Flashes of Panic

If you pay little or no attention to the running world, you may have missed that Ryan Hall ran a 59-minute half-marathon in Houston earlier this month. He broke the American Record, which was beyond old enough to drive and getting towards old enough to drink, and in fact ran faster than anyone born outside Africa ever had. There are seven faster people on the books, including names like Moses Tanui, Paul Tergat, and Haile Gebrselassie. So this was a legitimately big deal.

Still, I’m getting a little tired of reading articles talking about breaking “the 1:00 barrier.” This was not a Bannister-esque performance. One hour is the yardstick of a truly world-class half, to be sure, but it’s hardly a physiological obstacle. Four minutes for the mile was a “barrier” because for so long it had seemed like world best times were approaching an asymptote, and four minutes looked like it. There’s a quote about the four minute mile somewhere, saying, “It turned out to be less like Everest and more like the Matterhorn: it looked imposing at first, but I hear now they’ve even had a cow up it.” The four-minute mile needed a Bannister, someone to show it could be done.

Nobody’s doubted the sub-hour half-marathon could be done for fifteen or twenty years, if not longer. (I think Tanui may have been the first, on a course in Milan which turned out to be short; they remeasured, and he went out and did it again the next year on the full-length course.) Nobody set out to run a sub-hour and failed dramatically, time after time. Nobody declared it impossible. It was never a barrier.

It’s a handy round number. That’s all.

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