On this date, May 6, in 1954, in Oxford, England, 25-year-old medical student Roger Bannister became the first athlete to break the four-minute mile, finishing with a time of 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds. In other news, there’s currently a controversy over whether or not transgender girls and women should be allowed to compete against biological girls and women in sporting events. To that debate, we add a few more facts: The current men’s world record for the mile run is 3:43:13 by Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco. The current boys’ high school record for the mile is 3:53:43 by Alan Webb. High school boys have been running sub-four-minute miles since at least the 1960s. The current women’s world record for the mile run is 4:12:33 by Sifan Hassan of the Netherlands. The athletic performance gap between men and women is so big that the best women in the world… Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Running
High School Confidential
I ask my boy how school’s going this year, his senior year in high school. “It’s okay,” he says. “I don’t enjoy it that much but I do it anyway.” When we get to the subject of his English teacher, he says, “He’s fine, other than he’s got a Napoleon complex and spends the entire class talking about himself. I know everything about him and I’ve learned nothing about poetry. “He has a two-year-old daughter and another daughter six months old. He coaches a cross-country team. He considers himself the greatest runner of all time. We don’t know what pain is because he has a messed-up knee and he runs on it anyway. “He thinks Mr. Plette [the AP History teacher] is soft because Mr. Plette give higher grades than he does but don’t tell Plette he said that because Plette’s his boy. “He’s a San Francisco Giants fan. He’s… Read more →
The Legend of Cliff Young
I guarantee that this is the most inspirational story you’ll read today. Well done, sir! Read more →