Clayton Young’s long and winding road

Clayton Young is both a mechanical engineer and a runner by training and vocation. Until recently he was a part-time employee for Stryker, a world-wide medical devices company. He worked in R&D, developing instruments for sports medicine surgery. He did this on the side because of the demands of his other job as a professional runner.

Young will compete in the Paris Olympic Games this summer, and, as you’ll see, that requires a lot of time. He is approaching the Games as only an engineer might. He has been methodical in his planning, leaving no detail or opportunity for an edge unexplored.

He is currently in the midst of a 16-week training build to the Olympics. He lifts weights twice a week. He takes regular saunas to adapt his body to the humidity of the Paris summers, something another BYU Olympic marathoner, Jared Ward , did in his buildup to the 2016 Rio Games (where he placed sixth).

He sleeps eight to nine hours a night, naps one to three hours in the afternoon. In his words, he eats “like a madman,” all of it overseen by his wife Ashley, whose Instagram account — Feed Your Runner — provides regular updates of his prodigious food intake — eggs, burritos, smoothies, veggies, fruits, sandwiches, hamburgers, fish.

He prepares his mind, visualizing the course and all that the race could throw at him. He studies the Olympic course — “Flat for 10, then a good climb, peaks at 30K, a screaming downhill for 4K, then flattens out for 10K … "

He practices his fluid intake on the run. On a majority of training runs, he drinks from a bottle filled with water and other nutrients, “training my gut to absorb on the run, so I don’t bonk late in the race.”

He runs twice a day, once in the morning, once in the evening. Early on in his 16-week training, he ran 100-115 miles in each of the previous two weeks and increased it to 120-125 miles. He crams this into six days because he rarely runs on Sunday. He does speed training on the BYU track with training partner and fellow Olympian Conner Mantz , who makes the long drive to Provo for the workouts since moving to Park City to train at 7,000 feet.

Once a week they meet again to do a long run of 20-25 miles “at an honest pace,” with “pickups” — the last four to five miles at a blistering 4:40 pace or faster. Sometimes they are joined by Rory Linkletter , another former BYU runner who will compete in the Olympic Marathon, representing Canada.

An engineer’s approach

“Clayton has always been very methodical in his approach — you’d expect that from an engineer,” says former Olympic marathoner Ed Eyestone, who coaches Young and Mantz, as well as BYU’s track and field and cross-country teams.

For the Olympic trials, Young ordered thermoses as big as rules allowed and crammed each with a hat and water bottle. At each water station, he grabbed the thermos, unscrewed the lid, pulled out a fresh icy hat to place on his head and extracted a bottle for a drink, all while on the run.

The engineer’s approach has paid dividends. Young earned a spot on the U.S. Olympic Team by finishing in the top three of the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials in February and by meeting the remarkably stiff automatic Olympic time standard of 2:08:10. Mantz and Young are the only Americans to achieve the qualifying time, which means the U.S. will be represented by just two marathoners instead of the usual three for the first time since 2000.

In last fall’s Chicago Marathon, Mantz ran 2:07:47 and Young 2:08:00 — the fourth and seventh fastest times ever by Americans — and in February they finished one-two at the trials, one second apart and a whopping 50 seconds ahead of the third-place finisher.

They will give BYU three entries in the Paris Olympic marathon (along with Linkletter). For the record, five former BYU runners have claimed six berths in the Olympic marathon, counting Ward in 2016 and Eyestone in 1988 and 1992. All five of them are Utah high school graduates.

Young has been overshadowed by Mantz to a great extent until recently. Mantz made a big splash with two NCAA cross-country championships and his top-American showing in the Chicago Marathon. But his training partner has closed the gap and is gaining traction in the world of pro running, especially at the marathon distance.

From farm boy to Olympian

Young, the fifth of six children, grew up on a three-acre farm in Washington, the son of educators (his father was a principal and his mother a grade school teacher). The farm meant chores for the children — moving sprinkler pipe, painting fences and feeding a horse, a pig, cows, chickens, dogs, cats and ducks.

Clayton discovered his running talent in the fifth grade when the school sponsored a “mileage club” program in which students ran around a soccer field every Friday and tallied their mileage at the end of the year. Young and a classmate were tied for the lead until Clayton was kicked in the face by the family horse late in the school year and required 45 stitches. Clayton finished second, with more than 100 miles.

When Clayton was 14, the Youngs moved to American Fork, Utah, to be near family. The move proved fortuitous for a budding runner. He enrolled at American Fork High, which was soon to become one of the greatest cross-country schools in the country. He joined the AF team as a freshman in 2008 and by the end of the year he was running for the varsity team, which finished second in the state championships. The team won the next three state titles (and eight more since then). Young won the state championship as a junior and a scholarship offer from BYU, but his senior year was hampered by an IT band injury.

He signed a letter of intent with BYU’s cross-country/track program, another fortuitous decision because the team was about to take off just as AF had done during Young’s years there. After high school graduation, he left immediately on a two-year, Spanish-speaking mission in North Carolina for the Church of Jesus Christ. He gained 30 pounds, thanks to a lot of “good fried latino-style food” and little real exercise.

He ran only rarely because there was a shortage of mission companions who were willing to run with him, as mission rules required. But the time off did enable him to recover from and rehab old injuries.

He returned home in the fall of 2014 and began training with BYU, another program on the rise. “I got to see a dynasty born again,” he says. During the next four years, the Cougars finished 12th, sixth, third and second in the NCAA cross-country championships (and went on to win the title the year after Young graduated). Young ended his collegiate career by winning the 10,000-meter run at the 2019 NCAA track championships.

That victory changed everything for Young. As he says, “I had started to talk to agents, but running professionally wasn’t a big option until I won the NCAAs.”

Turning point

Young arrived at a crossroads. He had an opportunity to complete a master’s degree at Stanford (he had started it at BYU) or accept a dream job offer from ExxonMobil, which offered pensions, 401(k)s, paid paternity leave and prestige.

He took a gamble and turned to professional running instead. He convinced Stryker to employ him even though his pitch to the company seemed tenuous at best — he told the company that he required a flexible work schedule, that he could work only 10-15 hours a week, and it had to be at home, and, oh, yes, he had to have frequent time off for traveling, training and racing. He was hired.

“They’ve been fantastic and supportive,” he says. “Ever since I met the Olympic standard and the Olympic trials, I’ve done almost nothing for them. They said it’s OK, that this was the plan, to make an Olympic team.”

Even aside from training and other preparations for the big race, Young has maintained a frenetic schedule trying to keep up with everything that comes with making the Olympic team these days — meeting with advertisers, endorsement deals, media interviews, branding deals. There are negotiations for sunglasses and nutritional products and so forth. Young also maintains his YouTube channel , in which he chronicles his training build to the Olympics. The latter, which is funded by the shoe company that sponsors him (Asics), has attracted a huge following.

“Clayton has got some buzz going on,” says Eyestone. “He’s got a film crew that follows him around. Runners are eating it up. He drops in a weekly 20-minute episode. It’s really well done.”

Reflecting on his schedule since the Olympic trials, Young says, “A lot goes into being an athlete and telling the story and being marketable … It has been really exciting and fun for the most part, but last Friday I had three back-to-back interviews. I’ve done so many podcasts.”

No one remembers this now, but Young’s gamble in 2019 to turn down prestigious and high-paying jobs in the engineering field nearly backfired when his professional running career got off to a rocky start. He qualified for the 2020 Olympic marathon trials by meeting the qualifying time in a half-marathon, but his training was derailed by tendinitis in his left foot. He didn’t resume running until three weeks before the race, which was hardly ideal preparation for his marathon debut.

“I decided to still run it because I felt like that experience would pay off in four years,” he says. The results were predictable. He finished in 136th place, with a time of 2:29:46.

On the road

Road racing is a professional distance runner’s meal ticket, and In 2021, he won the U.S. 15K championships on the road and placed third in the U.S. 10K road championships. In 2022, he made a second attempt at the marathon and placed 18th in the Chicago race with a time of 2:11:51. But two months later, in February 2023, he was sidelined with a knee injury that required surgery. When he resumed running a month later the knee pain returned.

“That was a low point,” says Young. “There were a lot of unknowns. I tried physical therapy, aggressive scraping, massage, and the pain went away.”

It proved to be a breakthrough year for Young. In July, he won the U.S. 8K road championships; in September he won the U.S. 20K road championships; in October he ran the race of his life with the seventh-place, 2:08:00 showing in the Chicago Marathon. That was followed by his second-place finish in the U.S. Marathon Trials in February earlier this year.

Meanwhile, the daily grind continues for Young on the countdown to Paris. He is aided considerably by his wife, the former Ashley Bybee, who is part of a well-known running family in Utah County and BYU circles. She competed for American Fork High, which is how she met her future husband. They didn’t date until after he returned from his mission, but they were friends and exchanged letters while he was gone. They’ve been married for eight years and have two daughters, age 5 and 3.

‘A great team’

Ashley has gone all-in on Team Young. As Clayton likes to say, “My dream became her dream.” As she told LDS Living, “I watch marathons with him. Like, who else sits on the couch for two hours and watches running?”

She is part of the training effort. Young’s nutritional needs were provided by BYU when he was a collegiate athlete, but when he turned to the professional ranks all that changed. Ashley decided to take on the role of feeding the running machine that is her husband, which she chronicles on her own Instagram page, “Feed the Runner.”

“Figuring that out has been a big undertaking for sure,” Young told the magazine. “She’s really coordinated and planned meals. And when I’m coming home, when I’m leaving, what meals are good for certain workouts or certain races at certain times of days, and the shopping and the meal prep and the planning … And I know how to work really, really hard and she actually knows how to help me really recover.”

Says Eyestone, “I love how Clayton is embracing his opportunities here. He and his wife — they’re a great team.”

It’s easy to write off Young’s (and Mantz’s) chances of a medal in the Olympics. Young has the 64th-fastest entry time in the race (Mantz is 62nd), and the top eight — all Africans — have run under 2:04, the best being Ethiopia’s Sisay Lemma, who ran 2:01:48 a few months ago. But a championship race is a different style of racing altogether. All those fast times were produced in races with paid rabbits (pacers) taking them very aggressively through the various stages of the race.

A race without pacers

Those efforts were races against the clock, not their fellow racers, an attempt to achieve fast times. In the Olympics they will be running for a medal. If someone dares to push the pace, he does so at his own peril. It will be a race of attrition. It will be much more cautious and strategic — and, likely, slower.

Eyestone, who estimates that pacers provide a “4-5% energy gain,” explained championship-style racing this way a few months ago:

“There will be no pacers running nice, even splits. You’re looking at each other right from the gun and deciding how to respond — ‘Do I need to match this early surge or stay back with the pack and let (the frontrunners) dwindle (fall off the pace)?’ — and so forth. But with a championship-style race, you’re racing people, not the clock. And there’s the added pressure that this race happens only every four years.”

Young and Mantz will have to make decisions on the fly. As much as is possible, they have discussed every scenario that could unfold and how to respond.

Over the course of a 26.2-mile course, a lot can happen. Ward demonstrated what good race decisions can do in the 2016 Games in Rio. He ran prudently in the heat and, against all odds, found himself in sixth place at the finish line. For all the fast times that are produced in Chicago, Berlin, Seville, Tokyo and other non-championship marathons, it is a different story in the Olympics for all the reasons stated above. The last three Olympic races have been won with a 2:08 performance — and those are the fastest Olympic marathons ever other than the outlier of 2:06:32 in 2008. Before 2008, the fastest Olympic marathons were 2:09:55 in 1976 and 2:09:21 in 1984.

“People look at the rankings and think we have no shot at competing with (the Africans),” says Young. “But I will say this: When you look at previous Olympics, different conditions and championship-style racing, the heat, the humidity, and then look at how they got their fast times, on flat courses. I’m excited about that.

“A good day would be top 20, a great day top 10. You better believe that I have it in the back of my mind that if training goes well ... and I make good decisions in the race, I definitely have a shot; not a great shot, but it’s a shot. It can be daunting, but look at the history. Look at the podium of the last few Olympics. They were all 2:08. It’s a different type of race.”