Minutes after Conner Mantz crossed the finish line of the Chicago Marathon in record-breaking time, his coach, Ed Eyestone, asked him in front of a TV audience the question that is on the minds of all running aficionados: “I guess the next question is, how far can we take it now from here?”
How much faster can he go?
Mantz, the two-time NCAA champion from BYU via Smithfield, Utah, broke the 22-year-old American record in running to a fourth-place finish in Chicago on Oct. 12, continuing a yearlong streak of brilliant racing.
In April, he posted a time of 2:05:08 while running to a fourth-place finish in the Boston Marathon — a time that was superior to the American record but not allowed for record purposes because Boston is a point-to-point course. Then he topped that in Chicago, running 2:04:43 on a loop course — 55 seconds under the American record.
“I don’t know if there’s been a better year for an American for a long time. Maybe since Galen Rupp in 2016.”
— BYU coach Ed Eyestone on Conner Mantz's record-breaking year
The record run, which continued his reign as the top American road racer for the past three years, made Mantz the man of the hour in the running world. He has been bombarded with messages and requests, doing at least a couple of interviews daily for the next two weeks. One day he did two podcasts, back-to-back, followed by four media interviews in succession, most of them lasting 45-60 minutes. His name and story are rampant on the internet.
Mantz is fulfilling the great expectations he carried when he graduated from Sky View High in 2017. After winning two individual NCAA cross-country championships, he turned to professional road race and has ascended to the top of the sport.
“I don’t know if there’s been a better year for an American for a long time,” says Eyestone. “Maybe since Galen Rupp in 2016.”
In good company
In 2016, Rupp was sensational, winning the U.S. Olympic marathon trials as well as the 10,000-meter run at the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials five months later. Then he went on to place fifth in the Olympic 10,000-meter final and eight days later claimed the bronze medal in the Olympic marathon.
Any discussion of American success also must include Grant Fisher’s 2024 season in which he won the 5,000- and 10,000-meter runs at the Olympic trials and won bronze medals in both races at the Olympic Games.
Then there’s Mantz. So far in 2025, he has set four American records on the road — 20 kilometers (twice), half-marathon, marathon; claimed three consecutive victories in major road races, including the U.S. 20K championships; and placed fourth in two of the world’s most prestigious marathons — Boston and Chicago.
It has been a continuation of his performance in 2024, when he won the U.S. Olympic trials and placed eighth in the Paris Olympics marathon.
Mantz began thinking of such marathon triumphs as early as high school, starting with his decision to compete for BYU under the direction of Eyestone, who has continued to coach him as a professional.
Marathon-minded
“When I was trying to figure out where to go to college, I wanted to go to the place that would make me the best marathon runner long term and Coach Eyestone has helped me accomplish that,” Mantz told the NBC-TV affiliate in Chicago. “He’s been coaching me for eight years and that’s a long time. And I’m not the easiest guy to coach. I’m grateful for his patience and support.”
Which leads us back to Eyestone’s question: How far can he take it?
Mantz believes he can run faster than his American record if for no other reason than this: He says his race in Chicago was far from perfect.
“I left (the Boston Marathon) thinking I couldn’t have done anything more; I just needed to get stronger and faster and I’ll get it done,” he says. “But I made mistakes in Chicago.”
For reasons he doesn’t understand, he lost time at the water stops in Chicago. “On a few of them, I’d slow down to grab a water bottle and look up and see that I had lost three or four seconds from where I had been running (with the leaders), and I had to speed up to catch them. I never had this issue before.”
He also says the pacing was erratic, which, like his water stops, eats up more energy, the same way a car uses more fuel in slow-and-go city traffic vs. a steady speed on the freeway.
“I made the mistake of not trusting how my body felt rather than trusting what the pacer did,” says Mantz.
The plan was to run even 4:43 miles; the pacer took the leaders through the first mile in 4:30. The pace was erratic throughout the race — “a bunch of the miles were slow,” says Mantz. Miles 10 and 12 were 4:52. Mile 15 was 4:39. Miles 22 and 23 were 4:54 and 4:51, respectively.
“The pace was considerably off,” he says. “If I had run a consistent 4:43 pace, that would’ve helped me run faster.”
Mantz’s average pace was 4:45.4 per mile over the 26.2-mile course.
There were other mistakes, he notes. Among them: “For some reason I struggled on every turn. I slowed down. I don’t know if I do that in training or what.”
In the final analysis, he concludes, “It was a lot of minor things that add up.”
Record-breaking, yes, but not perfect
Those might have cost him two of his goals. The American record was his primary goal, but he also had two “stretch goals”: to break 2:04 — “That would’ve been hard; I don’t know if I’m ready for that,” he says — and to claim his first podium finish (top three) in a major marathon. He placed fourth in Chicago, just as he did in Boston.
“That was one of the things that was a little hard,” he says. “It would’ve made it a little better. I wanted to get on the podium. I did a lot of stuff right, but there were some things …”
He was philosophical about it. “In a way it’s a good thing. I took fourth without a perfect race. I’m pretty excited about the future.”
Mantz has dropped his time steadily since taking up marathoning – 2:08:16 in 2022 and 2:07:47 in 2023. The 2024 season was dedicated to championships racing (the Olympic trials and the Olympics), which are about placement and not chasing times. In 2025, he resumed his assault on the clock and dropped his marathon best to 2:05:08 and then 2:04:43. Since his debut in 2022, Mantz has cut his time by 3 minutes and 33 seconds.
The best is yet to come
Mantz is 28 years old. That’s on the old side for a sprinter or an NFL running back, but fairly young for a marathoner.
There is evidence — anecdotal and otherwise — to support the widely held belief that marathoners reach their best years in their mid-30s. Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya set a world record of 2:01:09 in 2022 at the age of 37, still the second-fastest time ever. Kenenisa Bekele of Ethiopia owns the third-fastest time ever, 2:01:41, set in 2019 at the age of 37.
In 2023, at the age of 41, Bekele set the master’s world record (40 plus) of 2:04:19. Sisay Lemma of Ethiopia owns the fourth-fastest time, 2:01:48, which he achieved just a few days before his 33rd birthday. Benson Kipruto of Kenya owns the sixth-fastest time, 2:02;16, which he posted in 2024, a week before his 33rd birthday.
Portugal’s Carlos Lopes won the 1984 Olympic marathon at the age of 37. Kipchoge was also 37 when he won the 2020 Olympic marathon. Ethiopia’s Tamirat Tola won the 2024 Olympic marathon one day before his 33rd birthday.
According to reporter Tom Banse, the average age of male and female marathoners at the 2022 world championships was 31, compared to 25 for 100-meter sprinters.
Outlier
Mantz, perhaps you noticed, is an outlier — an American making a name for himself in a race dominated by Africans. His performance in Chicago makes him the second-fastest non-African marathoner in history.
It would be difficult to overstate the dominance of African distance runners, and Mantz, born and raised in Cache Valley, is the lone American who has seriously challenged them the last three years in the marathon, although you could make an argument that training partner Clayton Young, another Utah native, has done so, as well.
Mantz has cracked the top eight in six of his eight international marathons, races in which Africans claimed at least the top three spots.
Of the 100 fastest marathoners ever, Mantz is one of only two who were not born in Africa (six of them represented non-African countries but were born and raised in Africa). The only other non-African runner in the top 100 is France’s Morhad Amdouni, who was born on the French island of Corsica and descended from Tunisian roots in North Africa.
“It’s (Mantz) against the world in some regards,” says Eyestone.
Not only has Mantz delivered fast times, but he has been remarkably consistent in a famously fickle race (a lot can and does go wrong in a 26.2-mile race, and it can happen in a hurry, via injuries, cramps, poor pacing, weather conditions, etc.). And Mantz has accomplished this while competing in two to three world-class marathons annually.
Let Eyestone explain again: “The depth of these races is such that they are more competitive than the Olympic Games; in the Olympics, they have a limit of three Kenyans; in marathons there are 12 or so. Plus some Ethiopians.”
All of which makes it extremely difficult to crack the top 10 consistently, as Mantz has. John Korir, the winner of the 2025 Boston Marathon and the 2024 Chicago Marathon, was running in second place in the 2025 Chicago race before fading and dropping out at about 21 miles.
“Conner has been darn consistent,” says Eyestone. “There aren’t many who have run eight (marathons) that well.”
Mantz’s ambitions and confidence have grown with his success. He had been thinking about an assault on the longstanding American marathon record for years, but “I didn’t bring it up to many people. It’s been on my mind for a while. I kind of believed I could break it for two years.”
He made a run for it in the 2023 Chicago race, but fell more than two minutes short of it — “I was decently far off,” he puts it. After running so fast in Boston earlier this year (2:05:08), he decided to make another assault on the record in Chicago and this time he didn’t keep it to himself. Weeks before the race, he stated his intention and it made headlines.
“I knew that if I didn’t say it, people would already know that I was going for it because I had run 30 seconds faster than the American record in Boston and it’s a course that’s quite a bit slower than Chicago,” he says. “I knew people would be asking me about it anyway. And I was pretty confident that I was going to break it based on my training.”
Eyestone doubled down on it. He went so far as to tell the Deseret News before the race that it wasn’t a matter of whether Mantz would break the record, but by how much.
It could’ve backfired on both of them, and for that reason Mantz felt the pressure of expectation. During the race he looked at his watch to calculate how fast he would have to run the upcoming miles to get the record.
“I was really happy about getting it,” Mantz says. “Unfortunately, it was more of a sense of relief. I would rather it be that when I finish I’m so excited that I accomplished a goal. But because I had been so open about my goal, I put extra pressure on myself. Instead of trying to focus on it secretly, I told everyone I was going for it. It made it more of a sense of relief at the finish line and not as fun as it might have been.”
Mantz’s next challenge is to earn a spot on the U.S. cross-country team that will compete in the 46th world cross-country championships Jan. 10, 2026, in Tallahassee, Florida. The U.S. trials are Dec. 6 in Portland, Oregon. Beyond that, in the aftermath of the Chicago race, Eyestone says, “I don’t know that our goals have changed other than to continue to go faster. Now he knows he can run that fast.”
Conner Mantz’s marathon performances
- 2022: Chicago, seventh, 2:08:16 (first American)
- 2023: Boston, 11th, 2:10:25 (third American)
- 2023: Chicago, sixth, 2:07:47 (first American)
- 2024: U.S. Olympic Trials, first, 2:09:05
- 2024: Olympic Games, eighth, 2:08:12 (first American)
- 2024: New York City Marathon, sixth, 2:09:00 (first American)
- 2025: Boston Marathon, fourth, 2:05:08 (first American)
- 2025: Chicago Marathon, fourth, 2:04:43 (first American)
Conner Mantz’s 2025 road-racing performances
- January: An American record of 59:17 while running to a second-place finish in the Aramco Houston Half-Marathon, breaking Ryan Hall’s 18-year record by 26 seconds. Along the way, he recorded a split time of 56:23 for 20K, also an American record.
- March: Mantz placed second again in the United Airlines New York City Half Marathon, clocking a time of 59:15, averaging 4:32 per mile. The time surpassed his American-record performance in Houston, but it does not count as a record because it was run on a point-to-point course.
- April: Mantz ran to a fourth-place finish in the Boston Marathon, clocking a personal record of 2:05:08 (see above).
- May: For the third-consecutive year Mantz won the BolderBoulder 10K in Boulder, Colorado, one of road racing’s biggest (50,000 runners), most prestigious events.
- August: Mantz became only the second American ever to win the Beach to Beacon 10K in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, breaking a 22-year course record with a time of 27:26.
- September: Mantz not only won the USA 20K road running championships in New Haven, Connecticut, but he broke his own American record by seven seconds with a tie of 56:16.
- October: Mantz placed fourth in the Chicago Marathon and broke another American record — 2:04:43 — breaking the record set by Moroccan-born Khalid Khannouchi in 2022, as well as the American-born record set by Rupp in 2018 of 2:06:07. To accomplish that feat, Mantz averaged 4:45.4 per mile for 26.2 miles.
