About

Trenton Sandler is a middle-distance runner at the University of Arkansas and a content creator building an audience around the sport. He races the 1500m and the mile, or as he calls it, the 3.75-lap race.

Before running

Born on May 26th, 2005, son of Pamela and Todd Sandler. He grew up in Leawood, Kansas, and spent most of his childhood planning to be a professional soccer player. He played from the age of three through his senior year of high school. Track was something he picked up in middle school because it was the only sport the school allowed at that age, and for years it stayed a way to stay fit between soccer seasons.

He was also always making things. Skits on an old camcorder, movie trailers that never got finished, videos copied from the creators he watched. A photography class his freshman year at Blue Valley North led to a videography class, and that one changed the trajectory. As he put it to FanWord, “I wasn’t just having fun. I was learning the psychology behind great content.”

Running got serious late. On May 6, 2022, his junior year, he ran 1:55.11 in the 800m at the Shawnee Mission North Relays, and three weeks later took third at the Kansas state championships in 1:58.03, earning All-State honors. He ran 4:19 for 1600m as a senior. He committed to LSU in the winter of 2022, signed in February 2023, and enrolled that fall to study kinesiology, switching to business analytics in 2025.

LSU

The first two years were mostly injuries. Back-to-back stress fractures carried over from high school, a low bone density diagnosis that took time to correct, and a fat pad impingement in his knee that cost him another eight weeks. He redshirted his freshman cross country and indoor seasons.

The change came the summer before his junior year, and it was a decision to do less. He slowed his easy running, stopped trying to match the fifth-year seniors in workouts, and raised his mileage to 70-mile weeks. He went from 3:48 to 3:42 in the 1500m in a single season.

In February 2026, he ran 4:01.91 for the mile at the David Hemery Valentine Invitational in Boston, a time ranked seventh in LSU history. Later that month he ran 8:15.64 for 3000m at the SEC Indoor Championships.

The season he ran alone

By January 2026 the LSU distance group had gone from twelve runners to three, and he was the only one racing the 1500m. He had already decided to transfer, and LSU would not let him redshirt if he was leaving. He left the team at the end of February and trained himself through March, April and May with no coach and no program.

That is the season he ran 3:42.28, on May 8, 2026, at Arkansas Twilight in Fayetteville. He entered the transfer portal on May 28 and committed to Arkansas on June 29.

He is careful about how he describes the decision. “I would not be where I am today without LSU,” he told The Kick. “Zero issues there. Zero issues with my team.”

Arkansas

He runs for Cale Wallace, who arrived from Iowa State, and joined a program that swept 2026: indoor SEC, indoor nationals, outdoor SEC and outdoor nationals. He is studying economics at Arkansas, graduating in 2027, with an MBA planned for 2028. He has two years of eligibility remaining and two numbers in mind, a sub-4 mile and a 1500m in the 3:37 range, with the 2028 Olympic Trials as the target beyond that.

The three-legged mile

On May 7, 2025, he and his LSU roommate Hugh Carlson set the Guinness World Record for the three-legged mile, running 5:34.29 tethered at the ankle and forearm with seven and a half inches of rope between them. They expected it to be easy. “I thought, oh, we could totally do that,” he told Runner’s World. Carlson described it afterward as “mechanically the most challenging thing I’ve ever done in running.”

The content

He has more than 63,000 subscribers on YouTube and 20.5 million views, with more than 50,000 followers each on Instagram and TikTok.

The goal is not personal. Track and field draws hundreds of thousands of competitors and millions of recreational runners, and gets almost no mainstream coverage. He makes videos that treat running as entertainment for people who do not follow the sport, on the theory that the audience arrives for the personality and stays for the racing.

What keeps him doing it is smaller than that. Coming off an injury during a bad season, he was getting hate online for the first time. Then a mother wrote to say she and her son watched his videos together, and that it did not matter to them whether he won. “What mattered was that I showed up and stayed real.”

He has worked with The Feed, COROS and Liquid IV, and created content for Target, Uber, Amazon, Men’s Wearhouse and Verizon. He sharpened his production work with the team at Declassified Media, and previously published two digital products for young runners, The ULTIMATE Recruiting Guide and a free strength plan for distance runners.

Dennis Yu, CEO of Local Service Spotlight, has been a mentor in how he thinks about building a brand.

Relentless

In May 2026 he launched Relentless: Mental Toughness with developer Rahul Kumar. It connects athletes with mental performance coaches, who build programs out of short lessons an athlete works through one at a time. The idea came from his own first two seasons at LSU, when he felt he had lost his competitive drive in races and went looking for something concrete to do about it. Its website is relentlesstough.com.

“We all know how to train our bodies daily,” he told The Extra Mile. “But no one knows what to do for their mind, and it really is trainable.”

Writing

He writes when something actually changes rather than on a schedule.

• Why I Entered the Transfer Portal, on leaving LSU and the season he trained alone
• I’m a Razorback: Why I Committed to Arkansas, on the visit that decided it
• Why I Built Relentless, on the app and what came before it

Personal bests