How many high school BOYS break 5 minutes in the mile ever year?

Runningart2004 wrote:

In my HS since 1995 there have been a grand total of 5 boys who have broken 5:00 in 20 years and 3 of those were in 1995. I know of nearby schools whose school records are over 5:00.

Alan

Where are these schools with school records over 5? WTH?!

Runningart2004 wrote:

In my HS since 1995 there have been a grand total of 5 boys who have broken 5:00 in 20 years and 3 of those were in 1995. I know of nearby schools whose school records are over 5:00.

Alan

Wow. Is that unusual? In the late 80s, my Illinois HS had only 150 boys and we had 3 or 4 go under 5 minutes all 3 years I was on the track team. We probably had even more capable but others ran the 800 or 2 mile. We had a pretty strong team, particularly for a small school, but every similarly small school we competed against had at least 2 or 3 sub 5 milers per year.

I live in Southern California now and the local high schools, which are big, each have probably at least 10 -15 sub 5 milers, I would think. I assume that because they field cross country teams with 15+ sub 18 minute 5k times.

If you assume Athletic.Net has every sub 5 performance in the nation listed then this year it is 23,390.

jjjjjjj wrote:

10 + 3 likely under 4:22, Flagpole? What workout schedule and mileage is typical for this team? My school had three guys under 4:22 for the mile in its entire history through my time. We had a 4:18 miler my senior year, then 4:49/4:55 and I'm not sure whether any one else got under 5, though there was certainly another guy who skipped track that year to earn money for the prom.

That's not a talent difference--there isn't some incredible genetic talent at these schools with great performance; they have great programs.

Nope...sorry, I was not clear -- 13 under 5:00.

jbghkjnkl wrote:

I would say there is wide variations yearly from area to area and school to school. Most years my school has 0 or 1 kid under, but when I was in school we had 6-8 kids yearly that were well under. I would be willing to bet the number isn't as staggering as people think and while California always has a slew of decent runners, you know there are other states where a 4:30 mile could win the state meet.

+1. Geographic bias is real; plenty of big CA schools will have 15+ kids under 5; many small schools throughout the country will have zero. I haven't seen a dual meet JV/FroshSoph race won slower than 4:55 in years, but there are plenty of areas in the US where that would win varsity races.

Athletic.net has ~22000 guys under 5 for a full mile/equivalent 1600; I know some states primarily use mile split, so we're probably missing a few thousand kids there. I'd assume the number would be somewhere from 25000 - 30000, but we could probably get a narrower estimate given information on which states use athletic.net versus which states use milesplit.

I don't think that the average would be 2 kids per high school. I qouls imagine that there is many more rural schools that have 0 kids running than bigger programs that have 10+. My district has 9 schools that have 250-350 kids enrolled, and all through my middle school years it took about a 5:00 mile to win. Although this year there were six kids that broke 5 in my district.

I think it's easy for people from larger programs and communities to realize how poor the running is in smaller states and smaller schools.

thedub wrote:

I don't think that the average would be 2 kids per high school. I qouls imagine that there is many more rural schools that have 0 kids running than bigger programs that have 10+. My district has 9 schools that have 250-350 kids enrolled, and all through my middle school years it took about a 5:00 mile to win. Although this year there were six kids that broke 5 in my district.

I think it's easy for people from larger programs and communities to realize how poor the running is in smaller states and smaller schools.

And with that being said, I think it's obvious that the number could be much higher. At small schools the XC and Track programs just get tossed aside, and the coach is normally a football or basketball coach who just doesn't care. There's probably several dozen kids from my school of 300 kids that could run sub 5. But only 2 of us did. And we were one of the better schools in my district. I would say 1 kid per school is a safe bet.

Steven Employment Units wrote:

Runningart2004 wrote:

In my HS since 1995 there have been a grand total of 5 boys who have broken 5:00 in 20 years and 3 of those were in 1995. I know of nearby schools whose school records are over 5:00.

Alan

Where are these schools with school records over 5? WTH?!

The Midwest.

Alan

Steven Employment Units wrote:

Runningart2004 wrote:

In my HS since 1995 there have been a grand total of 5 boys who have broken 5:00 in 20 years and 3 of those were in 1995. I know of nearby schools whose school records are over 5:00.

Alan

Where are these schools with school records over 5? WTH?!

Probably the South or ghettos

yeesh.how/why do you know that?do you follow your high school's sports team?! please say you are the coach....

Runningart2004 wrote:

In my HS since 1995 there have been a grand total of 5 boys who have broken 5:00 in 20 years and 3 of those were in 1995. I know of nearby schools whose school records are over 5:00.

Alan

thedub wrote:

And with that being said, I think it's obvious that the number could be much higher. At small schools the XC and Track programs just get tossed aside, and the coach is normally a football or basketball coach who just doesn't care. There's probably several dozen kids from my school of 300 kids that could run sub 5. But only 2 of us did. And we were one of the better schools in my district. I would say 1 kid per school is a safe bet.

Agreed that the number could be way higher. Some areas limit participation because of the seasons (if a kid wants to play baseball in the spring they can't do track, or if a kid wants to do soccer in the fall they can't run cross), some schools have really poor coaching, and who knows how many kids could find some success in running if they tried it. There are also plenty of 800 guys that could (in some cases easily) break 5, but never run the mile because they're tripling 4/8/4x4 in duals.

That being said, I think it's to our benefit to look primarily at the empirical numbers here--otherwise we end up lost in a sea of conjecture (do we assume all guys under 2:15 in the 800 could run under 5? All guys under 10:40 in the 3200? How many kids do we assume any given school has that could break 5 but don't do track?).

There were 8 at my HS during my senior year, the school had a population of around 1,000. There were probably 3-4 400/800 runners who could break 5 as well. No idea how many non-track athletes could have done it from my school.

My guess is well over 10,000 boys per year in the USA.

How many wejos every write a sentence without every making an error?

their their they're its it's

Learn them, love them, live them.

Hard to say. In Mass, league meets were never online in the spring, but were for indoors when we regularly competed on 200m banked tracks in Boston. My high school has a graduating class size of ~250, and my junior year we had about 10 go sub 5 in varying degrees (from 4:16 all the way up to 4:59), but most of those are not recorded online because they would happen at spring dual meets, while the people who were just under 5 would not qualify for states or state coaches (meets that were recorded online) because you needed times around 4:45 to go to those.

34% of runners in the data set were sub 5.

572,123 boys ran track.

http://www.ustfccca.org/2010/09/featured/high-school-track-field-participation-surpasses-one-million-for-second-straight-year

I averaged the number of results for each event in these groups.

Sprints: 29%

Hurdle: 11%

Distance: 21%

Throws: 22%

Jumps: 17%

So 572,123 boys participate in track

21% are distance, so likely raced the mile

34% of boys who race the mile had a time that is sub 5.

So 572,123 * 21% * 34% = 42,051

I had a 12 year old scout (just out of 6th grade) run a 5:16 mile after a 15-mile bike ride just off of soccer (played in a comp league) with no dedicated running training! He was very small and light.

math nerd wrote:

34% of runners in the data set were sub 5.

572,123 boys ran track.

http://www.ustfccca.org/2010/09/featured/high-school-track-field-participation-surpasses-one-million-for-second-straight-year

I averaged the number of results for each event in these groups.

Sprints: 29%

Hurdle: 11%

Distance: 21%

Throws: 22%

Jumps: 17%

So 572,123 boys participate in track

21% are distance, so likely raced the mile

34% of boys who race the mile had a time that is sub 5.

So 572,123 * 21% * 34% = 42,051

Athletic.net's data will be slightly skewed in many states because only major meets are reported (compared to, say, the Pacific Northwest states which have almost every meet included)

Impossible to say for sure just how many HSers break 5:00, but I would guess 25-40k nationwide (probably low/mid 30s). That's not too far off your calculation, but more in line based on what we know about the better documented states.

Go to a cross country meet in September-big invitational=5K In suburban Denver, there will be a dozen runners clustered around 16 minutes-maybe 25 under 17 minutes. 50 under 18 minutes-100 between 18 and 20 and 200 over 20 minutes.

Those sub 17 minute kids are your 5 minute milers. Those 18 minute kids are 5:30s.

Extrapolate throughout the state-there are a couple hundred kids-maybe.. 50 states-some are bigger than Colorado, some are smaller but my method give 1000 nationwide. Probably a little low, but not by a factor of 10. Split the difference-5000.

My high school PR-4:56. In Gunnison, CO at 7500 feet.

High Country wrote:

Go to a cross country meet in September-big invitational=5K In suburban Denver, there will be a dozen runners clustered around 16 minutes-maybe 25 under 17 minutes. 50 under 18 minutes-100 between 18 and 20 and 200 over 20 minutes.

Those sub 17 minute kids are your 5 minute milers. Those 18 minute kids are 5:30s.

Extrapolate throughout the state-there are a couple hundred kids-maybe.. 50 states-some are bigger than Colorado, some are smaller but my method give 1000 nationwide. Probably a little low, but not by a factor of 10. Split the difference-5000.

My high school PR-4:56. In Gunnison, CO at 7500 feet.

Your conversion of an xc 5k to a track mile is horribly off. For a faster xc course with a couple decent hills 4:30=16:25, 5:00=18:00, 5:30=19:45. And your way of figuring out how many sub 5 milers there are is way off. Kids who go sub 18:30 are generally capable of going sub 5 in track- in fact, I have yet to meet a high school runner who runs year round who has gone sub 18 that failed to break 5 later in their high school career. I am in a solid running area, it generally takes sub 4:15 or even faster to win states and in my COUNTY that has 15-30 schools, there are a couple hundred guys that go sub 5 every year. In my state there are probably a couple thousand and I live in a medium sized state. So it would definitely be up in the 30-40 thousand range if you factor in the states that are horrible.