HardLoper wrote:
Middle94 wrote:Well that's just rude for no reason, where is your answer?
I don't see how my answer isn't helping to answer the question. The OP doesn't state what country he is talking about anyway.
If you want you could divide 747 by the population of the UK and get an estimate for the rough percentage expected amongst a large populus. I'll bet that this number will be very, very similar to what it would be for the USA also.
The OP wanted to know what fraction of men could hypothetically break 2 with ideal training, not how many actually did it given only a small clique of people actually run track. Also, it wasn't meant to be rude at all but I see how it came across that way in writing.
Nowhere does it say in the OPs question anything about ideal training. The OPs title actually just says "How many people can run sub 2 800m?"
It specifies men between 15-40, with one to five years of training. Pretty much every man that ran sub 2:00 in the UK in 2016 fits that description.
In the UK athletics is pretty popular and the club system means lots of people from all walks of life take part, rather than track and field just being an elite college based activity. So we have a great demographic spread.
According to sport england, in 2014 2.28 million people aged 14+ took part in running regularly and 108,000 in track and field events in particular.
The number of sub 2:00 that year was 789 men and 3 women.
You can get an estimate from this data. Assume that half the population are men (I know a lot more men take part than women in the club system, maybe a ratio of 7:3) and it comes out at around 1.4% of men would be able to do this.
That's a hypothetical number and it tries to answer the question using stats.