This past weekend, a Montana State grad named Matthew Richtman ran 2:07:56 to win the Los Angeles Marathon, which ties him for sixth all-time on the U.S. men’s list.

What???

Let’s break every element of that absurd sentence down. First off, the Los Angeles Marathon usually posts results that rarely turn heads, with the winning time since the course was changed in 2020 being somewhere in the 2:09-2:13 range. And the last American winner crossed the finish line 31 years ago. Despite being point-to-point and net downhill, it’s not a particularly fast course, with over 900 feet of elevation gain—similar to the profile of Boston but with more climbing loaded into the first half. And the elite field tends to be pretty shallow: fewer than five men break 2:20 on average over the last five years, and no more than seven have in a single year.

The next fastest winning time in the last five years was John Korir’s 2:09:08 victory in March 2022. Six months later, Korir finished third in Chicago in 2:05:01.

The newly-crowned champion isn’t from a highly-touted training group or distance-running mecca; he lives and trains in Bozeman, Montana, and hails from Kaneland, Illinois. As an MSU Bobcat, he clocked (comparatively) modest PBs of 13:47.04 for 5000m and 28:21.79 for 10,000m, earning two All-American honors in cross country but never qualifying for NCAAs on the track or winning a conference title. His marathon debut was impressive; a 2:10:47 fourth-place finish at the Twin Cities Marathon last fall, and he clocked two 61-minute half marathon performance in the leadup to LA, but candidly, no one outside the most diehard of track fans in the upper Midwest had ever heard of this guy before last weekend.

His Strava account is entertaining, but shares little insight that would suggest a sub-2:08 run was right around the corner. He’s either leaving some critical data off his log (which, as written, suggests he rarely works out hard and only topped 100 miles twice in the leadup to LA), or he’s an all-time sandbagger in training in addition to being supremely talented.

Then there’s the way he ran the race (which you can watch for yourself in full on YouTube). He took the lead around halfway, dropped the entire field by mile 15 (which, although downhill, still involved splitting a 4:28) and ran something like 4:45 pace all the way home completely solo. That’s the kind of performance, on that kind of course, that suggests that his 2:07:56 could be worth something south of 2:06 in a race like Chicago.

How the heck did this happen?

The simplest, and possibly truest, explanation is that everyone is getting faster. 93 men have run sub-2:08 on record-eligible courses already this year, and Richtman’s time would’ve missed the top 150 in 2024. The number of sub-2:09 Americans has grown from 10 to 17 since 2020. It’s not crazy that someone new would join the top-ten list in 2025, but it’s safe to say no one expected it to be Richtman.

Still, someone like Matt Richtman finding marathon success that far exceeds his prior resume is far from unprecedented. Sure, Ryan Hall and Galen Rupp have NCAA titles, but riding the crest of the talent wave from Foot Locker to the Olympics isn’t the only path to the top of the American ranks. CJ Albertson, as he so often is, is the biggest outlier on the U.S. all-time list: he made exactly one NCAA championship, in the steeplechase in 2016 where he finished 22nd.

Richtman’s college career doesn’t look entirely dissimilar to others who’ve made their way up to the front of World Marathon Majors and Olympic Trials over the past few years. With repeated cross country success that exceeded his track achievements, Richtman is cut from the same mold that produced guys like Martin Hehir, Scott Fauble, and Colin Bennie. And like those guys, Richtman didn’t hang around the 10,000m circuit for a decade after college—he made his marathon debut the same calendar year he finished out his career at Montana State.

It’s also worth noting that the transition of talent upwards in distance isn’t quite as linear as we’d like to pretend. Joe Klecker’s experimentation with the half marathon hasn’t (yet) produced the fireworks some expected, and fellow Olympian Woody Kincaid’s half marathon debut in New York ended in a 63:00 effort after a 14:01 opening 5km. That’s not to say that these guys won’t one day be great marathoners, but their success over longer distances is far from guaranteed.

Only time will tell if Richtman’s incredible run in Los Angeles is a flash in a pan or the arrival of a generation-defining athlete. But in a world where we spend years anticipating the marathon debuts of guys like Grant Fisher, it’s always a pleasant surprise when the Next Great American Marathoner arrives suddenly out of nowhere.

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