I know there has been a lot of talk about Steve Spence's 43year sub-5 streak potentially coming to an end this year, but one of our employees revealed this morning on our weekly all-staff conference call that he has his own streak.
Steve Soprano, aka Employee 1.1, has gone sub-5 every year since his freshman year of HS in 2003. Now 32 and with a 3 yr old boy at home, his running has really taken a hit this year. He said he realized in the fall he hadn't gone sub-5 this year and decided he needed to try to do it. However, he's barely been running.
He estimates he's run 8 times in October, 8-12 times in November and 7 times this month. But he's going for sub-5 tonight. He lives in the Albany, NY area and is apparently going to try it indoors in the convention center where he measured off a mile with a wheel. His mile PB is 4:26. 5000 pb is 15:03, 10,000 is 31:02, half-marathon 67:53 and marathon 2:26:43. His last sub-5 was a 4:38 indoor mile at BU in February of 2018.
Morality Police - We Need A Ruling
He did reveal however that he's trying it today because he's thinking he'll probably come up short and then that will leave him one more day to do it, possibly on a treadmill at 0% incline or downhill on a road mile.
Do you guys think those are legit options? In the era of the Vaporflys, can on really argue that a treadmill at 0% is cheating? RW says that the wind resistance causes one to add "5 percent to the total energy cost" of running and isn't that pretty much what the Vaporfly's do as well? So instead of buying him a pair of $250 vaporflys, we save the cash and allow him to try it on a treadmill.
And given all of the qualifiers coming from CIM, can we really ding him for a downhill mile, particularly if he doesn't have the Vaporflys?
Lastly, anyone in the area that can live stream this for us?