships to get airtime. And again, here’s an area where track and field could stand to take notes. An out-of-season runner can only post so many #TBTs before recycled Olympic highlights in December start feeling stale, but their sponsors would delight at the chance for their logos to be splashed over televisions year-round.

The whole point of learning lessons from other sports (and writing about them in running newsletters) is that we don’t have to do our own beta testing. Track and field doesn’t have the luxury of burning a bunch of money, talent, and time to figure out what does and doesn’t work – we’ve gotta set our pride aside and cheat off the desk next to us. So as women’s basketball grows and changes, it benefits all the runners, jumpers, throwers, and meet directors with a dream to take notes.

The Lap Count Guide To Cold-Weather Training 🥶

Welcome to January in the Northern Hemisphere.

Many of you are likely in the midst of the polar vortex, a relatively new term for “cold front.” You are probably procrastinating on checking your weather app this morning for fear of seeing a single-digit number and wind chills pushing real feels below zero. For a decent chunk of that “many of you”—particularly readers in the south and Texas—these may be the coldest temperatures you’ve been subjected to in years, if not ever. 

Here at the Lap Count, we don’t want to lie to you about the reality that running in the extreme cold can be deeply unpleasant. Despite what the influencer community wants to sell you, no amount of biohacking or “staying hard” can truly distract from the reality that training at this time of year really sucks. 

Even gloved, your fingers will hurt. Even wool-socked, your toes will go numb. Your nose hairs will become known to you in a way they previously weren’t, as your breath condenses and freezes around them like booge-ry stalactites. With snow in the picture, your footing will falter, and if you aren’t careful, you’ll limp saggily like a golden retriever with hip dysplasia after your easy six-miler. Should you attempt a workout or faster paces, your muscles, no matter how clothed, may rebel—nope, sorry, not happenin’.

This isn’t to say running in the extreme cold is impossible (just ask any Midwesterner heading out for an easy hour wearing shorts and a hoodie.) Nor that it’s equally miserable for everyone — we will inevitably receive at least one email from a tundra-based reader this week who delights in shoveling out lane 1 and ripping 400s. But for the rest of us mere mortals with normal human biology and wavering resolve, we’re looking at the spring marathon on the calendar creeping closer by the day and starting to panic.

But the training block isn’t a total loss: with a few key adjustments, we can get through a few miserable weeks with the tips of our extremities intact and our resolve unbroken.

Dress for success.

There are basically two schools of thought when it comes to winter running apparel. 

One is to spend as much money as possible on new performance apparel and footwear — realistically, you should have at least $300 worth of products on each section of your body: head, shoulders, knees, and toes. This is actually an instance where you can buy your way out of discomfort! The more you resemble an astronaut or some sort of space blanket-wrapped spring roll, the warmer you’re likely to feel. And the placebo effect of hi-tech, performance-jargon terminology being hawked by apparel manufacturers everywhere can’t be discounted.

Then there’s the old school approach: layering and repurposing gear designed for other activities. Heavy gray sweats from your dad’s 1970s PE class will get dug out of the closet. The mud caked onto summer’s gardening gloves is now insulation. For an outer shell, you’re going to want to battle the wind with the loudest, most plasticky swishy jacket around. Then wrap every exposed or under-layered area with anything made out of wool, even if your skin gets scratched raw and you gain 20 points of sweat-weight over the run. Cap it all off with two-to-seven heavy socks over any protruding piece and you might stand a chance.

If the footing is bad due to ice or snow, and you don’t already own Yaktrax, you can approximate them and winterize an old pair of trainers with metal screws

Adapt, evolve, overcome.

Sure, you can tell yourself you’ll hit the same mile splits regardless of the weather from the comfort of your couch, but two steps into your warmup will have you conjuring elaborate conversion equations like Albert Einstein to justify why last week’s 5:30s are this week’s 6:00s.

In these conditions, completion is the goal. And that doesn’t even mean completing the full workout as written or anything close to it—some days, it means clocking eight minutes of semi-hard running and calling it a tempo. But hey, you got out the door and came home having logged some sort of elevated effort.

The key is not worrying about what the Strava stats look like—but who are we kidding, you’re not nearly that comfortable with your self-worth and fitness. So as a compromise, just make sure that your running log is full of dramatic and elaborate descriptions of just how awful the conditions were so your coach and the three other people who read your entries know what a hardo you are.

Bring the training indoors.

Of course, if you’re considering doing anything outlined thus far in this section… you could always just run on the treadmill or indoors some other way.

That’s right. The one trick that you’re conditioned to think is somehow weak or insufficient: running in a climate-controlled setting when it sucks ass outdoors. For every one Canadian pounding out miles on a Toronto bike path, there are five indoor warriors sweatily completing their threshold work in a 67º basement to a playlist of mid-2010s EDM hits. 

The treadmill catches a lot of flack. It’s boring. It’s horrible. It’s not real running. To all of these, we say: “hogwash!” Plenty of outdoor runs are boring or horrible, too. And there are thousands of athletes walking around citing PRs set on BU’s indoor track or on the roads of Valencia—are those places any more “real,” the miles logged within their confines any more legit than the “ground” covered on the treadmill? We’ll leave that one for the philosophers.

Toughen up.

Despite all the well-crafted wisdom and canny training hacks we’ve offered, some old-timers will still insist that aversion to winter running is a moral failing. And maybe they’re not entirely wrong.

When conditions are comically bad, sometimes the best approach is to lean into it and embrace the absurdity of it all. Wind chill registering at -15ºF? Well that’s unfortunate. Better run a fartlek with every “on” into the headwind at 6 in the morning while Joker-style laughing at the fact that you’re simultaneously hitting max heart rate and risking frostbite. Refuel with a glass of raw eggs and then go out for your double. Perhaps the reason why Minnesotans from Joe Klecker to Dakotah Popehn make up such a strong contingent of U.S. teams is truly because they’re built different and they train different.

As with all pontifications on running philosophy and performance, feel free to cherrypick which pieces of advice are perfect additions to your training regimen and which are unhelpful nonsense. At the end of the day – or week, or season – anything that gets you through the tough times without losing your mind along the way can’t be all bad, right?

More News From The Track And Field World 📰

– Last week, the London Marathon announced that the 2025 running of the race would be headlined by world record holder Ruth Chepngetich and reigning Olympic champs Sifan Hassan and Tamirat Tola. Well, the full fields have been released and frankly, they’re bonkers. There are too many established stars to list without this section becoming an undesigned Coachella poster, but notable debutants include Jacob Kiplimo and Eilish McColgan.

– Speaking of Sifan Hasasn, on the CITIUS MAG podcast she said she’d be down to race two event groups at one Grand Slam Track event if the appearance fee is right. (She’s less committal about attempting to win all nine World Marathon Majors.)

Conner Mantz also joined the CITIUS MAG podcast after his Houston performance to break his race down, and address topics like whether he thinks he’s poised to win the Boston Marathon.

– Olympic gold medalist in the 4 x 400m relay and University of Georgia star Aaliyah Butler has signed an NIL deal with Nike.

– Northern Arizona Elite has extended its team contract with HOKA through 2028. The group shed many of its veteran marathoners but still features a strong track contingent.

Tinoda Matsatsa of Georgetown broke the NCAA indoor 1000m record at Penn State, going 2:16.84.

– Paced by his brother Jonah, Josh Hoey picked up where he left off after a fantastic outdoor campaign by setting a new American record in the indoor 1000m: 2:14.48.

– And if you’re having fun with these past two off-distance bullet points, we have a real treat for you… Andrew Salvodon, a senior from Virginia Beach, broke the high school 500m national record, going 1:00.49, and taking down Quincy Wilson in the process.

– At the University of Washington Preview and Mile City meet, in the top heat, the Husky men put nine guys under four minutes in the mile, led by Nathan Green’s 3:50.74—a new facility record.

Selemon Barega—the 10,000m gold medalist in Tokyo—will be making his marathon debut in Seville, Spain, on February 23rd. Barega ran 58:57 at the Valencia half in December, so his training appears to be going well.

Shelby Houlihan is reportedly making her post-ban racing debut on February 1st at the Razorback Invitational in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She’ll be competing in the 3000m.

– In Millrose announcement news, Karissa Schweizer and Josette Norris headline the women’s 3000m.

– RIP to David Lynch, director of—among many far more important but certainly no less strange things—the greatest advertisement in the history of running shoes.

– 📺 And in terms of track to take in this weekend, the Dr. Sander Scorcher (Seriously, that’s the name now! We aren’t editorializing but we love it!) is this Saturday at The Armory, and can be watched with a RunnerSpace subscription. 📺

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