A Great Sporting Feat You Have A Good Shot At Seeing Live

In this day of YouTube, it's possible to replay many of the greatest sporting events in history. It's exciting to watch, but not as exciting as being there. It's hard to get to see a great event live. Some, like making a 7-10 split in bowling, are exceedingly rare, and admittedly pure luck to achieve. Others, like the baseball triple play are relatively easy to execute, but the circumstances when they can happen are rare. And then there are the historic firsts. Many are impossible to try to predict. Even feats you know will happen are never guaranteed. By the early 50s, it was clear that someone would run a sub-4 minute mile soon. But who would it be, and when and where? Some great moments in sports, like great matchups, classic games, are easier to see coming, but also usually expensive to attend. And the game could end up being a dud.

If you want to see a great achievement in sport happen live, a good one to try for is the sub-four-minute mile. The first sub-4 mile was accomplished by Roger Bannister in 1954, and since then hundreds of athletes have done it. But it's still relatively rare. It's still a benchmark. No woman has ever come close to it. Only a few American high-schoolers have ever achieved the feat, and it is still a time that only a small percentage collegiate men ever achieve. It's funny that in this day of metric distances for track events, the mile is still run at the national and international level, and some of the world's best runners still revere the distance.

The nice thing about the sub-4 mile is that you have a pretty good chance at predicting when it will happen. It takes a fast field of top runners, and a good track. We have both here at Penn State. Every year, our track and field team hosts two big (and two smaller) indoor track meets that attract some of the best collegiate athletes in the country. And Penn State's indoor track is one of the most modern and fastest in the East. The surface is relatively new and well cared for and the track has an adjustable lifting system on the turns to vary the banking for different race distances. In the last few years, there have been several sub-4 performances at the Penn State indoor track, and they seem to be becoming more frequent as teams catch on that this is the place to run a fast mile. The great thing about trying to catch a sub-4 mile at a collegiate meet is that it's pretty cheap (or free!) to go.

My running club hosts our own Indoor Mile Series in conjunction with the Penn State meets. None of our current Club members can come close to a 4-minute mile (though a couple of the old-timers have run one earlier in their careers). I often hang around after our events to watch the college kids run. I've seen some great sub-4:10 runs, but I've always missed the sub-4s!

Last week, I went to the two-day meet on Friday to do our mile run, but missed two great races run the next day. In the men's mile, the lead pack ran 30-second laps in the 8-lap race with near metronome precision until the last lap. Then Liam Boylan-Pett broke free from a tight pack to win the race in 3:59.40. Three others were under 4:02. The second great run was that of local star Rececca Donaghue, who set a facility record in the women's 3000m run. Rebecca is the coach of the local high school's girls' cross-country team, and she tried out for the Olympics this year in the 5K run, just missing the final cut. She also has some major national running achievements under her belt. Rebecca ran "unattached" (she is not a collegiate runner). She led the race most of the way, but Penn State's top woman distance runner, Bridget Franek, was on her heals until the very last lap of the 15-lap race. Rebecca won in 9:07.03, a facility record. Franek broke the Penn State collegiate record, finishing second in 9:10.04.

How do I know the "play-by-play" for these two races? A web site for track geeks called Flotrack now gathers videos from the major meets and hosts them on their site. Here's the video for the sub-4 mile. It's pretty exciting. Here's the video for the facility record 3K. It's over twice as long, but still fun to watch. The last meet of the Penn State Indoor Track season is this weekend. Maybe I'll get another chance to see a sub-4 mile!

Comments

[Tara]

Marty, did you see this post on Runner's World about how people don't watch running? http://dailyviews.runnersworld.com/2009/02/running-super-s.html

It's an interesting discussion. I never paid much attention to competitive running until recently. I got hooked watching the women's Olympic trials marathon in Boston last year - it was awesome to be part of that crowd.

[Marty]

I think it's an acquired taste, and one that it helps to know what's going on. Some events, like the ones they always show on TV, are easy crowd pleasers. The sprints, some field events, have universal appeal. Distance running is boring to most people. They're going around in circles, for cripes sakes! And they're not even going that fast! But if you're in the know, you can see the race unfold, see the strategy either working or falling apart, see the subtle clues that the guy that's ahead is toast and will end up in fifth. But you can be wrong! Rebecca looked like she was toast before the halfway point of her 3K, and when she got passed, I thought that was it. But man, she's tough. What a kick at the end!

And, by the way, they are going fast. It's been many years since I could sprint one lap at the pace those milers sustained for 8. If you want to see a truly amazing race, one that I remember watching "back in the day", check out Dave Wottle's run of the 800 in the 1972 Olympics. This is one for the ages.

[Chris]

I've alway been amazed at:

1) How easy the make it look
2) How much they have left at the end. The mile guy was going so fast in the last lap that it makes it look like he could've done better in previous laps.

Who am I to judge?

Just like this video of the recent 100m world record. Makes you think he had the potential to do even better.

[Marty]

Believe me, it hurts. Look at Bannister at the end of his mile. He pretty much collapses. Part of the "looking easy" is the training for an efficient stride. If you don't look good when you're running the mile, i.e. you look like your straining, then you'd probably be be better if you trained not to look that way. Untense your shoulders, take more even strides, concentrate on rhythm. But I know from my own meager experience, and from watching and talking to people much faster, that the mile is a hard race.

[Sam]

My former company was founded by one of the runners of that particular race.

As an aside, I remember my grandfather talking about Bannister, and other track stars just as a modern fan of collegiate athletics would talk of football and basketball. In his youth, the track events were the popular ones to go to.