Run a Mile Race,
Instead of a Marathon
Short, Intense Exercise May Beat Endurance
Sports
By Kevin Helliker in
the Wall Street Journal
It took Taylor Gilland
less than four minutes this February to run a mile, earning him membership in
one of sport's most-elite clubs.
The feat made Mr.
Gilland, an analyst at Blackstone Group, the athletic star of the
private-equity firm where marathon and triathlon accomplishments are too
commonplace to warrant much attention.
By running the mile in
3 minutes and 58 seconds, the 23-year old proved that distance isn't the only
measure of respect for the weekend warrior. Amid an endurance-athletics arms
race that has pushed competitive distances to beyond 100 miles, an antithetical
question is gaining force: How fast can you run one mile?
The mile is making a
comeback. Since 1999, the number of mile-length road races in the U.S. has more
than doubled to 700, according to Bring Back the Mile, an organization devoted
to promoting the distance that once made famous Roger Bannister, the first man
to run a sub-four-minute mile, and Jim Ryun, the first high-school athlete to
do so. This Saturday's Fifth A-venue Mile, a New York Road Runners event, will
host a field of 5,000, up from 52 at its 1981 debut.
Signing up for these
races are newcomers to running, children, retired marathoners and others eager
to cross a finish line in minutes rather than hours. Until he ran last year's
Fifth Avenue Mile, the pride of Michael Mooney's running career was a marathon
he ran 30 years ago and finished in two hours and thirty-six minutes. At last
year's Fifth Avenue race he won the 55- to 59-year-old age group with a time of
5:01.
"Most certainly,
my mile time exceeds all personal efforts to this point," says Mr. Mooney
a 58-year old former pharmaceutical salesman. At this Saturday's Fifth Avenue,
Mr. Mooney hopes to break five minutes.
Amateur runners have
been flocking to longer races for decades. Enrollment in triathlons, half
marathons and marathons has more than doubled since 1990, according to Running
USA, a nonprofit organization dedicated to distance running.
The more-is-better
school of exercise would hold that a single mile offers skimpy health benefits
compared with the 26.2 miles that marathoners traverse. But, a research paper
published in July in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, says
milers enjoy the same mortality-fighting benefits as marathoners. The study of
55,137 adults over a 15-year period found that those who ran less than an hour
a week lived longer, as did those who ran more than three hours a week. Both
groups on average lived three years longer than non-runners.
A small, but growing
body of research suggests that the benefits of endurance athletics may
eventually diminish or disappear for longtime practitioners.
Evidence is also
mounting that short bursts of intense exercise may produce fitness benefits
equal to that of sustained endurance workouts. A 30 minute workout of 10 minute
intervals of intense exercise and recovery "has been shown to improve
aerobic capacity, skeletal muscle oxidative capacity, exercise tolerance and
markers of disease risk," said a review of exercise research. The review
was published this year in the journal Applied Physiology, Nutrition and
Metabolism.
That's good news for
people who don't have time to train for marathons. As a new -hire at
Blackstone, Mr. Gilland works far more than a 40-hour week, often leaving him
with about a half an hour a day to exercise.
He makes the most of
it, sometimes running 4 miles on the streets at a 5:30 pace, other times
hitting the track to sprint shorter distances. He also runs stairs, swims,
lifts weights and does yoga. Training for a fast mile requires lung-bursting
sprints.
"It is way more
painful than marathon training," says Marissa Isang Smith, 27, who hopes
to break five minutes and win her age group at this year's Fifth Avenue Mile.
Last year she finished sixth in her age group with a time of 5:21.
In a nation where the
marathoner long ago became the model for runners, the revival of the mile gives
public health officials hope for getting more Americans on their feet,
especially children.
At this year's running
of the three-year-old Liberty Mile in Pittsburgh, children accounted for 219 of
856 total runners. In the last five years, the American Running Association has
persuaded schools in 25 states to launch mile runs.
"We're proving to
PE teachers that even kindergarten children can run a mile," says Dave
Watts, executive direction of the association, a nonprofit public-health
agency.
The mile also offers
children an early chance to discover their abilities. At last month's Liberty
Mile, 52-year-old Richard Loeffler started out thinking that he would pace his
9-year-old son, Barron—who finished in a speedy 6:55. "I think I wound up
holding him back," says Mr. Loeffler.
As a competitive
distance, the mile went into decline in the 1980s when U.S. high schools began
running 1,600 meters—nine meters short of a mile.
Aiding the comeback of
the mile is that America never made a transition to the metric system. Only 425
American men have run sub-4-minute miles.
The appeal of that
achievement isn't lost on elite marathoners, including Olympic medalist Meb
Keflezighi, winner of this year's Boston Marathon.
"If the right
opportunity [to race the mile] comes along at the right time, he would jump at
it," says Merhawi Keflezighi, the marathoner's brother and manager.
Amid a rise in the
number of 5 kilometer races, the public tends to know only what constitutes a
fast mile and a fast marathon.
"Even when you
run a marathon, people ask, 'What was your per-mile pace?' " says Todd
Straka, a 47-year-old runner in Boulder, Colo., who is prouder of his fastest
mile at 4:27, than his fastest marathon.
Chris Pasko, Mr.
Gilland's boss at Blackstone, ran the 3,000 meters in college. "But the
only question people ask me is what my mile time was," he says.
Mile races can also be
kinder to spectators. "It doesn't take your whole day," says Mr.
Loeffler, the Pittsburgh runner.
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