Clayton Young has been saying he’d open the curtain back up. He wasn’t kidding.
Episode 1 of his four-part docuseries — Team Brooks | Boston 2026 Marathon Build — dropped on YouTube on Friday, and within a day it had over 35,000 views. For anyone who’s followed Young’s career, the video is exactly what they’ve been waiting for: raw, detailed, and filmed like a runner who genuinely understands what his audience wants to see.
It covers the first five weeks of his Boston build — workouts, lab tests, the Brooks announcement shoot — and gives the most honest picture yet of what it actually looks like to come back from 18 weeks of ankle injury and try to be competitive at a World Marathon Major six weeks later.
“I’ve Got Four Years Left”
The most striking line in the video isn’t about shoes or splits. It comes in the opening minute, almost offhand.
“Realistically, I’ve got four years left,” Young says to camera. “Four years left from an odds perspective to see the difference that I can make in this sport. My best years are these next four years and I needed to make a decision now to make these next four years the best four years.”
He’s 30. He’s coming off the worst injury of his career. And he just bet everything — the agent, the contract, the sponsorship — on himself. It’s the kind of framing that makes the rest of the video hit differently.
What the Workouts Actually Look Like
The training footage is the heart of Episode 1. Young is candid that his fitness isn’t where it normally would be at this point in a build — he went from 50 to 130 miles over five weeks, starting from almost nothing — and the workouts show it, in the best possible way.
The first session was a 4×3 mile at marathon pace at Lake Loop in Utah, run alongside fellow Boston contender Jared Ward. Young started at 4:55 per mile and held on. “My marathon pace is not what it once was coming off the injury,” he admits. “Even the last two sets, all I could do was hang on to marathon pace of 4:50 to 4:55.” He finished all four. Ward called it a big step in the right direction.
The second workout — a 10’/5’/3’/2’/1′ descending effort with 1:1 rest — was the first session where Young says he really felt like himself again. “This is one of the first runs where I felt like I really got to crank and feel some turnover.” He called the Hyperion Elite 6 “really poppy,” noting the foam responds rather than just compresses. “It’s fun and exciting and probably haven’t ran that fast in a while.”
The week capped with a 25-mile long run featuring a 6-mile pickup from miles 17 to 23 — the longest tempo effort inside a long run Young says he’s ever done. They averaged 5:29 per mile for the pickup section. “When it’s a six mile pickup, you have time to think about how much you have left and you have to navigate the mental demons.” He navigated them.
Why Brooks, In His Own Words
Young has talked about the Brooks decision in interviews, but the video puts it plainly. His primary concern was always the shoe. Before anything else, he got prototype Hyperion Elite 6s, went to the lab, and ran blind biomechanics and V2 efficiency testing.
“The data came back really, really good. And I was very impressed.”
Then he watched teammate Casey Clinger run 59:30 at the Houston Half Marathon — the third-fastest time ever by an American — in the same shoe. “Not only are these shoes testing well on me, but they’re working for other athletes.”
But what sold him beyond the footwear, he says, is the infrastructure. “It’s now no longer just going to rest on me. I have a whole team around me — from their performance footwear team to their apparel team to their physiologist team to even their brand team.” For someone who spent seven years largely operating as a one-man operation inside a sponsorship, that sentence carries weight.
The Mentality Going In
Young is clear-eyed about where he is. He knows he may show up to Hopkinton underdone. He knows the compressed build is a gamble. He describes his approach as “a healthy urgency and pressure, but definitely a little bit of like do or die mentality.”
But there’s something in his framing that’s hard to ignore. “I might not be in the fittest shape of my career,” he says. “But I might be the most prepared mentally, because I’ve just been through so much.”
Three more episodes to come before race day. Boston is April 20.
