New Yorker: How Fast Would Usain Bolt Run The Mile? - Yours truly bets his house it would be over 5+

At the Fifth Avenue Marathon, it's about 150-200 (nonelites) of the field of 3000 or so (males) that break 5:00.

The sub-5-minute mile

The real work for Cook began last summer.

Cook opted to stay in Durham instead of returning home, and he set his sights on tackling a long-standing personal goal: the sub-five minute mile.

The mile is a staple of Duke’s preseason conditioning testing, and, heading into this season, just three of Krzyzewski’s players had broken that barrier: Johnny Dawkins, who holds the record at 4:38, DeMarcus Nelson and Kyle Singler.

And let me tell you, Duke basketball has had some pretty fine athletes over the years.

Rojo's Wejo wrote:

Nice attempt at an insult but I was a three year starter in both football and basketball and could have played either in college but the scholarship money was highest in track

Scholarship money was highest in track over football and basketball?

No way, troll.

Another data point wrote:

(Ultra)Endurance athlete Tobias Mews:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/active/10875747/Could-you-run-a-5-minute-mile.html

5:07

This is what is nowadays called an "epic fail".

I've cracked 5 approaching 1000 times over the last several years since first doing so. It's the kind of effort where if I'm coming down sick with a mild fever but (usually foolishly) run my planned workout anyway, I'll take the first mile in 5:00 to gauge my health. If I struggle to go under 5:00 as an opening rep, then I know I've probably got the flu and should go home and rest. I could probably run a 5:20 with the flu, if it meant I could get an aspirin or something sooner. And I'm not even fast, absolutely mediocre.

Usain Bolt could run a 4:59 mile while juggling McNuggets with one hand and popping recovery fries (Yam, not potato) in the other.

Dude he was blocked in more than half the time! Should hit 4:40 or less on a clean track run.

What Cram didn't warn me was that the start would be treacherous. Within seconds of the gun going it was a jostle of elbows and a tangle of feet as we sprinted off towards Admiralty Arch. I should have gone out harder, but I'd done no speed work in my training, so instead I found myself caught in the bunch. As the seconds ticked by, the crush got worse, not better, as people in front of me who had gone off too fast started to slow, blocking the path for those behind.

PRs for Usain Bolt:

100 y (Outdoor): 9.14+ on 31 May 2011

100 m (Outdoor): 9.58 WR on 16 Aug 2009

150 m straight (Outdoor): 14.35 WB on 17 May 2009

200 m (Outdoor): 19.19 WR on 20 Aug 2009

300 m (Outdoor): 30.97 AR on 27 May 2010

400 m (Outdoor): 45.28 on 5 May 2007

4 x 100 m (Outdoor): 38.70 on 24 Feb 2007

This was settled a long time ago by the NFL superstars thread about this show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTlrdczjjOA

which took real sprinters and football players and pitted them in an 880 yard run, which James Lofton won going away, but gives the real-world example of Carl Lewis who ran 2:10 and then 2:16.

For an ordinary MD runner trained equally at 800 and mile the equivalent of 5 minutes is about 2:17. That's a ratio of 300/137 = 2.2.

But it's a lot easier for a sprinter to get under 2:17 than 5. It's logical to suppose a short sprinter will slow down progressively faster each time they double in distance from 200 to 400, 400 to 800 and so forth. A 20s 200 man who runs a 45 is 2.25 times slower at 400, and should slow down even more at 800. If he can run a 2 flat, he's still 2.67 times slower over 800 than 400, and that number would have to drop dramatically to 2.5 again to be capable of a 5-minute 1600.

The real-world example of Lewis shows the price of type2x muscle. Even conservatively estimating his 400 speed at only 50 flat, his 880y/400 ratio is 130/50 = 2.6. To get to sub 5 over a mile, he'd need a mile/800y ratio of 300/130 = 2.3, almost as low as the MD specialists. More likely he'd be slower than 130x2.6 = 5:38. And even more likely his 400 is closer to 48, making his 880y/400 ratio that much higher, and mile/880y ratio higher still.

The real question is could Lewis, and Bolt who is bigger and heavier than him, run a sub 6.

I have a feeling you've only completed a fraction of the necessary 10,000 hrs using your brain.

The Superstars competition was basically a more strenuous decathlon, right? Didn't Lewis bike 400m all out a few minutes before running the 800m? Probably went 75% trying not to strain a muscle.

None of them seemed too tired in pre-race interviews. And they had to qualify for it by prelims in the first place, so it wasn't really a decathlon as such. At least he didn't get beat by Dusty Dvorak.

Whether he was tired or not, Lewis's performance show there's no way he could run sub 2.

In the unlikely event he could achieve 2 flat fresh, and the even more unlikely event that his 400 potential was as slow as 50s, his 880y/400 ratio would still be 2.4, almost as high as the 2.5 ratio he'd need to achieve to match that 2 flat with a sub 5 mile. Almost certainly the mile/880y ratio would be way higher than 2.5 if 880y/400 was already at 2.4.

The question is whether he could run sub 6. Sub 5, no way. Lofton might, though. That depends on where he got that 800 speed. If he's a 45s 400 guy (more likely Lewis's 400 potential also) then his 880y/400 ratio is already well over 2.5 and it's a gamble to expect that to drop from 880y to mile. The one sign that it could is that he has good MD form. Lewis and Bolt don't.

The bet-hetching Prof Ross Tucker tweets:

Ross Tucker‏@Scienceofsport

Remember I polled the "twitterati" a few weeks ago, here were the results. I'd say 5:20 TODAY, & 4:45 with training

37% of 1019 votes said more than 5 minutes.

disgraceful_admin wrote:

I have a feeling you've only completed a fraction of the necessary 10,000 hrs using your brain.

The Superstars competition was basically a more strenuous decathlon, right? Didn't Lewis bike 400m all out a few minutes before running the 800m? Probably went 75% trying not to strain a muscle.

It all comes back to Bolt's 800 PR--stated earlier in this thread as 2:10. A 2:10 guy with a 45s quarter is having a ridiculous drop-off as the distance increases (especially considering he's a 19.19 200 guy!).

45/2:10/5:00 just makes zero logical sense, and if you've ever worked with athletes running in the 2:10/5:00 range, you'd know that. 55s 400 5 minute miler guys run 55/2:10/5:00. 49s 400 5 minute miler guys run 49/1:58/5:00. There's no way in hell a guy running 45/2:10 is running a 5 minute mile.

Again, this is all assuming the information stated earlier about Bolt's 800 PR is actually accurate.

Hans n is an elite rock climber, multiple times world speed climbing champion, has broken the speed record for climbing El Capitan many times, and was a D-1 NCAA pole vaulter. Extremely lean (looks like an elite runner) and very methodical in his training. A major goal of his for years was a sub-5:00 mile. He never achieved it.

I will add that the troll on this thread is a Grade VI crackpipe psycho, whose only mission in life at this point is to assert that a sub-5:00 is "easy" or "slow", and a 4:16 is "mediocre".

The deleted name above was Hans Florine^^^

At age 43 I ran 4:40. I also was clmbing as hard as Florine at that point (though I was older).

Nonetheless, I am not delusional enough to think that every random football jock can run sub-5:00 off of grabass pickup games and a few wind sprints.

But I don't have the benefit of your unique experience with:

https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5487/14255062625_3c1f012b77_b.jpg

As a scientist, I couldn't help but try a more analytical approach to this question. So I decided to plot all of Usain Bolt's PR's from 100 m to 800 m as a function of distance to see what sort of trend arose.

I plotted time "t" as a function of distance "x," and interestingly it turns out Bolt's PR's vary quadratically with distance. Perfectly.

t = 0.0001x^2 + 0.0525x + 3.2703

R^2 = 1 (seriously)

Assuming this relationship holds up for anything longer than 800 is pretty much stupid, but let's see what it gives us...

If x = 1609.34 m, then t = 346.6 s or in other units 5:46.8

So, reckless extrapolation of the data says Bolt can't run under 5:00.

Kim Collins tried a mile.

http://www.runblogrun.com/2013/09/sprinters-gone-wild-kim-collins-versus-james-ellington-the-aftermath-the-interview-with-christine-oh.html

What do they mean when they say that he has never run a mile?

Never done a 1mile easy run, never done a 8x200m intervals session, or never raced 1 mile?

I can't imagine that he hasn't totalled 1 mile in a run before! he runs 600m+ when he wins a 200m race and does a lap of honor!

How about a match race with Ronaldo? That might draw him in. With a big payday of course. I think he would struggle to break 5:00 after going out in 58.