Breaking Four: A Family Affair Story

It is always a major milestone for a runner when they break the magical 4:00 mile barrier.  Since Don Bowden of Cal first did this in 1957, over 383* other American milers have achieved the feet.  As of September 2012, twenty Ivy Leaguers are a part of this club (at least one miler per current institution, including Army and Navy).

Columbia alum Liam Boylan-Pett (#315 on the sub-4:00 mile list) recently shared the story of the father-son miler duo Sam Bair II and Sam Bair III on their attempts to become the first father-son duo to both break the 4:00 barrier in the mile.  Boylan-Pett wrote the four part article for the “Bring Back the Mile” website.  A link to each part is below:

Lap 1 | Lap 2 | Lap 3 | Lap 4

You can follow more of Boylan-Pett’s writings on his tumblr account, “Will Run For Food“.

* – the list keeps on growing as it the list only has all of the athletes who bested the mark before May 2012.  It does not include Olympian Donn Cabral’s achievement from September 2012.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2012 at 8:22 am. It is filed under Alumni, Columbia, Spotlight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.