The Deets is way behind on this news, but it’s better to be late than never on news this big. My brother in law, Jake, went sub-4 in the mile for the first time with a 3:59.4 in Nashville, TN on June, 2, 2007:
Bruce Brothers has a great column on Jake’s
Chasing the dream of a sub-4 mile as the big clock just keeps ticking
Watson, 21, has been running for years, logging as many as 85 miles a week and steadily inching closer to that 4-minute milestone. He hit a time of 4 minutes, 4 seconds as a Notre Dame sophomore, “and I knew I wanted to come out the next year and take a run at a sub-4,” he said.
Ah, the mystical sub-4.
Watson can remember going for a run with a friend six or seven years ago and dreaming out loud.
“We were talking about running a sub-4 mile,” he recalled, “and it seemed completely inconceivable.”
But Watson continued chasing that dream and continued closing in on it. As a junior at Notre Dame, he produced a time of 4 minutes, 0.71 seconds at an indoor meet in February. And he recorded a time of 3:43 over 1,500 meters, a time people told him converts to a one-mile time of 4-flat “or 3:59-high,” he said, meaning 3:59.9.
Awesomeness.
Congrats, Jake.