Magic Miles

If you follow NCAA track and field like I do, you have to be excited. There are a ton of middle and long distance athletes that are pushing the limits of what is expected from collegiate athletes. The mile, especially, has my eye right now. It is a thrilling event, a wonderful combination of speed, strength and tactics. And it is seeing a resurgence in the college ranks. The magic number for the mile has always been 4 minutes. Four quarter miles in one minute each. Through today, there have been 17 collegiate men this season that have powered through the event faster than that magic 4:00 mark. In fact, 10 American men ran their first sub-4 mile this last weekend. This brings the total number of American men that have run sub-4 in our nation’s history to 342. Over the past 3 years, we have added 44 Americans to the sub-4 list. What has caused this rapid increase in our totals?

One of the causes of our recharged Mile totals, I believe, is an ease of getting race results. We used to have to wait for a month or two to find results from out of the way events to be published in a magazine. Now, we can fire up our laptops and find results within hours, if not minutes, of an event being completed. There are many times that we can actually watch the race online and find out instantly! Every race from UW this past weekend was streamed live online, as well as the US Cross Country Championship races from Spokane. So, it is easier to find out which athletes are doing what. This allows athletes to play the “why not me” game, and step up their achievements.

Part two, our coaches are not afraid to put our athletes in positions to run fast. This means getting the athletes into races where all the other great athletes are competing. Having a large group of very fast athletes banging heads in a race is where we get these bulk additions to our all-time lists. They know the race is going to be fast and only have to worry about beating the guy next to them. Additionally, we seem to have moved away from the “loneliness of the long distance runner” and more into group training. There are several post-collegiate groups that cater to middle distance athletes, as opposed to only focusing on marathoners.

I believe the biggest reason for the influx of names to the USA mile list comes down to one name: Bernard Lagat. When Lagat became a US citizen, he brought with him a list of accolades and accomplishments that few Americans had ever achieved. Heck, he even had an Olympic medal! Lagat forced the other American athletes to step up their games. He caused them to train and race harder than they previously thought possible. Since Lagat became an American citizen in 2005, there have been 77 Americans that have run a sub-4. That averages to 12.8 per year. In the previous 45 years we only averaged 5.8 new athletes running sub-4. If you want to wear the USA across your chest, you still have to go through that man. To beat him, you have to train ridiculously hard. Lagat is a product of the American collegiate system and has had amazing success on the international level. It comes back to athletes seeing that success and saying, “Why not me?”