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.

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.