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‘Brother Square Toes’ by Rudyard Kipling is about more than just the 60-second run — the slowest a sub-four-minute miler will want to cover a single 400-metre lap of the outdoor track in. But it is poetic and a lesson learned in time.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
What is the length of a mile anyway? With the metric system of measures long dominating the globe, the mile seems archaic at 1609 metres. Even those who run mile repetitions, do not always bother with the nine extra metres. It is 400m of the standard track four times for 1600m. Perhaps this is the true metric mile. The 1500m is also odd now, with the three laps plus 300m. If real estate was not such a commodity and World Athletics measuring protocol were not so stringent, perhaps a 500m track would make more sense.
Think about it, 500m, 1000m, 1500m, 2000m, round and round we go.
The 1500m race would be three even laps. It is one of the more popular distance events, after all.
Meanwhile, hanging on to the relic and the vaunted benchmark of four minutes for men, we continue to collectively legitimize a middle-distance runner’s right of passage at sub-4:00. The women are now getting perilously close to the standard. With super shoes, wave light technology and supplements, this turn too shall pass.
For now, the latest accomplishment comes from a 15-year-old New Zealander Sam Ruthe with his 16th birthday still a month away, he earned an early gift, a sub-4:00 clocking in at 3:58.35 seconds. Ruthe is the youngest. Previously it was Norway’s Jakob Ingebrigtsen at age 16 years and eight months with a slightly faster time of 3:58.07.
Ingebrigtsen has now run as fast as 3:43.73. Ingebrigtsen currently holds eight world, area or national records. He has also won two Olympic gold medals and two World Championships golds as well as two silvers, mostly in the 1500m, but has run the 5000m in 12:48.45 which is a national record. Ingebrigtsen earned gold in the event at the 2022 Eugene World Athletics Championships.
Fans of course will be expecting similar great things from Ruthe. No pressure, son.
Ruthe’s record run was held on Wednesday in the Go Media Stadium in Auckland.
Ethan Smolej the NZ 800m champion paced with targets of 58-seconds through 409m, 1:59 at 809m and Sam Tanner will then take it on to 2:58 with a lap to go. Weather for Auckland was 15C with wind around 16 kph).
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
— Rudyard Kipling.
