What percentage of people can run a mile in under 5minutes?

Far fewer than 1% can currently break 5 minutes for a mile.

Several points:

1) In 1985 at age 35, I ran a 4:56 mile in a road race. This was on 25-30 miles per week including 1-2 interval sessions (repeat 200s). I planned to take that down to low 4:40 range but increased my training load too drastically and broke down.

I was always a much better sprinter than distance runner so I considered sub-5 a very good accomplishment.

I continue to compete in Masters (age-group) Track & Field as a sprinter and jumper up to a national and international level. My training consists of lots of sprinting, weightlifting and plyometrics with little total mileage - so even going under 7 for a mile is challenging.

2) I can guarantee that Usain Bolt cannot break 5 for a mile. According to the best sources I can find, Bolt has never run continuously for more than 650 meters AT ANY PACE. In the 2012 Olympic year, his longest run was 450 meters. if he trained hard for it - but I doubt that anyone could persuade him to do that, he probably could go under 5, though he would lose significant sprint speed as he transferred as he would need to recruit more slow-twitch muscle fiber at the direct expense of fast-twitch fiber.

3) Sometimes college football teams include a mile as part of their conditioning training. I\'ve heard of a defensive back running I think a 4:48, but often no member of the team can break 5:00 because football players have to be predominantly fast-twitch power athletes, NOT endurance athletes.

I did it when I was 16, but can't anymore. Do I count?

I think there are a lot of overestimates here and I will use your post as an example. If we take your data that 4% of people in a race are putting sub-5-minute miles, which includes natural untrained talent, hobby runners, and elites, the the number is ridiculously small. If you think about it, you are taking your data from a city of, lets say 100,000, where only say 500 come to a race (including an unknown number of outsiders), then only 4%(500/100,000)=0.02% +/- some error can run a sub-5-min mile at will!

Again find a 1mile race results anywhere in the US and see see the % of young adults in that race did a sub5. Keep in mind these are people who have volunteered to run it yet many will not be close to 5.30.

I mean, is this kind of thinking pervasive here on letsrun or is it a general thing. Why is running THAT different from any other human trait? You know very well that many regular runners cannot crack sub-5, so that tells you it is a reasonably fast time. The last elite man in many international races may often doesn't crack sub4. So in perspective sub5 could be well over 90th percentile of mile times liberally. Do you think many students have the ability to score 1300+ on SAT or have an IQ of 120 because they have a head? If you don't understand what I am asking, do you think because most people have have legs with feet, they can run sub5?

Out 100 people you see everyday 1 or none can currently run less than 5 minutes in the mile. That makes it less than 1%. And the percentage diminishes a lot when you include the elders to the total percentage. I currently train with 4 people who can run a sub 5 min mile and the total of people iv'e met that can run a sub 5 min mile are around 50 in my life and im 17 years old. But of course if you train for it with determination around 99% can run a sub 5 min mile (1% being the paraplegic or people with some sort of problem). And btw I started to run track last year and 2 months later i ran a 4:44 in the mile. And now i am around the 4:30s.

65% of Kenyans

90% of males

40% of females

The percentage correlates with the prefix Kip in your surname and a Biblical name as your first.

Who gives a shit. You are just grasping at the only thing that you can in order to feel superior to people.

Sub 5 mile -- I would love to know what percentage of males over 30 could run just one lap at 5 min pace (75 seconds). It takes sustained speed and the some level of cardio fitness.

I would guess that most men would start out too fast and generally die in the second lap, so third and fourth laps are irrelevant.

For a starting point, I go to a 2000-kid public high school in an affluent and healthy part of the country, with a pretty decent focus on athletics and a top-5 xc program in the state. So a good demographic for sub-5. There are 10-11 kids who can go sub-5. So 0.5%.

If 0.5% in a healthy, relatively athletic high school with a strong xc program are sub-5, I think its safe to say that in the general population--older, fatter, and less athletic-- the number would be at least a fifth of that, probably a tenth. So, 0.1% to 0.05%. 0.01% would not surprise me.

Genetically, somebody should call daniel epstein. My intuition tells me that, from birth about 50% of the male population has the neccesary genetic talent. From day one, though, that is diminished if they aren't encouraged to be active, play sports, live healthy. I can't tell you how many kids i've seen on the high school track team that run so pathetically I feel bad for them because it's clear that, as kids, they were never active and never gained the necessary strength and coordination.

The plural of anecdote is not data, but, lacking any credible data for things like this, I'll offer myself as an example of why there is no fracking way 50% of the population could break 5, even if they devoted their lives to it.

On the first day of junior high, 7th grade for me, half of all the 7th grade boys - maybe 200 - raced 600 yards. I blew the group away. I had had a very active summer, playing a lot of soccer etc. Inspired by that, I went out for track the next spring and ran every year after that. Now I wasn't very diligent in those first years in the off-season, but I ran, at least semi-consistently, and breaking 5 minutes was a pretty big goal for me. I didn't accomplish that goal until I was a sophomore. I had trained pretty hard for it, actually in 9th grade, but was not able to do it. Now some of that may have been physical maturity, but not all of it.

Like others who have commented here, my high school was huge and our XC team was a power house. Yet, out of 4000 students every year there were no more than 8 or 9 who broke 5. And lots of kids tried.

So, I'd say that the actual percentage of males with even the potential to break 5 is likely less than 5%. Probably a lot less. As someone said above, the percentage of females who can do it is effectively 0. So, my guess is that the percentage of those with the potential to do it is around 2.

The percentage of those who could actually do it now is probably 1/100 th of that.

Hahah this is going to be cool.

This guy can

Link wrote:

So, I'd say that the actual percentage of males with even the potential to break 5 is likely less than 5%. Probably a lot less.

I agree that I was probably off before when I said 50%. But on my xc team, and we're good, but no long green line, we have 50 boys of whom 8 can break 5. That's 16% of high schoolers who are training for at least a year.

Now let's assume that there are at least 6 underclassmen who haven't broken 5 but will before they leave high school. Having seen them run, I'm fairly sure that's accurate. That's 12/50. I also know that there are at least 8 kids who are so lazy and don't train that they can't be considered in the pool of "actively training hard." So 12/42. Now I'm going to assume that at least 3 more kids could break 3 in their lifetime, if they continued to train at a high level in college and beyond. 15/42. That brings the percentage up to 36%.

So 36% have potential to break 5 with long term, hard training based on my school. How many more could have that potential on my team alone if they grew up running around every day, walking / running to school, all that kind of stuff? That would raise the percentage.

Granted, you also have to subtract a certain portion of the percentage with the understanding that the xc team doesn't perfectly represent the general population's potential, because it is self-selecting for the fastest guys. but i would guess, at birth 40% of males have the potential

I think that at birth virtually all normal men have the potential to run a sub-5 mile at some point in their life. However I don't think you can take the average American male aged 18-30, train him for 6-months, a year, or what have you, and expect him to break 5. The problem is that most people, especially in a country like the US, just don't have a running background. Either they didn't play sports as a kid or they played sports like football or baseball that didn't involve much running.

I think you're seriously underestimating just how biased a sample the typical hs xc team is, never mind yours at a power house. Most kids - even in present day, sedentary USA - have an idea of whether they're athletic and, in particular, able to run well by the time they're in hs. There's certainly exceptions - kids who were fat from an early age but who have talent - but the kids who go out for cross are, I think, pretty much the kids who are able to do well at cross. From 3rd grade until - I think - 7th or 8th, there was some gym time spent on running. I was always one of the three or four best in my grade and every year, modulo kids moving in or out of the district, the pecking order was roughly the same. I wasn't the best runner on my HS XC team, but, I was the best runner from my elementary school. Anyway, this is a long winded way of saying that the examples of diamonds in the rough are rare exceptions. And, believe it or not, no matter how mundane an accomplishment breaking 5 might be for everyone on these boards, it requires gem-like talent to run that fast.

Link wrote:

I think you're seriously underestimating just how biased a sample the typical hs xc team is, never mind yours at a power house. Most kids - even in present day, sedentary USA - have an idea of whether they're athletic and, in particular, able to run well by the time they're in hs. . . And, believe it or not, no matter how mundane an accomplishment breaking 5 might be for everyone on these boards, it requires gem-like talent to run that fast.

I'm not sure I am. We have by far the most unathletic team in the school just because of the fact that we have 10-15 kids who are serious and the rest who couldn't hack it at other sports. I'm fairly sure that the soccer, lacrosse, swimming, and maybe even basketball teams could beat our guys if you took away our top 15. And I can think of 5 or 6 kids off the top of my head who would be sub-5 guys who do other sports.

My biggest point, which I think you're underestimating, is the importance of lifestyle from a young age. A huge portion of the population could be athletes but never will be because they were raised in a sedentary lifestyle. Even if they're not fat or anything. Another important factor is training-- we have a decent program, but if we had more long-term development from middle school, a focus on higher mileage etc., which is something that almost no american high schools do, we would have even more kids under 5. If we're talking about genetic talent at birth, I stand by 40%. If we're talking potential freshman year in high school after 15 years of whatever you've been doing, that number decreases drastically.

.01% of the total population today is probably on the high side.

I live in a decent-sized metropolitan area of around 1.6 million people. The largest local running club has around 4,000 members. At our annual 1-mile track race, about 15 guys normally break 5. Of course, very few of the high school kids compete in this, but you get the idea.

Most people are totally blown away if they find out you can run under 6 minutes in the mile, let alone under 5.

100% of young, able bodied men and women. It just takes a little dedication and effort.

This seems the most on target answer to me. 5:00 isn't tough for a reasonably athletic guy (okay genes) who trains his butt off. My brother was a soccer player and has run 5:10 on half-assed training (10-15 miles a week for two months) and he has run five miles straight once in his life.

Lots of "unathletic" guys run track and eventually break 5:00 by sheer commitment. These are not beastly athletes, these are gangly dudes who somehow gut out a 5 minute mile. I have a hard time believing more than 75% of guys aged 15-50 could not get down to a 5:00 mile if keeping their testicles depended upon it. So that would put it > 25%.

If I think about the rural county where I grew up, there are about 40,000 people and probably 5-10 people (if you don't count the universities) who could break 5 at any given time, so 0.05% might sound right. There's probably a couple high school runners, a couple former guys who ran/run in college, some random older guys (one guy I used to play tennis with was a Dean Karnazes looking guy who could do about 4:50 and he was around 40).

Tons of "non-runners" in their 20s could break 5 if they really, really, really wanted to. It's not that special. In fact it's pretty slow unless you're a high school chick.

Oops meant to write 0.02%.

True. My best in High School was a 4:48 split during a two mile race. I wasn't going around bragging about it. I think I could have run a 4:35 that day for just a mile. In the state I lived in that wouldn't have been in the top 10 at our state meet. I thought of myself as being pretty slow. There are guys out there averaging that for the Marathon.

Who knows how many people could do it? Most don't want to go through the effort. Can you blame them? 5:10 is slow and 4:59 is also slow. I mean who really cares?

For a girl breaking 5 is a little more significant.