It's kinda weird, surely there is an ahk script/bot someone could write that could congregate each new sub 4 miler at the end of each year. Seems like a system that should already be automatic and basically free to execute lol
Well over 100 ncaa athletes ran sub 4 in the mile or equivalent in the 1500 last year. It isn’t what it used to be with the new shoes. Despite a multiple page thread about an Ivy having three such runners.
I expect track and field news is using this as a way to protest the IAAF's acceptance of super shoes, which never should have been allowed in the sport. I'm glad that they placed some limits on stack height, but when you're run by a Nike lifer, you're going to cave, as Seb did.
Anyone who wants a continued record keeping of sub 4 miles is welcome to do it themselves. A small community of people could continue keeping track very easily and publish it anywhere online. Maybe someone should make a dedicated website for it and take over where t and f news left off
Fair enough. So T&F News could at least be bothered to add sub-3:55 miles to their list. That can't be that hard.
Or, if you run a sub-4, send them an email with a link to the race result. They click the link, read the result and update the list. I get 63 emails a day. They can handle 63 emails about a sub-4 each YEAR. It isn't like we are talking about thousands of results. Jeez...
There are only 170 men in the world who have ever broken 10.00 in the 100. That list is way more relevant right now than some oldster sub-4 list, since more than 1400 guys have done that. Sub-4 is Yawnsville.
This is the exact thing I keep trying to tell everyone. American's getting faster and competing on the world stage has been building for a long time. Go back to 2016, it took 4:07 to make the top 25 high school marks for the year. 10-years before that it was top 5 annually. What else happened in 2016? The American's dominated the Olympic distance events (medals at 800, 1500, 3000st, 5000, marathon). This has nothing to do with Super Shoes.
How about this...going into the 2009 season, 1 U.S. athlete had ever run under 13:00, Bob Kennedy. By 2019, the number was 10. Again, this has nothing to do with Super Shoes. American's have been building towards what you're seeing now for a over a decade.
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.
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.
Well, I am old. But I don't think that is what drives my love of the mile and the sub-4. I think the sub-4 is amazing because it is both utterly elite AND at the same time something that people can train for and achieve through a mix of talent and effort. It is the perfect goal for someone who is trying to reach the next level, but isn't there yet. You can earn it. Not to mention, a lot of our (American) life is measured in "miles" so it resonates and feels like something real, not just a random number, like 1500 or 3km.
Sub-10 in the 100m is better, for sure, but less interesting. You have such a limited sub-set of phenotypes which can possibly run sub-10. It is not something a kid in XYZ country can aspire to if he doesn't have a very specific set of genetics (that are not shared across all nations). That is the thesis of The Sports Gene by Epstein. Such a good book. He points out that top milers have come from almost every part of the world. 95% of all sub-10 100m runners have only come from one sub-set of a sub-set.
The powers that be at T&FN don't like talk about PEDs, don't like to admit that PED use is rampant in the sport.
Obsessing about super-shoes is a facile way of attributing every extraordinary/eyebrow-raising performance to a factor other than PEDs. And then it gets expanded to an explanation for a rising tide of "good" performances that don't even push the performance curve, just fill the curve out in a way that is readily predictable without resorting to reliance any extraordinary explanatory factor.
The obsession with shoes at T&FN is facile and superficial. There is virtually no serious scientific discussion of the issue at the site or in the forum. Findings from studies about "stacked" road shoes are hazily presumed to be conclusive about track spikes even though the technology is completely different. The echo chamber is self-reinforcing.
My first spikes in the fall of 1970. I remember sitting them on my dresser. Got inspiration just by looking at them. The ones in the picture (1964) weren't quite the same as in 1970. These were better than the leather spikes of the day, but still not as good at the nylon (Tiger Spartan B) or suede (Spider) of the mid 70s.
That's a dumb reason to drop it. With easy access to race results how hard is it to update the list?
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.
All-time athletics manages to update their list for all events around the world in a few days. Athletic.net manages to update 100s of HS meets and TFRRS does the same for college. Maybe I'm just missing the complexity of adding 70 or so 4-sub minute mile times a year. They already have the results for past years so nothing needs to be done in that regard.
More to the point, T&F in the US should have a central repository for meet results. There would be no need to put out an annual list if it were possible to just search on sub-4 minute miles in 2022, for example.
It would be great to see someone take on this task. No reason it has to fall on T&FN. Perhaps the readers of Letsrun could even crowdsource maintaining an up-to-date list.
And at the same time keep a list of women sub-4:35.