Sub 5 Mile: Tops in Human History?

you are a f'ing troll and tool and that's all

at the payton jordan cardinal invite some of the 1500 open women's times were around 4:30 which translates into JUST below a 5 minute mile. and these are elite runners who specialize in the 1500! you find me an 8th grader besides jordan hasay (and I don't even know if she could) who could run a 5 minute mile. By the way you bring up paula racliffe, paula's PR! in the 400 - who is arguably one of the best women's runners in the history of the sport with a 30 flat 10k and a 2:15 marathon (no doubt better than your own times) - is 59 seconds. so tell me again 61 is easy for women.

the only reason i say this is because i've seen the women tain lots - my girlfriend is a pure speed runner in a great d1 program and when she finishes a track workout with a 28 second 200 i have never seen any other women close to her

you are just talking out of your ass

[quote]LouSiffer wrote:

easily dude..t

5 mins for a woman is elite?? in what 8th grade?

come on now... paula/deana can run 5:10/5:15 back to back for 26.2. and sorry but a 61 400 for a woman isnt fast either, esp at the collegiate level.

most good athletes simply do not run track they play other sports (i dont like that but its a fact).

you do not have to be a good runner to run sub 5, you need a modicum of athletic ability. if you can run a 32/33 second 200 (which most good athletes can) you can run sub 5.

another piece of info on how solid a sub 5 minute mile is a for women

the ny state high school record for the mile set, by nicole blood, is 4:48

and this guy has 2-3 girls on the field hockey team at his school who can guy sub 5... do you have any idea how stupid that makes you sound

My high school only had about 125 in my graduating class, but we had 4 seniors who ran sub 5, and I believe there were at least two other guys who could have done it that were seniors. They did other sports, and I think they might have had to train for it, so this gets back to the question of having done it, or having the talent to do it. Still, either 4 or 6 out of 125 is a large percentage. I know there was one junior who ran sub 5, so maybe my year was a statistical anomoly..

I think I stand by my .02% assessment early in this thread. I agree with the poster stating that looking at the % of people who have run sub-5 is the important statistic. For those of you who think it's not that difficult, you should take the time to read some threads on other running sites, where it's not the norm to cut 10% from your actual PRs. There are runners out there who would be thrilled to run a 6:00 mile.

Using this race as an example, I think there are MAYBE 2 racers who could break 5:00 now or have previously done so (note they too are in HS).

http://www.coolrunning.com/results/06/ma/May7_2ndAnn_set1.shtml

Also, remember this is a subset of people who likely run, or at least exercise on a somewhat regular basis. I've even seen plenty of HS mile races where the winning time is over 5:00.

It is sad, but when I start thinking about the number of people at where I work, who could RUN a mile, the numbers don't look good. When I start factoring in a time-limit of even 8 or 7 minutes, it starts to seem comical, picturing some of these people even trying it. Sub-5:00 is a whole other world to most of the people on this planet.

I think you overestimate the abilities of your baseball guys.

17 for 5km does not guarantee a 5 minute mile. You need to have leg speed as well.

For someone who trains for the mile, it is not that difficult. For the rest it is difficult. I run a 2:54 marathon, but my mile PR is 5:21. Of course, this summer I'm going to destroy that 5 min boundary, but still, it will be a major effort. My HS had 400 students. Of them two beat me at two miles (xc skiers). Of these two neither had the leg speed to do a sub 5. None in our school did (no track team though...)

You guys are psychopathic if you think a few % of the population can run a sub-5. Absolutely not. It would be a small fraction of 1%. I'm fitter than everybody at my 100 person company and every person on my street and I can't break 5 minutes. The idea that poor people can run fast is lunacy. If a person is breaking 5 minutes it's because of training, not walking their half-starved ass around, and we know that poor people in Western countries are fatter than richer, so they're out of it.

And that's among men. Hardly any women can break 5.

Stop making stats out of the guys you read about in magazines or the people on your collegiate track team. Go to the mall, take a picture of 1000 people, and guess how many of them could break 5. I'd be surprised if it's more than 1. Most people don't run seriously. Of those who do, few can break 5.

but why is the relevant percentage the percentage who could do it right now?

isn't it a better measure of the level of accomplishment involved to ask how many people could do it with some reasonable amount of preparation (say, 6 months of training)? think about some silly skill-based record, like bouncing a ball so it hits a certain spot (perhaps a bad example, it's the best i could do off the top of my head). if some kid practices for months and is able to hit that spot every time, is it fair to say that the proper measurement of the impressiveness of the feat is to compare it with the number of people world-wide who could do it at this moment? or does it make more sense to consider how difficult it is to acquire the skill necessary to accomplish the feat? that is, to consider both preparation and age.

in other words, i think we can all agree that with perhaps a handful of exceptions, nobody in the world younger than about 8 years old or older than 60 years old can run a 5 minute mile. but some portion of this group will be able to in the future and some portion was able to and/or did at some point in the past. shouldn't that be taken into account?

so when you are looking around your office at 55 year olds who are overweight, think of them not as fat 55 year olds, but rather as fit 21 year olds. same goes for these high school anecdotes. think not of your 100 person track team, think of those 100 people at their prime mile-running age, which for most, if not all, of them is in the future.

you wouldn't say that a world's best (of the year) 1500 run on january 1st is the best ever 1500, so why would you only consider the ability to run a 5:00 mile today when considering how impressive the accomplishment of breaking 5 minutes for the mile is?

hrunner wrote:

another piece of info on how solid a sub 5 minute mile is a for women

the ny state high school record for the mile set, by nicole blood, is 4:48

and this guy has 2-3 girls on the field hockey team at his school who can guy sub 5... do you have any idea how stupid that makes you sound

Blood ran 4:42 a a soph in 2004.

duh wrote:

if you put a gun to all of those people's head i bet at least a billion people would run under 5. Considering most porer people are in better shape endurance wise I think you might be underestimating. I think the watershed level is about 4:30. Break that and you're in the top million.

Oh yeah, I know tons of poor people who can run 5 min miles...

whatever, fine, i just did a quick google search and the first thing that came up was that she set a new ny state high school mile record of 4:48, she probably bettered it later that year but you get the idea of how rare it is for a woman in high school to be much under 5.

tweedledee wrote:

Blood ran 4:42 a a soph in 2004.

Actually, you used a terrible point of reference.

She's 18 seconds under 5:00 - that's a ton. It would seem like a whole lot of girls could fit in that 18 second window.

I don't disagree with your concludsion, that 5 minutes is difficult for a girl, but I disagree with the manner in which you arrived at that conclusion.

no i stand by my reasoning... nicole blood is a huge statistical outlier.... just an awesome miler for a high schooler... i'm not saying no girls can get under 5, i'm just saying that not many at all can - and if they do they are approaching the very elite in the high school ranks... take the same reasoning to men:if you are telling me that since blood ran 4:42 and 5 minutes is a FAR 18 seconds from 4:42 then many women in the general population should be able to run under 5by the same reasoning, many men in the general population should be able to run under 4:15 - and we all know that most men in the world can't run under 4:15 (i would put that number around .001% or less

jutter man wrote:

Actually, you used a terrible point of reference.

She's 18 seconds under 5:00 - that's a ton. It would seem like a whole lot of girls could fit in that 18 second window.

I don't disagree with your concludsion, that 5 minutes is difficult for a girl, but I disagree with the manner in which you arrived at that conclusion.

hrunner wrote:

.... just an awesome miler for a high schooler... i'm not saying no girls can get under 5, i'm just saying that not many at all can - and if they do they are approaching the very elite in the high school ranks...

to beat a dead horse - why use the difficulty of running a 5 minute mile in high school as the main reference point? don't most people who run in both high school and college improve their times in college? assuming you agree, doesn't this suggest that human beings' "peak" ability for mile running is after age 18?

so while high school can be a useful reference because it is a time when many, many people compete in track events, i wouldn't put too much stock into it when trying to answer what i consider to be the question at heart here - how impressive is it to run a 5 minute mile, measured by the percentage of human beings who could do so in their prime.

ah where to start.. first off for women in D3 you need to run in the 55s to qualify in the 400. so NO 61 is NOT fast by any standard for a track runner in any division. second, re HS track. do you honestly believe that the BEST athletes are running track? especially for girls? we get the bottom tier (unfortunately) so what passes for 'elite' is hardly representative of the total pool of athletes.and sorry, but my pr is indeed faster than Paulas (not by much but lets say i was threatening a comeback if she was a bit faster)

you make a good (if poorly formatted) point about the frailties of my position. i still think from a theoretical standpoint, it is the most relevant.

at the least, if we are trying to get a sense of how impressive the accomplishment is, i think you should base it on the percentage of human beings who, at their peak moment, could have run a 5-minute mile (distinguished from my ideal phrasing of the question by not allowing hypothetical mile-running-training before the big 5-minute mile attempt).

i just don't see why you should eliminate somebody like jim ryun from the pool of people capable of running a 5 minute mile (assume for the sake of argument, if you don't mind, that mr. ryun is not currently capable of running a 5 minute mile).

LouSiffer wrote:

second, re HS track. do you honestly believe that the BEST athletes are running track?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Surely you agree that Michael Johnson and Alan Webb were the best athletes (or at least best suited to run fast) at their schools? But then there are also poor athletes in track, just like in any other sport. What's your point?

We don't think baseball players are slower than track guys because they are poorer athletes, we think they are slower because track guys train every day to do one thing: run fast!

Who is more likely to be better at hitting: baseball players.

Who is more likely to be better at racing the mile: track guys.

It's incredibly obvious.

(ps - One final thing. The stereotype of long distance runners as castoffs from other sports - I don't buy it. I'm a very good athlete and I just happen to love running. But even if we say it's true for a moment, I think the very qualities that make these runners not so good in other sports - small, skinny - make them good at distance running. If you stick Michael Vick in a cross country race, he's all muscle and fast twitch fiber and he will fail miserably. Just because he's a "better athlete" doesn't mean he could step into the world of middle and long distance running and dominate.)

LouSiffer wrote:

and sorry, but my pr is indeed faster than Paulas (not by much but lets say i was threatening a comeback if she was a bit faster)

That's quite a claim. So which Olympic Trials did you run in?

I can't believe how many people have said that there were only 1-2 people who could break 5:00 in their whole school. At my high school, it took sub 5:00 to letter, and we usually have at least one freshmen if not more do it every year.

A great deal of people with some talent and drive can break 5 minutes if they trained, but since people are lazy, the percentage is very small.