How hard is it to go sub 50 in the 400 meters?

Check this out. Last year, 739 12th graders in the US broke 50:

, but only 51 broke 48.

2 broke 46.00 [2]

14 broke 47.00 [12]

51 broke 48.00 [37]

255 broke 49.00 [204]

739 broke 50.00 [484]

1550 broke 51.00 [811]

2683 broke 52.00 [1133]

3431 broke 52.50 (go all the way to page 34)

Compared to college:

1 broke 45.00

33 broke 46.00

126 broke 47.00

384 broke 48.00

770 broke 49.00

The world top 161 are all under 46.00:

. Notably, 54 (33.5%) are from the USA.

In some ways these lists are incomparable. The high school list includes many athletes who will never run in college, the college list includes many athletes who did not go to high school in the USA, and the world list includes athletes from a much broader pool since even the college list, even though it draws internationally on talent, is highly USA-centric. Furthermore, there is a filtering of the population respectively from high school to college to world, since most high school students will not run in college and most college runners will not compete against the world. In fact, I'll ignore the collegiate stuff for the rest of this post, and instead look at the progression from HS age to elite-level, and then extrapolate that progression to current US high school students to estimate the population of sub-50 potential people in the US as a percentage.

I couldn't find the HS times for any of the top guys...

WVK ran 45.09 as a 21-year old (and improved by 2.06 to today)

MJ ran 45.23 as a 21-year old (and improved by 2.05 to his WR).

Kirani James ran 45.24 as a 17-year old

Machel Cedenio at 20 has run 44.01. At 18 he was 45.13.

Cedenio is the genetic freak of this bunch, fwiw, but the other guys seem to have improved about 2 seconds from their teens, or a bit less than 5%. If we assume that the current crop of HS seniors would also improve by 5% if given access to elite training focused on 400m performance, then the HS equivalent of 52.5, when improved by 5%, is 50 seconds. Looking down to the cutoff for seniors running 52.5, that's 3431 American HS athletes who could potentially break 50.

In 2010 there were roughly 10.6 million young men aged 10-14. Evenly divided by the 5-year age groups gives us about 2.1 million who would be 18 this year, so the 3,431 male HS seniors who have posted a 52.5 or better come from a population of 2,100,000 18-year old males. That's 0.16%. Granted, not every elite athlete runs track. You can argue that one. There a lot of errors here and a lot of assumptions, but this crude break-down can provide a strawman to break down and reason from with respect to pure numbers vs. percentages. I'm going to hazard a guess and say it's

... less than 1%. Ironically, it puts me outside the list since my best was a 52 (in a 4x400 split), although I was trained for the 1600 and 3200.

Ha, you distance guys are so desperate to believe sub 50 is so hard. Look, just like it's easy for many of you to run a fast 5k, it's not that hard for 5-10% of guys to run sub 50. The reason there aren't 10% of guys running sub 50 is that most don't ever try.

Yeah but I'm not a distance guy. I was a sub-50 guy. I understand your point of view--I was in California Southern Section (granted, one of the fastest sections in the country), in the smallest division, and 50.xx was rarely good enough to win the section, never good enough to make it to Masters, and a joke a the state level. I don't know why other people have trouble running a sub-24 200, but they do, just like you and I had trouble running a 16-17min 5k.

I do notice your percentage keeps dropping. I don't know what the answer is, but 5% would be my upper limit.

kimani wrote:

Yeah but I'm not a distance guy. I was a sub-50 guy. I understand your point of view--I was in California Southern Section (granted, one of the fastest sections in the country), in the smallest division, and 50.xx was rarely good enough to win the section, never good enough to make it to Masters, and a joke a the state level. I don't know why other people have trouble running a sub-24 200, but they do, just like you and I had trouble running a 16-17min 5k.

I do notice your percentage keeps dropping. I don't know what the answer is, but 5% would be my upper limit.

Yeah, I guess my percentage keeps dropping as I get "talked down" by everyone. I just figured some are good at distance, some sprints, but fairly evenly distributed. It sounds like maybe a lot less people have basic sprinting speed than I thought. It might be close to 5% than 10.

34yearoldguy wrote:

Ha, you distance guys are so desperate to believe sub 50 is so hard. Look, just like it's easy for many of you to run a fast 5k, it's not that hard for 5-10% of guys to run sub 50. The reason there aren't 10% of guys running sub 50 is that most don't ever try.

Exactly what I was saying.

It's closer to .0003 percent. Theoretically if it were 1-5 percent most high school teams would have 3:20 4x400 relay teams! All you need is 4 boys to make the relay. If your high school had 400 students and 200 boys at 5% you have 10 runners with 50 capability! You could have an A and B squad with two alternates! At a small high school like this most coaches and athletes know who has wheels and they could get them out for track. This obviously doesn't happen because the 1-5 percent capacity isn't even close.

The state of Iowa has mostly small schools where every coach knows who is roaming the halls and what kind of ability these kids have.

The state has 36 runners at 50.99 or faster which comes out to be 0.00029 percent. This is actually a slightly higher percentage of high school age boys than California (0.00024) despite the better weather and more competitive atmosphere. It's probably because they identify more good athletes and less emphasis on single sport participation. Let's double that number to account for better weather and competition. 0.00058. Then double it again to get almost every single remotely athletic kid on the team. Now you've quadrupled the track team size. So we have 0.0016. Roughly 1.6 out of 1,000. And this on the EXTREMELY generous side.

Except not all high school boys try or want to run 400m. Also I'm talking about who could run sub 50 in their 20s, not just highschoolers. Lots of late bloomers and those that were close in high school but needed more training.

team1.kml wrote:

Check this out. Last year, 739 12th graders in the US broke 50:

Merely add that this is on average fewer than 15 per state and the idiotic discussion is over.

Even in top divisions it's still less than one per school. Way less.

I went to a mid-sized high school in the Midwest. The coach ended up putting in about 40 years at that school. He had been 46 sec 440 runner back in the cinder track days, top 6-10 in the US. He specialized in developing 200-400 runners, and relay teams. His teams were always competitive and won a few state overall championships. Out of 1000 students (probably closer to 1600 in his later years at the helm), they'd get 50 or so runners on the track team. The 400 runners were usually all-around athletes (football receivers and defensive backs), but sometimes hurdlers and mid-d runners. In his 40 years he had only a handful of sub 50 sec runners, but they'd always had a bunch in the 50-52 range.

Most of the kids that didn't run wouldn't have been close to 50 sec anyway (not many bystanders). talk of 5-10% of the general population being able to run sub 50 is crazy talk.

Yeah, but there were a BUNCH of 50-52 second gus as you say. If they continued training in college, no doubt they would break 50. The debate is not what percent of high schoolers can do it, but men at any age in their prime.

The fact that high schoolers can do it, and bunches are close, means that 5% achieving it at any point in their life is quite possible.

34yearoldguy wrote:

Yeah, but there were a BUNCH of 50-52 second gus as you say. If they continued training in college, no doubt they would break 50. The debate is not what percent of high schoolers can do it, but men at any age in their prime.

The fact that high schoolers can do it, and bunches are close, means that 5% achieving it at any point in their life is quite possible.

Ok, 34yearoldguy you are persistent.

In 2015, 2178 17/18 yo seniors ran 51.7 or faster out of 14806 in a US sample of HS 400m runners (this is actual data). That's 14.7% from that sample. (I think it's random enough).

To get to say 49.9, that would be about a 3.1% improvement. It might be possible with sufficient desire and intention in action for guys at 51.7 in HS?

I agree that we ought to expect an improvement from a 17/18 year old to his prime (about 27 yo) if he continued to try.

So potentially, about 14% of males might be capable of sub-50 based on this reasoning.

But the problem is in calculating how select the 400m HS runners are. I suspect that they are quite biased toward males that can run faster than normal.

So if we use 1 million ( it's higher) males in the general population who at any given time are 17/18 yo against the 2178, we get 0.22%.

Therefore, for males in their prime, I suspect between 0.22 and 14% can run sub-50. I believe the percentage is way closer to 0.22%....less than 5%.

34yearoldguy wrote:

Yeah, but there were a BUNCH of 50-52 second gus as you say. If they continued training in college, no doubt they would break 50. The debate is not what percent of high schoolers can do it, but men at any age in their prime.

The fact that high schoolers can do it, and bunches are close, means that 5% achieving it at any point in their life is quite possible.

I don't think you're really getting quite how big a number 5% is, in terms of people.

Say, we take a good sized university like USC, which has about 12,000 male students each in the prime of their lives. If 5% of them can run under 50.0, then that's 600 USC students that should be able to run under 50. So if we were running a USC-only track meet, and the qualifying time was 50.0 seconds we would have 75 heats of the 400m. If there was 5 minutes between heat start times at our USC-only track meet and it started at 11am with the men's 400m, then sometime around 5:15pm it would be time to move on to the next event. Having just spent the last 6 and a bit hours watching every single USC competitor in every single heat run under 50.0 seconds.

Now lets apply that to the USA as a whole... There are about 11 million men aged between 20 and 24, which is the prime age for a 400m runner. If 5% of them can run sub 50.0, that means 550,000 sub 50.0 runners. So if we ran a USA-wide track meet with a qualifying time of 50.0, there would be 68,750 heats of the 400m. Given there are a couple more heats than the USC-only meet, we're going to run this one on a slightly tighter schedule and only put 2 and a half minutes between heat starts. And we'll start a little earlier, say 9am. And given we might run over-time, and it's going to be a popular event we'll allow the competition to run 24x7. So say we start off this USA-wide track meet with the 400m heats at 9am, on the 1st of June to ring in the summer season. Then we should be ready to move onto the the next event by around 5pm. On the 27th September. Having just spent the entire summer, and the first first month of autumn, watching a never-ending stream of 400m heats filled with 20 to 24 year old American men running under 50 seconds.

Still think 5% is a reasonable estimate?

If you put it that way, the numbers do seem quite large. It seems ridiculous when put in those terms, but only because you'll never get 11million 20-24 guys training perfectly for the 400m. You underestimate because society is so out of shape at large. You never know how many sloths have untapped ability that wasted away. I'm guessing around 5%

34yearoldguy wrote:

If you put it that way, the numbers do seem quite large. It seems ridiculous when put in those terms, but only because you'll never get 11million 20-24 guys training perfectly for the 400m. You underestimate because society is so out of shape at large. You never know how many sloths have untapped ability that wasted away. I'm guessing around 5%

0.5% max. That's still an about two weeks of non-stop sub-50 400m heats.

The good news is that this puts you in the top 0.5% of the population, I'm terms of 400m ability at least.

The bad news is you're demonstrably in the bottom 0.5% in terms of IQ.

So on average, just a regular guy.

StillNotReallyGettingIt wrote:

34yearoldguy wrote:

If you put it that way, the numbers do seem quite large. It seems ridiculous when put in those terms, but only because you'll never get 11million 20-24 guys training perfectly for the 400m. You underestimate because society is so out of shape at large. You never know how many sloths have untapped ability that wasted away. I'm guessing around 5%

0.5% max. That's still an about two weeks of non-stop sub-50 400m heats.

The good news is that this puts you in the top 0.5% of the population, I'm terms of 400m ability at least.

The bad news is you're demonstrably in the bottom 0.5% in terms of IQ.

So on average, just a regular guy.

Haha, well the sub 50 400m sure didn't do much for me, that's for sure. You may be right about the percentage being lower, but I guess the world will never know. If I ever find a magic genie, my first wish will be that all males must train from age 14 to 24 for a sub 50 400m. Then I'll come back to this thread and let you know I was right or wrong.

I was a walk on at the University of South Dakota. Never ran high school track but knew I was fast. Fastest time was 51.7 out of blocks and 50.9 in relays. I worked over spring break with 24-year old assistant coach who had been state champion in 800 meters. He could not keep up with me. I just ran my senior year. He told me I had raw speed to run 47 with continued work. 51.7 was 18th fastest in the North Central Conference with the top 15 in the conference finals, So just missed it. Except for major high schools in Sioux Falls and Rapid City, 51.7 would be faster ever at these schools.

Did not run 200 much, but fastest was 23.02.