Clayton Young will attempt to break the American marathon record at the Bank of America Chicago Marathon on 11 October, targeting the 2:04:43 that his training partner Conner Mantz set on the same course last autumn. Young made the announcement on Wednesday's episode of the Nobody Asked Us podcast, hosted by Des Linden and Kara Goucher, ending several weeks of speculation about where the 2024 Olympian would race this autumn.
The scale of the task is considerable. Young's lifetime best is the 2:05:41 he ran in Boston in April, a performance made more striking by the fact that he arrived on the start line after a compressed build-up. Boston's point-to-point, net-downhill course is not eligible for records, however, so on paper Young's fastest record-eligible marathon remains the 2:08:00 he ran in Chicago in 2023. Measured against his true best he needs 58 seconds; measured against the record book he needs more than three minutes.
Young has a better view of the target than most. He and Mantz train together under Ed Eyestone in Provo, Utah, and were teammates on the United States team at the Paris Olympics, where both finished inside the top ten. Having watched Mantz's build-up to last October's record from inside the same group, Young will have a clear picture of what 2:04 fitness looks like in training, and that familiarity is presumably part of what has persuaded him to commit to the number in public.
Chicago remains the obvious venue for such an attempt. The flat loop through the city is where Kelvin Kiptum set the then world record of 2:00:35 in 2023 and where Mantz produced his American mark, and organisers routinely assign pacemakers to protect designated record attempts deep into the race. With the marathon's global standard reset by Sabastian Sawe's sub-two in London in April, 2:04:43 no longer looks like an outlandish figure for a leading American, even if only one has ever run it.
The announcement follows a pattern that Josh Kerr established on the track this summer: declare the target early, accept the pressure, and use the build-up to generate attention. Young has been candid that a miss would not be a disaster, since a personal best on a record-eligible course would still represent significant progress. But the framing matters. With Sawe out of Berlin and the autumn marathon season looking for storylines, Young has volunteered one, and Chicago in five weeks' time will tell whether it was ambition or overreach.