How many people can run sub 2 min 800m?

Bad Wigins wrote:

There's a difference between who can and who actually does. It's not easy to reach your potential at 800m.

To run your maximal 800 you have to sort of go insane somewhere between 400 and 600 meters and manage to stay insane the rest of the way. A fast 800 can seem like a great idea before you start, but that is quickly proven wrong by 400m when the sensible thing to do is decline the impending suffering. So you have to depart from reason temporarily.

I can rarely finish a 1500 or mile because after one lap, I realize I don't want to do 3 more.

Haha I like this analysis. I personally think the 1500m is less painful than the 800m but I'm better at the 800 unfortunately. Things might change though.

In 2006 54 boys broke 2 in HS in Minnesota. 15-19 year olds made up 7.3% of about 5.2 million, 379,600 divided by two for half male, guess, 189,800/54 boys, = 1 in 3,500 or .028%.

Another data point that makes lots of assumptions, like that no male aged 15-19 broke two besides HS runners, obviously there were many college freshMan that did, probably some soccer players that could have. On the other hand, this age group, 15-19 is probably much more capable of breaking two than the top four years of the range, 36-40.

Here are some data points:

High school:

Milesplit.com's performance list for high school for the 2016 outdoor season has 3143 boys breaking 2 in the 800m

College:

Milesplit.com's performance list for college for the 2016 outdoor season has 2540 men breaking 2 in the 800m

Directathletics.com's NCAA 2016 All-College Outdoor Track List has 2830 men breaking 2 in the 800m

Directathletics.com's 2016 NAIA Outdoor Qualifying List has 247 NAIA men breaking 2 in the 800m,

so Directathletics has ~3100 college men breaking it in total.

Taking MS's high school data and DA's college data (neither of which are "complete" lists per se, but I would say the majority of HS and college athletes who did it in 2016 outdoor are on these lists), we get 6220 HS and college athletes who pulled it off last outdoor season.

It's extremely tough to say what anyone could theoretically do with 1-5 years of perfect training for the 800m, so I'm only going to make a guess about how many US citizens could pull it off if they had to run it about a week from now (i.e. long enough to get rest, but short enough that they couldn't really train for it). I'd wager 10k or fewer would. Thoughts?

I ran in a shitty D3 conference and no one with a 1:59 PR was going to score at the conference meet, there were probably 15 people who could run sub 2. You'll have D1 programs with 30+ people who can go sub 2, many of them who concentrate on other distances. How many college programs are there in the country? I would figure on average there will be like 5-10 per school. Are there 500 programs? And then think about all the non-college runners.

DoritosLocosTacos wrote:

Probably, based on my own experiences, around 1/3000-1/5000

Sub-2:00 definitely requires a far above-average level of genetic potential, but the number that can do it is more than 1/3000. Most high schoolers with the kind of speed required will either go out for the track team as sprinters or devote themselves to other sports.

This is a good point. It’s very hard to tell how many people who have no interest in the 800m would actually break 2:00 if they were to hypothetically train for it. You would think that there are a lot of people out there that are great 800m runners that just do not care (at all) about it and focus their talents on soccer, or the trombone, or snowboarding, or classic car restoration, painting, or computer games, or weed.

I was an 800 guy. Relative to other events, its basically a deathwish of an event. Pretty certain its an event that will take years off your life.

As a 1:57 HS man, we had roughly 10 or 12 guys on our D1 HS team that could break 5:00 in the mile. Of those, I was the only one who could break 2 in the mile. Most of them were basically 2 flat guys. Our 4x800 composed of basically the same guys, our absolute PR was 8:07 or thereabout.

That is 4:20 mile equivalent and close to 2:30 marathon. Not many.

I would guess that with 5 years of optimal and hard training from age 15, something like 10% of guys could break 2. Given 3-5 more years, maybe 15%. The optimal training is a massive assumption as very few runners ever do such a thing

I also agree with this. The event is crazy. I’m a 1:56.9 high school guy myself (never in an HS open, only in a relay- some people that only break 2 in a relay do not show up in the data) on a HS 4x800 that was 7:45. Part of the event is having the will to do it. There is a difference between doing something and being capable of doing something. But at the same time, one of the dudes on the team was really into chorus and got into the track team on a whim, found out he was good and went 1:53. If that makes any sense…

Several boys in my class of 100 did it, this was thirty or so years ago. Admittedly one of them at longer distances was a state champ several years and became a repeat all American and ran a 4 minute mile in school. Another was a wide receiver keeping in shape who turned out to be fast. We also had a 400m runner who ran sub 2 in practice. My favorite story about him was that he won the region 400 without having sobered up or slept from the night before. Me and a friend who was a 5-10k guy were at around 2:02. Again, that's in a class of 100 boys. Only the top tier guy was doing more than 30mpw. We did a lot of intervals and hills. This was in the era when the dogma was quality miles over lots of miles.

if you can run 14:20 you should be able to run sub 2 like that's raising red flags for me honestly like either your speed needs some work or one of those is a lie either your 5k pb or the 800 one

Relay legs dont count. Sorry not sorry

1 in 200. I have coached high school long enough to have pretty good stats.

If those stats are accurate and we assume the bulk of those runners were aged 15-40 then this works out to be approximately 0.0031% - Did a bit of research and there are approx 24 million people in the UK aged 15-40 . 747 divided by 24,000,000 X 100 = 0.0031%. This is ~ 1 in 32,000 people can break 2:00min in the UK in that age range. Sounds like a pretty reasonable answer.

Actually just realised I misread the question. Didn't factor in the running of 50 mile per week. Probably more like 1 in 500-1000 in that case.

Threads like this are always an attempt to show how running is all about hard work and has little to do with talent and are undeniably false. Success at any level in running, like ANY sport, requires A LOT of talent.

My HS (granted only 400 students) has had 3 people ever break 2:00. School opened in 1955.

What's 2:00 worth? 4:20? I ran 4:27, 9:32. Had two teammates run 4:28 and 4:30 both ran sub 2:00 (1:59, 1:58) but I could only manage 2:04....in a really lol...2:06 open. 56 best 400m (bits open and relay).

Alan

I suspect most never tried and this probably doesn't take into account further development after school.

Thinking about how many of the kids you went to school with who could do it is probably a good way to estimate, though.

There were about 100 boys in my year at secondary school. One did middle distance athletics at a club until he was 13 or 14 and could do 2:10. If he'd kept it up through school/into adulthood he would surely have been able to run sub 2.

There's at least 2 other boys who played football (soccer) that would have been better middle distance runners than him and I think there's were at least few others who could run sub two with time and training but I'll keep my estimate conservative at 3% of males genetically capable of sub 2.

Really interesting part of this thread to me ended up being the variety in splits for other events among those who were + or - about two or three seconds on either side of the 2:00 minute barrier - so here is my contribution to that. All times from Sr year high school;

800m; 1:59.00
1000m; 1:26.00
400m; 50.5
200m; 23.3
Long Jump; 20'-06"
1600m; ~4:30s (estimated from known practice times, but never ran it in competition)

I was a late bloomer and took training seriously ONLY in-season, and even then the diet wasn't great because it wasn't stressed as much as it is today and I was always coming off a 5 month wrestling season in which most of it involved hard weight cuts. The year was 2006.