United States Sub-4:00 Milers list no longer being updated because of supershoes

Excelling at one mile does not mean one will excel at 1500m or other Olympic or W.C. events. We no longer keep records for 6 miles, we no longer keep records for 3 miles. Two miles is already fading away. Learn how to race 1500m.

You fail to acknowledge the NCAA (the world's largest league for Track and Field) races the mile indoors still

Way to miss the point by a mile.

Lame. As if the previous 70 years of spike technology and all-weather tracks didn't make sub-4 miles easier. A 3:59 miler isn't going to make the Olympics but at least it gave them a way to be part of running history. Sounds like T&F news is too lazy to keep the list up anymore. That's their right I suppose but it's not a positive development for the sport.

Spike technology has developed very little in the lead up to super shoes. The only thing spikes from mid 2000s differ from spikes in the 50s or 60s is weight. The shoe isn't making you run any faster - it's just not slowing you down as much. The spikes I wore in the mid 90s are literally no different from the spikes they were using in the 70s and 80s. Nylon upper, half-inch of foam, plastic spike plate.

It was inevitable that all tracks would eventually convert to all-weather for the same reasons that we no longer drive on dirt roads... maintenance! All-weather are much easier to maintain and the surface makes it much easier to run on during inclement weather (hence the name). But are all-weather tracks that much faster? BU has been around for years, but only recently have we seen a dramatic increase in times.

Here's some fun facts: Ryun and Clarke competed on both cinder and synthetic but never ran as fast as they did on cinder. Ryun's 3:51 mile WR was finally broken by .01, 8 years after he set the record and 7 years after all-weather tracks were introduced. Clarke's 5,000m WR was broken by less than a second 4 years after all-weather tracks were introduced and his 10,000m WR was broken by only one second - again, 4 years after all-weather was introduced.

Is all-weather really that much faster than cinder? Maybe, but the stats don't really show it. Compare and contrast 60+ years of running tech with what we've seen in the last 2 years.

63 US runners broke 4 last year. More than double that of any previous year. US sub 4 times had averaged around 30 the 10 or so years leading up to super shoes. Already this year, 29 US runners have broken 4.

I hope you gals & guys begging for updated one mile stats are 110 years old. Move on. From 1939, first time a man raced sub-1:48 800m, sub-4 mile was a reality. Up through 1968 Summer Olympics, a sub-4 miler was likely to make Olympic final in at least one event, 800m to 5000m. There was a time when a sub-4 mile may have gotten a guy an invite on Tonight Show with Jack Paar. Sub-4 mile gets a guy nothing today. If a dozen or more women 100 plus years from now start racing 800m sub-1:52, we can start sub-4 mile discussions at that time.

The only type of “woman” who can run that time is a biological male

Bad idea. I'm cancelling my subscription.

Bring back the mile - 1500m is stupid.

i've been telling them everyone after 183 is irrelevant for years now. glad they've finally caught on...

that's my story and i'm sticking to it,

cush

That's a dumb reason to drop it. With easy access to race results how hard is it to update the list?

I heard that everyone after 182 is just living in the past? But could just be a rumor.... :)

I wish I could just ignore part of my job because I thought it wasn't as important any more

The only thing that the "stats" show is that Ryun and Clarke (and Jazy, Keino and Snell) were extreme anomalies. The shoes and the tracks were terrible. Basically hard leather and soles with nails hammered into them.

I came into the sport just as the cinder tracks were almost all phased out in favor of rubberized asphalt. I did get a chance to run on cinders TWICE. Todays yoots couldn't imagine what they were like. The rubberized asphalt weren't much better. Your spikes stuck to them, especially when it was hot...then they melted causing you to stick to the track.

Finally the modern synthetics, Tartan, etc started catching on in the 70s, so racing and foot comfort improved dramatically from the "all-weather" asphalt tracks.

Training shoes: breaking them in used to be a painful process of blisters, bloody socks, bandaids and callousing, something that runners haven't experienced for 40 years.

That's what I was thinking. It's easier than ever to figure out. We don't need all of the asterisks denoting whose ran faster in their career or not, just simply keep the chronological list going. I hope someone else, or some other track and field magazine takes it on. How else is Ben Blankenship going to keep track of the "Fast Forest"

Give it to the young guys to keep track of. If the old guard isn't doing their job well they shouldn't do it at all.

I used to love looking at who made the list every year, but completely agree: sub-4:00 mile is no longer what it was... maybe they could reset at sub-3:55 or perhaps sub-3:50.

It's been trending this way forever, I hate that the excuse is 100% 'super shoes'... Go back 15 years to the year 2008 how many high schoolers ever ran sub 4? How many in a typical NCAA season? The answer is 4 athletes 80+ years of high school track, and typically in NCAA there were only 15-20 athletes running sub 4 in the mid to late 2000's... Then go to 2015 before even the vaporfly existed, let alone the new spikes. From 2011-2015 we add 3 new sub 4 high schoolers in five years, almost as many as several decades before that. And how many NCAA runners are running sub 4 now in 2015? The answer is 32, a new record. And that's before any super shoes. Now let's bump up to 2019, still before super spikes, and we have another 3 high schoolers in only 4 years. So we got 6 of our 10 sub 4 milers in a span of 8 years, before anyone was wearing super spikes. US running was already starting to explode. It had been decades since US athletes were sniffing global medals, and now in the past decade we've got medal contenders in nearly every event. And then you have to remember that a portion of NCAA sub 4's is because of extra covid eligibility, and another big thing is the number of 300 meter indoor tracks and banked tracks that are available for people to compete on. Far more athletes are getting good opportunities to run fast, and more athletes are spending more time in the NCAA system before they go off to the real world and start working. Most 4 flat milers do not continue training 100% after college, so this extra time spent in the NCAA is huge.

It is probably a function of the amount of work required to verify the results. In 2002 there were 7 athletes added to the list from 4 meets. In 2012 there were 23 athletes added from 14 meets. In 2022 there were 63 added from 32 meets. You would hope for the list to be valid that some checking was done to verify the results. Obviously the major meets are easy to verify but smaller meets would be harder.

Maybe T&F is just getting too many emails from people claiming they ran a sub 4 minute mile at a local open meet. After some digging they find the meet wasn't fully sanctioned or the timing equipment wasn't calibrated properly.

On their web page they include the comment, "Thanks to Kevin Biolsi for his early-’18 historical vetting of the list which turned up multiple discrepancies." so obviously they have had problems in the past verifying results. They have probably decided that it has become too much work to keep the list accurate and rather than let it become corrupted they are just going to cap it off with the 2022 additions.

355 is the new four. 359 may not even score points at some ncaa conference meets these days.

If we need a round time, maybe 740 3000, or 1330 5000