Colin Sahlman is the 13th U.S. high-schooler to run under four minutes for the mile
And he may not even be the most remarkable kid in the U.S. at the moment
At the Dr. Sander Columbia Invitational in New York City on Saturday, Colin Sahlman, a senior member of the futuristically powerful Newbury Park High School, California distance program, ran 3:58.81 to win the invitational section of the men’s mile and set a meet record. That unlikely “W” made Sahlman the thirteenth American high-school student to violate the 240-second line and only the fourth to do it indoors.
Total Running Productions broke down the achievement in yet another soothingly wonkish video.
At the same meet, Sahlman’s teammates Lex Young and Aaron Sahlman ran 7:57.06 and 8:01.72 for 3,000 meters. Aaron Sahlman is somewhat obviously Colin Sahlman’s younger sibling, but Lex has a twin brother, Leo, who was at the same level as the other three in cross-country and didn’t race this weekend. Lex missed the national high-school indoor record by 0.15 seconds—held by his brother Nico, now running strongly as a true sophomore for Northern Arizona University.
It boggles the mind that Aaron Sahlman and the L-Youngs are juniors and therefore have another four and a half seasons of prep competition remaining. But a senior from Woodstock, Georgia named Will Sumner, although probably not destined to be in the same events as the aforementioned studs, is probably better than all of them, especially given that he isn’t a product of a flamboyantly overachieving dynasty.
Sumner, slated to become a Georgia Bulldog in the fall, ran an incredibly patient 800-meter race on Saturday at the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix on Staten Island (also sort of in New York City), finishing in 1:48.14—the #2 all-time indoor prep mark, and 0.47 shy of Josh Hoey’s 2018 standard (video).
Colin Sahlman’s 3:58.81 mile netted him 1,145 World Athletics points, whereas Sumner’s 1:48.14 for four laps was worth 1,135. So, the two are, at the moment, closely matched limb-flapping athletes, adjusted for their respective event ranges.
Well, sort of. Earlier this season, Sumner—who holds the fastest times in the nation this winter in the 400-, 500-, 600, and 800-meter runs—blazed a truly unfathomable 1:15.58 600 meters. That performance is worth about 1,197 World Athletics points. Sumner’s performance isn’t listed here yet, but that time places him 18th on the all-time world list. Sure, it’s an infrequently contested event, but…
Maybe this is the best way to contextualize how historically good Sumner as well as the Sahlmans and the younger Youngs—and for all I know, there’s a Rico-Rex twin set romping its way toward the Newbury Park pipeline as I type this—really are. Mary Cain and Katelyn Tuohy were both judged to be once-in-a-lifetime talents in high school. Yet the highest point total Cain achieved during her high-school years (and beyond) was 1,191 for a 4:24.11 indoor mile, while the 15:37.12 5,000 meters by Tuohy that shot future expectations of the then-sophomore into the ionosphere scored 1,115 points. (Tuohy’s American under-20 indoor 3,000-meter record in December of 8:54.18 now stands as the North Carolina State runner’s highest-rated mark at 1,148 points.)
Or maybe this works even better: Achieving 1,197 points in an indoor mile requires a time of 3:54.89, the personal best of American Ryan Hill, #87 in the world all-time in that discipline. (Hill, now with HOKA, was one of the professional runners who finished behind Colin Sahlman on Saturday.) It’s also worth a 13:03 outdoor 5,000 meters.
Somewhere in all this (he said with the usual irritated grunt) is an adjustment of unknown magnitude owing to the introduction of quantum-leap-caliber racing spikes—specifically the Nike Dragonfly ZoomX—in the fall of 2020. But once an athlete is already at 1,100 points, better shoes are unlikely to account for a difference of more than, say, 30 points (that’s about two seconds in a mile). These kids are simply showing up and not only running as fast as established pros, but running like seasoned, cagey pros—not that anyone gets away with reckless racing tactics beyond a certain competitive level unless it’s 1978-1981 and the runner is Henry Rono.
Homing in on the suddenly 8.3-percent larger U.S. high-school sub-four-mile club, here’s a screen shot of Wikipedia’s list. I won’t link to the page it’s on because the list has four omissions: A pair sub-fours Jim Ryun clocked in 1965 between the two already listed (3:58.1 and 3:56.8), and Drew Hunter’s 3:58.86 and Michael Slagowski’s 3:59.78 at the 2016 Prefontaine Invitational, a race I witnessed in my first and presumably last trip to TrackTown, U.S.A. [“Editor’s” note: The newsletter version of this whole section sucked, as did my first attempt to fix the Web version.]
Adding Ryun’s, Hunter’s, and Slagowski’s missing performances to this set reveals that these thirteen high-schoolers have run a total of twenty-one sub-four-minute miles. Ryun did it five times, Hunter three times, and Alan Webb and Slagowski twice each. Hunter and Webb are the only two to achieve the feat both with and without a roof over their heads, although Hobbs Kessler’s 1,500 meters in 3:34.36 last spring (1,183 points!) should be placed in a low orbit around the outdoor sub-four gang.
Strangely, Ryun was a junior when he became the first prep runner under four, while the 20 three-fifty-somethings achieved in the fifty-seven-plus years since were all run by seniors. Or maybe not so strangely, given that Ryun is the best miler on this list when you strip away the effects of basic technology—and I’m affording faster track surfaces at least as much weight here as I am the speedier shoes.
Traditionally, when a miler runs under four minutes in high school, it has granted him almost automatic “future Olympic prospect” status. The problem here is that the running public has stubbornly continued judging four minutes as a world-class time despite that no longer being true decades ago. A kid who runs four minutes today is a great runner even if he does it in superspikes and has been training wisely and hard from practically the day he could first walk. But in the mid- to late 1960s, a 3:59.9 was tantamount to around a 3:50.0 today.
When Ryun went under four minutes for the first time in June 1964, Peter Snell’s world record was 3:54.4, and Ryun was only the 13th American ever to dip under the 4:00 mark, including three who were right in front of him that day. The first three times Ryun broke four minutes as a senior, he was chasing Snell’s revised world record of 3:54.1; in running 3:58.3, 3:58.1, and 3:56.8, Ryun crept closer to the mark each time. Ryun’s high-school best of 3:55.3 on June 27, 1965 came eighteen days after the overly forgotten Michel Jazy of France broke Snell’s global standard with a 3:53.6.
Ryun therefore crept closer to the shifting world record in each of his five sub-fours, finishing 4.6, 4.2, 3.0, 2.7, and 1.7 seconds behind it in that order. Jim Ryun was one of the best middle-distance runners on the planet within two years of going for his first practice jaunt.
In 1966, Tim Danielson became the second American prep runner and the 18th American overall to slice through the barrier. Ryun himself, by then at the University of Kansas, lowered the world record to 3:51.3 shortly after Danielson's 3:59.4. Then, in 1967, in the race in which Marty Liquori became the third American kid under four with a 3:59.8, Liquori watched Ryun break his own record by 0.2 seconds with a 3:51.1. Liquori wound up the 25th American to join the sub-four-mile club that day, putting him in still-very-lofty company.
For obvious reasons, both Danielson and Liquori were, like Ryun, seen as solid bets for one day winning or narrowly missing Olympic medals. But while Liquori indeed enjoyed a distinguished career, making the 1968 Olympic team in the 1,500 meters at age 19 and taking Ryun’s measure in multiple classic match-ups thereafter, Danielson wound up starting a family while studying to be an engineer in college, and was unable to make running a top priority. He did in fact go on to work for the same aerospace firm for 40 years, but is now in prison, convicted of murdering his third wife in 2011. (No, he didn’t kill the first two; there’s just no other way to write that sentence.)
So, to review, each of the years 1964, 1965, 1966, and 1967 saw a U.S. high-schooler run one or more sub-fours. Then, after that, it somehow took almost 34 years for the fourth kid to add his name to the small, easily recited throng. When Webb ran 3:59.86 indoors in January 2001, he was only the 238th American overall to crack four minutes. His 3:53.43 at the Prefontaine Classic that May was rightly ballyhooed—and the rules concerning ballyhooing have never been made clear anyway—but it was also 10.30 seconds off Hicham El Guerrouj’s still-standing 1999 world record. In those 34 years, meet officials had figured out how to record times to the hundredth of a second, and the sport had gone nearly as global as it is today. Webb was still great, but not even as good as Liquori had been in high school in absolute terms, with Liquori being 8.7 seconds behind Ryun's world-record 3:51.1 in his one schoolboy sub-four.
Webb went on to make one Olympic team (2004) and set the U.S. outdoor mile record (3:46.91, still going strong after almost fifteen years and the fastest mile in the world this century). His career is nevertheless viewed as a disappointment by most observers, not so much because he failed to improve as much as expected after high school, but because he did conspicuously improve while never running to his proven ability in international championship meets.
What about the rest of the names on the list? It took another ten years for the fifth student at an American high school to break four minutes, and I worded it that way because Lukas Verzbicas is a Lithuanian national. But when Verzbicas ran 3:59.71 in June 2011, over 360 Americans had by then done the same. Sadly, Verzbicas, who holds the U.S. high-school two-mile record with a dazzling 8:29.46 from the 2011 Prefontaine Classic, switched to triathlon after a short stint at the University of Oregon—his ultimate plan all along—and in July 2012 saw his career all but end in a terrible bicycle crash. Verzbicas returned to triathlon competition in 2013, but was done within three years. It’s therefore impossible for two reasons to know how good a runner Lukas Verzbicas might have become.
Since the spring of 2015, eight more runners have joined the U.S. sub-four high-school list; in total, over six hundred Americans have logged a mile somewhere in the threes, about 45 percent of the current worldwide total. To call the feat mundane would be a mistake, but to suggest it heralds remarkable things on an international or even national scale became an unwarranted move at least twenty years ago. Remember, Webb didn’t merely “break four minutes”—he did it by about half an outdoor straightaway. Had a 3:59 signified the upper limit of his talent at the time and his career had otherwise followed the same path, he might never have made an Olympic Trials final.
It’s clearly too early to tell where Leo Daschbach (now at the University of Washington), Kessler (running professionally for adidas) and Colin Sahlman will land in the all-time annals of the sport. And to be fair to Matthew Maton, Grant Fisher, Hunter, Slagowski, and Reed Brown, none is older than 25, so to write any of those men off might be premature. But among those five, one has already become great, one is close to great but seems unlikely to get much better, and the other three seem finished.
With Fisher having moved up in distance at Stanford University and finishing in the top ten in both the 5,000-meter and 10,000-meter “2020” Olympic finals last summer, it’s safe to say he has ascended to the world-class level. Meanwhile, Maton, the other 2015 sub-four honoree, attended the University of Oregon for a bit and was out of running within a couple of years.
Hunter hasn’t been a dud, and the 7:42.63 3,000 meters he ran a little over a week ago rates as the best objective performance of his career at any distance. His talent is undeniable, as is the fact that he moves incredibly fast for someone whose body wobbles in at least five distinct planes when he competes. But he appears to be in a pattern of injuring himself, getting back into great shape without as much work as most others need to attain his level, and then calling it quits before the summer is half over. These past two Covid-affected years haven’t permitted a glimpse into whether that may change. But he’s running for his mom now, and if that doesn’t get him to Eugene this summer or to Paris in 2024, I don’t reckon anything could.
One almost-final, possibly interesting note: Slagowski hasn’t raced since 2018, while Brown, now a redshirt senior at the University of Oregon, has performed solidly at times, but hasn’t gotten much faster. Of the thirteen runners on the American high-school sub-4:00 list, Maton, Slagowski, and Brown appear to be the only three who were a year behind their expected graduating classes. Maton was already 19 when he slipped under the barrier, and both Slagowski and Brown reached that milestone less than two months afterward. This isn’t to dilute the sub-four achievement, but ceteris paribus, when an exceptionally talented male runner that age has an “extra” year to mature in high school, he, despite not training in most cases like a collegian, is apt to creep that much nearer to his ultimate potential before he heads off to university—or, as increasingly the case, the pros.
And that brings me to my final observation of the weekend. Other than wanting to be working toward a degree, does it even make sense for Will Sumner to take his insane capabilities to the NCAA so he can become bored beating up on everyone there for free? While knowing nothing at all about the lad besides what I’ve written here, I will be frankly amazed if Sumner doesn’t un-commit to UGA and sign with a shoe company after he graduates in a few months. And concerning all those Newbury Park kids, maybe Colin Sahlman should start the Newbury Park Elite TC in his parents’ home the instant he’s done with high school in June, and remain the sole and founding member as he waits for his brother and the (known) Young twins to join him in the summer of 2023. Despite Nico Young’s exploits as an NAU Lumberjack, whatever they put in the water supply in that part of California seems worth staying as close to as possible if you’re dreaming of an eventual sub-13:00 5,000 meters or sub-7:30 3,000 meters.