Bad Wigins wrote:
That's how many hours of your life spent chasing sub 5? No, I just don't believe it. There is not enough mystique around sub 5 to obsess like that.
I just got done reading all 360+ posts on this thread and felt that I had to address this.
It's easy to make the opposite argument. For us mortals who aren't blessed with world-class talent, the quest to run a five minute mile just plain sucks. It's time-consuming. Track meets take all day, superspikes are hard to obtain, and altitude tents and transcontinental flights are expensive. The training and racing can leave you with blisters, black toenails, tendonitis, stress fractures, blood from being spiked, and a whole host of other injuries. And doing long runs and hard workouts by yourself in the summer heat and the winter dark and storms is downright miserable. Given the steep prices one has to pay, the very idea of running an arbitrary distance in an arbitrary time for the pure sake of it, and not because of competition, money, or fame, is one of the dumbest and pointless ways to spend your time, and anyone who does it is a fool.
As is often the case with things that seem insane, there may well be some deeper sanity in it. In this case, what is this sanity? What is the deeper reason, if there is one?
The reason is that, as trite as it may seem, running 4:59 gives us a meaning and purpose in life. There is more to life than just eating, sleeping, working, mating, and dying. Now let's look at it this way:
Imagine the moment, after a decade of preparation, months of waiting for ideal races and racing conditions, and just under five minutes of the most strenuous physical activity you've ever done in your life. When you muster every shred of will in your being to force your exhausted body, gasping lungs, and burning lactic acid filled legs to take the final few steps to the finish line. You take that last step, and you see the clock read 4:59 for the first time in your life. What would that feel like? Would it even be possible to describe the pure joy of that sensation?
Look, everyone has to do something with their life before they die. Everyone has to find some way to spend their time in a way that they see as potentially rewarding or fulfilling. For some of these people, clearly, running a sub 5 mile serves that purpose. Almost nobody in the country even knows how far a 5K is (let alone knows what a good 5K time would be), and the same is true for the marathon, the 800m, the 1500m, the 8K, and virtually any other running event that you can think of. But every American knows the mile, and succeeding at such a difficult task that few people will even think of trying can instantly instill respect in people from coast to coast. And in the great struggle to reach the outermost limits of your potential, wouldn't that teach you other valuable life lessons like perseverance, discipline, determination, and delayed gratification? Wouldn't there be at least some satisfaction in knowing what you're truly capable of?
It's not hard to find stories about how running changed people's lives for the better and helped them overcome depression, drug abuse, various addictions, and deteriorating physical health. And if the only thing standing between your problems and experiencing pure happiness and contentment is running a 4:59 mile, wouldn't you want to do it? Wouldn't that then be the smart thing, the only intelligent thing to do? Especially when tasting even a small piece of it - just running and not going sub 5 - can be healing, restorative, and powerful enough to alleviate depression and other forms of suffering.
If running a five minute mile isn't your dream, then what is? Something unattainable to the average person like competing in the Olympics or landing on the moon? If spending a considerable portion of your resources to run 4:59 is a bad idea, then is staying home to play video games and binge on Netflix a better one? If enduring the brutally punishing training and racing isn't worth the sacrifices for the reward it promises, then what rewards are you working toward, and what other sacrifices are you willing to make for it? If you believe in any of the cliches about following your dreams, living with passion, and being true to yourself, why would you ridicule someone who is actually out there putting it into practice?
After all, for all the million or so "be yourself" phrases that echo across the planet as empty words, there is at least one soul who is cranking out 200m and 400m repeats by himself on a wet track, shivering in the cold, following some unseen, unheard push that has prompted him to leave the creature comforts behind to aim for something higher. And he has followed it.