Minimum speed to run a 4:59 1600?

slower.

“In high school, Tori Tyler never broke 70 seconds for a 400 and her 800 PR at Gunn was 2:28.0. To give you an idea of the kind of runner she is, here are a few of the workouts she was doing her senior track season:
12x400 in 72 with 2 minutes rest. Perfectly reasonable for a 5 flat miler, but amazing considering how close they were to her 400 PR.
8x800 in 2:36 on a 5 minute cycle. Again, a pretty standard 2 miler workout (800s at 2 mile race pace), but surprising given her 800 PR. She once did 10x800 at this pace as well.
And my personal favorite:
12x400 in 78 with 15 seconds rest. We ran these in lane 8 and the rest was the jog from the finish line to the stagger start. This was the last hard workout before she ran 16:50 for 5K at Junior Nationals.
Fittingly, she will be running the 10K at the NCAA DII Championships in a few weeks.”

400 speed: lim 75-1/n as n approaches infinity

At least 65 maybe 66.

Depends on age. I am 50 and can run sub 5 but only about 70 for 400.

74:)

I bet for a million bucks you could drop a 69... Seriously when was the last time you rested for a couple days, went to track, warmed up and ran a 400m all out? For most distance guys the answer is never. You go something like I ran a 72 at the end of the workout and it was hard. Let's call my best a 70...

It can be done off of 66"-67" 400 speed. But realistically, most people will need to go under 63.

My freshman year I ran 5:01 in the 1600 (not 4:59 but I think close enough that it applies) but couldn't run faster than 71 in any of the several 4x400s I ran.

I would pull a hamstring.

You definitely don't need to be able to run a 63 400m to run a 5min 1600m. If you can go under 70 for 400m and have half decent aerobic development, you can go under 5 for 1600m.

The only way someone with a 400 PR of 69.9 would break 5 is if they were an ultramarathoner. And even then, I'm not so sure.

How rested were you for the 4x400s? If you trained through that meet and did like 3 other events that day, your real PR would probably have been 4-5 seconds faster.

It is good to know that there is not a single elite 1500m guy with decent aerobic development.

there are probably very few young people that lack the foot speed to break 5. for the avg young person that's new to training you would expect most that are barely breaking 5 to be in the 58-63 range for a 400m. but, with a lot of training the necessity for speed would obviously go down. so if you know you have no speed but have the desire to train a LOT, i'd say about a 69 as have others in the thread.

Exactly. I ran 5:01 with a 66 second first lap - probably could have gone at least 61 quite eadily

I think you’re spot on.

i have never run better than 4:52 but have run 62s once (…maybe I could go 60s) but even when I do 400m repeats , 71s feel very fast.….also have run 32:49 for 10km on the road and I believe I could go close to 32 min even if I dropped my mile to 4:45. you’re doing great:)

If you can't run 75s, it's not speed that is the problem. Thinking boys without biomechanical issues at least, no one can't run 4:59 because they don't have enough speed. It's stamina/endurance, since the mile is something like high 90s aerobic.

infinitesimally smaller than 1:15 per lap for sub 5

There at numerous threads asking this same question. A much better question: What is the maximum 400m speed to race sub-5 one mile?

Answer: 42.66 seconds.