In one 26.2-mile run around downtown Orlando, Conner Mantz became an Olympian.

Mantz won the 2024 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials with a time of 2 hours, 9 minutes, 5 seconds, clinching a spot at the upcoming Paris Olympics along with training partner Clayton Young (2:09:06).

The victory was an iconic moment for Mantz, a marathon that will forever change his life.

But on his Strava page, it was simply this: Morning Run with Clayton.

Mantz is one of thousands of athletes who shares daily workouts on Strava, an app that tracks a runner’s location using GPS data and records their mileage, times, elevation, speed, cadence and heart rate. Strava operates as a social media, too: Athletes can like and comment on each other’s runs, post pictures and write captions.

This leads us back to Mantz’s beautifully simple caption: Morning Run with Clayton. The data:

  • Pace: 4 minutes, 52 seconds per mile
  • Average heart rate: 166 beats per minute
  • Cadence: 185 steps per minute
  • Olympic spots clinched: 1

Mantz’s Strava also reveals a 4.15-mile shakeout run — captioned “Last one” — the day before Trials and a 1.22-mile “Warm Up” an hour before Saturday’s historic race.

For his Trials-winning run, the Paris-bound marathoner even gifted us a 506-word recap of the race, in which he wrote: “While Clayton celebrated and enjoyed the moment, I did my best to finish. Clayton could’ve out kicked me, but let me finish ahead. I’m unsure why. I’m grateful to have competed with Clayton and ran a great race today. It was a dream come true.”

As Mantz alluded to, Young led him by a few steps until the final moment, when he allowed his teammate to eke ahead and win by one second. Young explained his decision in a post-race interview.

The two were college teammates at BYU and are now best friends headed to Paris together.

In Saturday’s women’s race, Fiona O’Keeffe, Emily Sisson and Dakotah Lindwurm all punched their tickets to Paris. O’Keeffe won emphatically, setting a U.S. Trials record with a time of 2:22:10 in her marathon debut.

Like O’Keeffe, Lindwurm is now a first-time Olympian. She earned third-place on Saturday by running a 2:25:31.

A former hockey goalie in Minnesota who started running in high school, Lindwurm was once a walk-on at Division II Northern State University in South Dakota. She finished 36th at the 2020 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials in Atlanta and was considered a longshot heading into this year’s event.

Lindwurm is known for her prodigious training volume, often logging 130-mile weeks on the road.

To date, she has logged 23,050.5 miles on Strava, spending 2,654 hours and 34 minutes (over 110 days) on runs since she opened her account in 2018.

Lindwurm has recently been quoting Taylor Swift lyrics in her captions. On January 29, a brisk eight-mile run was “Are you ready for it?” and her Trials triumph was “One day we will be remembered,” a lyric in Swift’s “Long Live.”

Keira D’Amato, a 39-year-old mother of two with the second-fastest ever marathon time by a U.S. woman, was considered one of the favorites for Trials. But in the Orlando heat, D’Amato dropped out during the 21st mile. After the race, she on her Strava, “The heat was no joke. Didn’t win the battle, but still fighting the war. ❤️”

D’Amato’s Strava is littered with puns (some incredible, some cringeworthy), such as:

Many more of the world’s top marathoners are on Strava, and all are worth a look:

  • Clayton Young, who will make his Olympic marathon debut in Paris.
  • Molly Seidel, the Tokyo Olympic bronze medalist in the women’s marathon.
  • Zach Panning, who led at Saturday’s Trials until the final few miles.
  • Eliud Kipchoge, considered arguably the greatest marathon runner of all time and two-time Olympic champion.