A 2:34 marathon the hard way – here’s how Tomas Rodríguez shattered the run record at IM Texas

While most triathlon fans aren’t too familiar with his name, based on his incredible performance at Ironman Texas yesterday, there’s a good chance we’ll hear a lot more about Mexico’s Tomas Rodríguez Hernandez in the future. The Mexican flew to a 2:34:14 marathon yesterday to outrun Germany’s Patrick Lange by a minute and take the Ironman North American Championship.

Triathlon Magazine actually wrote about the Mexican champ a few years ago – contributor Loreen Pindera tracked down Rodriguez Hernandez before his runner-up finish to Lionel Sanders at Ironman 70.3 Mont-Tremblant:

Fighting for the podium behind Sanders: Who is Tomas Hernandez? Laundry and Beals sprint for third

In a Strava post he titled “Two laps for show 1 for win” we can see just how fast Rodriguez was going as he broke the previous Texas course record by almost six minutes.

Here are the 5 km splits:

• 16:59
• 17:07
• 17:03
• 18:06
• 17:56
• 18:25
• 19:45
• 20:12

Rodriguez was “struggling” through the final lap of the race (how many of you would like to “struggle” through a 20:12 5 km split?), and ran 4:09 and 4:00 for the last two kilometres of the race.

“I ran the first two laps so fast,”  Rodriguez, the winner of Ironman 70.3 Campeche earlier this year, said after the race. “The last lap I just wanted to survive.”

The Mexican champ ran the first half marathon in a scorching 1:13:12, and ran his fastest-ever 30 km split of 1:45:36. If he’d been able to hold that pace he would have run a 2:28 marathon.

The man Rodriguez outran for the win in Texas, Patrick Lange, has run almost that fast at the end of a full-distance race twice – he ran 2:30:31 to win Ironman Israel in 2022, and 2:30:27 on his way to a runner-up finish at Challenge Roth last year.