59:43 Revisited: How Ryan Hall Did It, and Why His American Record Has Stood So Long

Hall's American half marathon record celebrated its 18th anniversary this week, but it may not last much longer

Ryan Hall awoke on the morning of Friday, January 12, 2007, to see the snow falling thick and fast outside his parents’ house in Big Bear Lake, Calif. Hall was stopping by on his way from his training base in Mammoth Lakes, five hours north, to the Ontario Airport, an hour west, where he was scheduled to fly to Houston later that day in order to make his half marathon debut.

As he ran a few easy miles that morning across fresh powder, Hall’s legs felt great, just as they had for most of the previous two months. It did not matter that nobody had plowed the roads yet. Hall was in such a good mood, his stride so bouncy, that he felt like Tigger.

But as Hall and his wife, Sara, left his parents’ house, the snow was showing no signs of relenting. Big Bear Lake sits at more than 6,700 feet of elevation, and the drive to Ontario required descending winding California State Route 18, also known as “the Article Circle.” On a good day, the road offers scenic views of the valley below. This was not a good day. But Hall had a flight to catch, so after finishing his run, he strapped snow chains to the tires of his Honda CR-V and hit the road.

Struggling to drive in the icy conditions, Hall lost control of the vehicle and crashed into a ditch on the side of the road (it did not help that Hall had attached the chains to the rear tires of his front-wheel drive CR-V). Neither he nor Sara were hurt, but he could not hide his frustration, slamming the steering wheel with his fist and screaming in anger. Tigger was gone.

Eventually, another driver came along and helped pull the car out, but the road ahead was closed off due to the weather, forcing the Halls to take refuge at a local diner. They would not be flying to Houston that afternoon, and Hall began to wonder if they would make it there at all.

“I was not a picture of composure,” Hall said. “What was adding to the stress was I was feeling so good leading up to this race. I was like, I’ve got to get to this race. I’ve never felt this good in my life.”

You probably know how this story ends. The Halls flew out on the next day instead, and a day after that at Sunday’s Houston Half Marathon, Ryan shocked the running the world by winning the race in 59:43 in a daring solo effort. The time made Hall the 14th man under 60:00 in the half and ranked him #8 on the all-time world list. He tore more than a minute off Mark Curp‘s American record of 60:55.

(From the archives: The LRC homepage after Hall’s 59:43, MB: Ryan Hall’s Performance The (fill in the blank) Best American Performance EVER)

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Victah Sailer photo

Today, 283 men have broken 60:00, and Hall has slid from 8th to a tie for 199th on the all-time list. Thanks to an influx of supershoes, the world record has dropped from Haile Gebrselassie‘s 58:55 in 2007 to 57:30, set by Yomif Kejelcha at the Valencia Half in October. Yet Hall’s American record, set five days after Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced a new creation called the iPhone, still stands. Tuesday marked its 18th anniversary, and his performance remains iconic.

Here’s what eventual New York and Boston Marathon champ Meb Keflezighi, who had already won an Olympic silver medal at that point in his career, had to say about it last week.

“[When Ryan ran 59:43], it’s like okay, now it’s a new game,” said Keflezighi, who finished 3rd in Houston that year, some 2:39 behind Hall. “…It was a big, big, big, big day. A huge day for US distance running.”

With a new crop of Olympians — Conner MantzClayton YoungJoe KleckerHillary Bor — set to take aim at Hall’s mark at this year’s Houston Half on Sunday, there is no better time to reflect on Hall’s record run. Here is the story of how it all came together — and why the mark has stood for so long.

***

“I was getting my doors blown off on the track”

By January 2007, Meb Keflezighi was firmly established as America’s top road runner. He was 31 years old and had earned the silver medal in the 2004 Olympic marathon in Athens, and had since gone on to notch podium finishes in New York and Boston. His last race of 2006 had gone poorly, as he finished just 21st in the New York City Marathon after a case of food poisoning. His target for the first half of 2007 was April’s London Marathon.

Keflezighi entered the Houston Half Marathon as the slight favorite, though he expected Hall to be in the mix for the win. Like Hall, Keflezighi was based in Mammoth Lakes, and he had heard Hall was in good shape.

“I was just doing basic intervals,” Keflezighi said. “I wasn’t super fit. But it was a US championship, I wanted to win.”

Hall, then 24, was coming off a 2006 season that had been simultaneously disappointing and promising. Hall had won the 2005 NCAA 5,000-meter title for Stanford and made the World Championship team that summer (13:16.03 5,000 pb). He focused on the same event in 2006, but after a disastrous European season that culminated with a 13:58, last-place finish at the London Grand Prix, he came to realize he lacked the speed to contend in the 5,000 at the highest level.

“I was getting my doors blown off on the track,” Hall said.

Embed from Getty Images

At the same time, Hall was discovering he had an aptitude for the longer events. In February 2006, he had won the US cross country championships (a 12k race in those days) by 27 seconds, dominating a field that included former NCAA XC champs Jorge Torres and Dathan Ritzenhein. He then won the US 20k championships in September and broke the US 20k record by running 57:54 at the World Road Running Championships in Hungary in October, where he placed 11th, 39 seconds behind the bronze medallist. Houston would be his official debut in the half, but his strong runs in the 20k (57:54 for 20k is 61:04 half marathon pace) demonstrated obvious potential.

And, unbeknownst to the US running community, Hall had leveled up over the winter. He was planning on making his marathon debut in Los Angeles on March 4, and was stunned at how easily his body was absorbing the training. The highlight: a 12-mile threshold workout at 4:48 pace on a hilly road at nearly 8,000 feet of elevation. His coach, Terrence Mahon, could scarcely believe Hall’s splits.

By the time he arrived in Houston, Hall felt ready to attack Curp’s American record, which had stood since 1985.

“You can just feel your body absorbing the workload and it’s a pretty special feeling when you feel it clicking and you feel the times coming easy and effortless,” Hall said. “…I remember just thinking this is going to be really interesting. I have no idea what’s going to happen here, but I’ve never felt this good in my life.”

***

“Send it. Send it as hard as you can.”

Hall suffered a painful headache on Saturday and slept poorly the night before the race. But conditions on Sunday — temps in the mid-50s, no wind, foggy and a little humid — were terrific for distance running. And Hall felt good enough on his warmup to know that he was still ready to go.

“The travel complications, flying the day before the race, the headache, not sleeping, none of that stuff mattered,” Hall said. “All that mattered was the body was good, the energy was good, the fitness was good.”

The race began before dawn, which lent a spectral air to proceedings as the lead pack raced raced through foggy, largely deserted streets in the dark early miles. The opening pack passed one mile in 4:38 before Hall dropped a 4:30 second mile to open up a seven-second lead. Keflezighi recalled telling Dan Browne that they needed to close the gap to Hall, only for Browne to assure him Hall would come back to the pack.

But by 5k (14:05), Hall had stretched his lead to 17 seconds, and Keflezighi soon realized the rest of the field was fighting for second.

“By 4 miles, I knew that it’s not gonna happen,” Keflezighi said. “That’s it. He had too much of a gap.”

Hall wrote two sets of target splits on the back of his hand, but never wound up consulting them (Victah Sailer photo)

Before the race, Hall had written two sets of splits on the back of his left hand. The first, targeting the American record, was for if he was having an “A” day. The second, targeting around 4:40/mile pace (61:10), was for a “B” day.

But once the gun fired, Hall never looked at his hand. When he passed one mile in 4:38, he didn’t think about how fast he was running (60:44 half marathon pace). He thought about how he felt.

“It just felt too slow, it felt too easy,” Hall said. “I remember just thinking, okay, if I was out on Green Church Road [in Mammoth Lakes], could I sustain this effort? I had been doing these 12-mile thresholds, a bunch of them, so I knew what kind of effort I could sustain. And I said, yeah, this would be an easy day out there.”

So, rather than maintain his effort, Hall picked it up. It was a little scary, Hall said, seeing so many mile splits in the low-4:30s. The effort felt right, but because he did all of his training at altitude, he was not used to turning over his legs quite so quickly.

“I wasn’t planning on running that fast,” Hall said. “There was no thought in my mind of trying to break an hour that day.”

Reflecting on the race nearly two decades later, Hall is glad he stayed aggressive.

That was an important lesson and one that I’m glad that I got right on that day,” Hall said. “…You always think when you’re racing and in the middle of your career, “Oh, I’ll run faster than that…’ I had never felt like that before in my life and can’t guarantee I’ll ever feel like that again. So when you’re getting a flier like that, just send it. Send it as hard as you can.”

Hall after the race with his parents Susie (left) and Mickey (right) (Victah Sailer photo)

Hall passed 10k in 28:21 (59:49 pace), 15k in 42:21, and 10 miles in 45:33 (thanks to David Monti‘s 2007 race recap for the splits). With no rabbit, his only company was an unusually crowded press truck, which included Mahon, Sara, and his parents, Mickey and Susie.

The last two guests had been a late addition. Initially, Hall’s parents had planned on spending the weekend in San Diego to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary. But the night before Ryan planned on leaving their house for Houston, he asked Susie for a haircut. This, she knew, was a sign: Ryan only got a haircut when he knew he was really ready to race. After he told her how well his training block had gone, the Halls called an audible and flew down to Houston instead.

Susie had brought a cowbell to ring for her son, but it would remain silent. Because it was the press truck, they were prohibited from cheering — a policy the Halls adhered to even as every runner save Ryan faded from earshot. Still, Hall feels fortunate that his family had a front-row seat for his greatest performance.

“I’ll never to forget being able to look at my parents, Sara, Terrence,” Hall said. “To be able to share that moment with them was a very unique experience. I mean, when do you ever get to run a race and get to look at your family, coach, and wife the entire race?”

(The trip proved bittersweet for Ryan’s parents. While they were away, a pipe froze in their attic, resulting in a flood of their house, which Mickey had built from the ground up. Mickey and Susie had to move into a rental, and it took a year to rebuild the damage.)

Ryan suffered a small stomach cramp around the nine-mile mark, but it never grew into anything significant. He slowed slightly toward the end, going 14:05-14:16-14:00-14:45 for his 5k splits, but had such a large buffer on the record and sub-60:00 that he had time to celebrate in the finish straight, throwing his arms up and encouraging the crowd to cheer. As Hall crossed the finish line in 59:43 in his red-and-black Asics singlet, he uncorked a mighty fist pump, which has become the iconic image from that day’s race.

Ryan Hall celebrates his 59:43

Ever since he began running as a teenager in Big Bear Lake, Hall had held a firm inner belief that he was destined to do something special in the sport, a belief that grew as his family and coaches nurtured his passion. This, he knew, was that something special.

“When you go and you actually do it, it’s like finally, finally!” Hall said. “I’ve been freaking going at this thing so hard for so many years, over a decade, and finally I’m getting to live this moment that I’ve been working for since the time I was 13. The amount of joy and happiness and gratitude and excitement that I felt in that moment was indescribable. It’s one of the happiest moments of my life.”

***

The aftermath

Word of Hall’s time quickly spread across the US running community. Ritzenhein, Hall’s rival dating back to their high school days, heard about it at a workout in Boulder with the Torres brothers and Jason Hartmann.

“They said that he had run 59:43 and I was like no way, must be wrong,” Ritzenhein said. “Must be a short course. It was so impressive that it was hard for me to believe.”

It was real, but even Hall was having a difficult time adjusting to his new reality. Just six months earlier, he had been getting his ass kicked on the track. Now he was one of the fastest half marathoners in history. According to the IAAF scoring tables at the time, 59:43 was a better performance than every other American middle distance or distance record.

“To be one of the best guys in the world at the half marathon distance was pretty surreal,” Hall said. “I was like, dang, I just took a big step here. And I still had my debut marathon to look forward to…It gave me that confidence that I needed to then go to London and not be scared to mix it up with the big boys.”

Yes, London. Hall had initially planned on debuting close to home in Los Angeles, but he quickly realized he needed to aim bigger. Typically, the major spring marathons have already set their fields by mid-January, but the 59:43 had raised Hall’s profile significantly, and London made Hall an offer once his agent Ray Flynn reached out to them. Hall was especially intrigued by the opportunity to race against Haile Gebrselassie and Paul Tergat, two legends he had grown up watching at the Olympics on TV.

As Hall weighed the offer, he also received encouragement to run London from Meb, who was also running the race.

“I’m like, you’ve gotta go get that debut record,” said Keflezighi. “At the time it was 2:09:41, [Alan] Culpepper and Alberto Salazar tied. I was like, get that, your name will change and that’s marketability.”

Once again in London, Hall showed absolutely no fear. If you were an American who got up early to watch the race, you may have thought you were dreaming when you saw this on the screen at 35k:

Hall faded to 7th by the finish, but he broke the US debut record handily, running 2:08:24. He would remain competitive with the best in the world over the next five years, making two Olympic teams, finishing in the top five at six World Marathon Majors, and running the fastest marathon ever by an American, 2:04:58, thanks to a big tailwind in Boston in 2011. Hall developed a reputation for pushing hard, both in races and training, something that propelled him to great heights but may have hastened his retirement from the sport, which came at age 33 in 2016 after years of fatigue and low testosterone levels.

***

Why hasn’t anyone broken 59:43?

When Hall ran his American record back in 2007, only three countries had a faster national record in the half: Ethiopia, Kenya, and Eritrea. His time was 48 seconds slower than Gebrselassie’s world record. Now, 19 countries — including Switzerland, Sweden, Italy, and Portugal — have a faster national record than the US, and the American record lags 2:13 behind Kejelcha’s world record. Every American has access to supershoes far faster than the minimially-cushioned Asics Hyper Speeds Hall used to set his record, yet no one has run faster than 59:43. Why?

Early on, it was because 59:43 for 13.1 on the roads was really freaking fast. But as distances perfomances have improved across the globe since the adoption of supershoes in 2017, it has largely come down to opportunity.

“On the track, you can run a 1500, 5k, 10k pretty frequently,” Hall said. “You have a lot of opportunities. In the half marathon/marathon distance, there are only so many flat, fast, good opportunities to run fast, and you’re working it into your marathon training if you are a marathoner.”

Mantz and Young are among the Americans lining up to take a shot at Hall’s record on Sunday in Houston (Kevin Morris photo)

That last point is particularly notable. Few of America’s top talents tailor a training block around peaking at a half marathon. Ritzenhein ran 16 half marathons in his career, but says he never had one specific race where he went in with the goal of breaking the American record. His best time, 60:00 (still #4 all-time US), came at the 2009 World Half Marathon Championships in Birmingham where he earned the bronze medal.

Keflezighi said he took one shot at the record, at the Rock ‘n’ Roll San Jose Half in October 2009. He felt he was in shape to break it (he would go on to win the NYC Marathon four weeks later), but his pacer did not make it beyond three miles and Keflezighi wound up running 61:00.

That puts in perspective how special Hall’s run in Houston was, for he ran his time without any pacers. And while Hall was gearing up for a marathon, he maintained some residual speed from focusing on the track the year before. As a result, he said, there was never a point in his career where he was in better position to run a fast half.

“It was the perfect storm of my body coming into its own,” Hall said.

It is important to remember that Hall is an all-time US distance talent — the dude ran a 2:06:17 marathon, pre-supershoes. It was always going to be a tough ask for someone to break a record he set while in peak half marathon shape.

But with the supershoes providing a boost of perhaps a minute (or more) in the half, 59:43 has looked far more attainable. The new World Ahletics scoring tables equate it to 3:50.25 for the mile, 13:03.30 for 5,000, 27:17.96 for 10,000, and 2:06:19 for the marathon.

Galen Rupp took a few shots at a fast half in his career, running 59:47 at the 2018 Rome-Ostia Half (though the course was not record-eligible) and 60:22 at the Row River Half in 2020. Two-time Olympian Leonard Korir ran 59:52 in New Delhi in 2017.

America’s top current marathoner, Conner Mantz, ran 60:55 in his pro debut at the US Half Marathon champs in 2021 and 61:12 in Houston in 2023. Mantz, who is in this year’s Houston field, told LetsRun in October that he would like to break Hall’s record one day, but said he has had other priorities during the last three years.

“It’s been on my mind since even before I went pro, but finding the right race and peaking for one is a little difficult to do, just because the marathon is the big race,” Mantz said. “…The times I’m in the shape to do it are always when I’m heading into a marathon. And I’d much rather go run a fast or good marathon than get the American record in the half.”

Other potential record-breakers such as Woody KincaidJoe KleckerNico Young, and Graham Blanks have yet to race a half.

That will change on Sunday for Klecker as he’ll make his debut on the same Houston course where Hall set his record 18 years ago. Between Klecker, Mantz, Clayton Young, and US 10-mile record holder Hillary Bor, there is a serious chance that 59:43 finally goes down this year in Houston.

“I think it’s just a matter of the right people getting in the right race at the right time,” said Ed Eyestone, who coaches Mantz and Young. “We have probably four or five guys [right now] that are capable of that on the right day.”

Keflezighi offers a word of advice to this weekend’s hopefuls.

“They better get it before Grant Fisher gets it,” Keflezighi said.

Victah Sailer photo

Fisher, 27, who holds American records in the 3,000 (7:25), 5,000 (12:46), and 10,000 (26:33), clearly has the fitness, but is another athlete for whom the timing has not worked. He told LetsRun he considered running Houston this year but decided to focus on the indoor season instead.

Hall, for his part, said he has been waiting to hand off the record for a while.

“I’m honestly shocked I still have it,” Hall said. “When the new shoes came out, I was like, my record’s gone this year.”

Hall also holds one record that is unlikely to ever be broken: fastest half marathon by an American without supershoes.

“In my mind, anyways there are the records pre-supershoes and post-supershoes,” Hall said. “It’s almost like we’re in a different category now.”

As he looks back on 2007 Houston now, Hall said that in some ways, that day haunted him. For seventeen seconds short of an hour, he felt a level of bliss he spent the rest of his career trying to recapture. Hall ran fast times and won an Olympic Marathon Trials, but none of it felt as easy as that morning in Texas. His hope is that every runner gets to feel that way at least once in their life.

“It’s that effortless running when you’re just floating,” Hall said. “It was like that, the whole time. That sensation is why most people run, when you have those days when you’re eating up the ground and it’s not even hard and you’re just flying. It is super, super, super fun.

“If the boys go out and run faster than I did, I’ll be the first one to congratulate them and I’d be stoked to pass along the record to them. For me, what’s most special about that day isn’t the time or the number or the American record or anything like that. It’s the sensation I had during that run. And you can’t take away that experience that I had. That day will forever be cemented in my mind as one of the most cool experiences of my life.”


Talk about Hall’s amazing run on the world-famous LRC Messageboard.

Relive the run via LRC archives:
*The LRC homepage after Hall’s 59:43
*MB: Ryan Hall’s Performance The (fill in the blank) Best American Performance EVER) Wejo started this thread after the race.
*David Monti’s race recap
*2007 Houston Half photo gallery

Come back later this week for a full 2025 Houston Half Marathon preview.

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