Four minute mile question.

[lovetorun]

I know John Walker and Steve Scott both have well over 100 sub four minute miles to their credit but my question for you statisticians out there is who is third, fourth and fifth etc. and what are their numbers.

[dj]

Third is Marcus O'Sullivan, the only other member of the 100 sub-4 club.

I don't know fourth or fifth.

[PZhelev]

sub-4 mile

Correct. Scott has 135 sub-4 miles, Walker - 126 (or 129 if you include a time trial, a road race and a relay run), and O'Sullivan has 101.
BTW, I am not a statistician, but simply a Walker fan.

[Hedgehog]

I wonder if Mike Boit had an appreciable total. Wasn't he running fast into his mid to late thirties?

[lovetorun]

I was hopeful that gh would weigh in on this question ...we know the top 3 but I'd be interested in who the other 7 of the top ten are? I guess this may not be fair to the European metric milers who may have run a lot of fast 1500m that aren't counted.

[kuha]

I'm tempted to say that if dj doesn't know it, it's not humanly knowable.

[Jon]

Fourth is Ray Flynn (89) and fifth is Eamonn Coghlan (78) according to NUTS:
http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~rsparks/sub4-mst.htm

[tandfman]

The problem with that site is that their listing of sub-4 miles has not been updated since 2002. I doubt if there are any new additions to the top 5, but you can't completely rely on a source that has not been kept up.

[mcgato]

The problem with that site is that their listing of sub-4 miles has not been updated since 2002. I doubt if there are any new additions to the top 5, but you can't completely rely on a source that has not been kept up.

I'm pretty sure this is the site that I referenced a couple of years ago and noted that it hadn't been updated in a while. I was informed that the guy who kept it up died a few years back. If there is info on it that you want, you might want to download it.

[Jon]

I doubt if there are any new additions to the top 5.

So the data is good enough for the purposes of this thread.

[eldrick]

I was informed that the guy who kept it up died a few years back

sounds likely - he apparently had leukaemia a decade+ ago & from looks of amount of chemo he had, it's quite surprising he ever lasted that long - musta been helluva a fighter

http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~rsparks/leukaem.htm

[Master Po]

As noted above, including 1500m equivalents would of course add to the impressive totals of Scott, Walker, O'Sullivan, et al., and also would likely reveal other high frequency sub-4:00 & 1500m equivalent performers. For instance, one obvious addition to the 100+ club would be El G. Using pela2's lists ( http://www.alltime-athletics.com/ ), which for 1500m include sub-3:38 performances and for 1 mile go down to about 3:55, I tried to count El G's performances. Being careful not to double-count en route 1500m times in mile races that are included in the 1500m lists, I counted ~86 1500m performances, and 20 mile performances for El G. (I also got a slight headache from this exercise, and so don't plan to confirm these #s any time soon...)

[tandfman]

I doubt if there are any new additions to the top 5.

So the data is good enough for the purposes of this thread.

Probably. But "I doubt" and "probably" are not quite what I'd like to be able to say. It would be nice if we could all confirm the facts, as we could if this work had been kept up to date.

[lovetorun]

gh...isn't it a T&FN source that has the great list of USA sub four milers in chronological order? I thought maybe you had (or could compile) a similar list of sub four (and even include 1500m equivalents as MasterPo intimated) totals.