Why Alan Webb's 3:53 at the Prefontaine Classic Still Stands

With this being the 51st running of the Pre Classic, we're feeling nostalgic about one of the most exciting races in meet history: the 2001 Bowerman Mile. For much of the world, the headline from that showdown was Hicham El Guerrouj - the Moroccan legend and arguably GOAT miler - breaking the tape in 3:49.92 for the first sub-3:50 mile ever run on U.S. soil.

But for just about every domestic fan crammed into the then-still-wooden grandstand of Hayward Field, the real story was unfolding a few seconds back, where Alan Webb, a senior at Virginia's South Lakes High School, was making history of his own.

A few months earlier, Webb had become the first American high schooler to break four minutes in the mile indoors - and the first American high schooler to break four, period, in 34 years - and on the strength of that performance earned an invitation to race the big boys at Pre. Now, on a sunny May day, he was barreling down the homestretch, gaining on Bernard Lagat, ultimately finishing in fourth place going up against the best middle-distance runners in the world.

Everyone in attendance - hell, everyone in the race, too - knew they had just witnessed something special. But when Webb's official time popped up on the scoreboard, it became immediately apparent just how special.

3:53.43.

Webb had obliterated Jim Ryun's 3:55.3, a national high school record that had stood - seemingly unbeatable - for 36 years and run the fastest mile by an American of any age in several years. Despite track rarely breaking through into the broader popular culture, America has always been fascinated with the sub-four mile and Webb became something of a national curiosity. (He even appeared on the Late Show With David Letterman!)

The record remains Webb's, and as of this summer, it's 25 years old. With no high school athletes in the Bowerman Mile this year, and scant opportunities for a teenager to run faster than 3:53.43 left on the calendar, it's likely we'll have to wait another year to see if Webb's record makes it to 26.

And yet, nobody's given it a legitimate scare. Let's talk about why that might be the case.

The race itself and Hayward Magic

For one thing, the 2001 Bowerman Mile itself was - surprisingly - perfectly suited for an athlete like 18-year-old Webb. The pacers were given marching orders to get the contenders out at sub-3:50 pace. That's quite a bit faster than Webb's PR coming in (3:59.86). But it proved to be not terribly far off what he was capable of, and ensured that things strung out enough to keep him from having to swing wide or battle for position. Webb patiently sat near the back, right on the rail, bounding along at a 3:55 clip through the halfway. As the pace took its casualties, Webb calmly slid around them as he ratcheted down his effort. He didn't waste energy and he didn't have to spend time in lane two. 

Another part of the magic of Webb's race was that he seemed totally unphased by the moment. But it also sort of makes sense that he was that confident.  He'd only raced against pros one other time - in the race he first broke four minutes - and held his own, placing third and within sniffing distance of the win. Why wouldn't he expect a similar outcome this time around? Aside from that indoor mile, all his other recent races had been totally dominant performances where he buried high school peers.

Without the internet being such a load-bearing aspect of life back then, and given the relative shortage of post-season high school all-star-style meets, it's entirely possible Webb stepped on the track at Hayward blissfully unaware of where he should have finished in that race, on paper. He knew he was good, but didn't know the specifics of just how good. In that vacuum of context, he was able to shock the running world.

When a modern teenage 3:52 aspirant liens up against any field today, he'd have to have actively avoided learning anything about the other runners he's up against. Everything is online now. Not just their PRs, but from social media, aspects of their personality, and from Strava, even the nuts and bolts of their training.

That same high school star would have also likely run numerous elite-level high school invitationals by the time the Pre Classic rolls around. Accordingly, he'd have run within a second or two of 4:00 several times already. Even if he's theoretically capable of 3:52 on the right day, he's gotten multiple tastes of 3:58 or so efforts... he knows what that feels like and knows that it's preposterously hard to do so. His pacing governor is calibrated, as are the bounds of reasonable expectation. This isn't to say a major breakthrough isn't possible for a kid like this, but he simply may be less inclined to go for the moonshot if he suspects a 57-second opening 409 meters might send him over the edge.

Training and what it says about talent

The current assumption is that modern training is smarter and overall better than what most athletes of the Webb Era were doing. And if you wanted to extend that assumption to its absolute limits: if you transported an 18-year-old star from the early 2000s to today and had them train like a top-tier high schooler now, they'd put up even more impressive times.

To really push this series of assumptions further, then with better training stimulus and slight improvements in footwear, under ideal racing conditions, a kid slightly less talented than Alan Webb should be able to run faster than he did.

But that's the core problem with breaking Webb's record. In terms of high school running ability, nobody has apparently even been just slightly worse than he was in 2001. (That's not to say nobody has become better than Webb was. Not many people would at this point argue that Webb was the best American miler ever, despite his 3:46.91 lifetime best.) Two incredibly good high schoolers have since run in the 3:56 range - Colin Salhman and Owen Powell - but that's a mighty big gap over a mile. 

Webb was just that good. You could easily make the case that over the last 50 years, he was one of the three greatest high school track and field athletes in America, regardless of event. It's going to take a generational athlete, coming off of an unblemished training block, plopped into a perfect racing environment for Webb's record to fall. Who knows when all three of those boxes will be checked again?

1.) They're still running crazy times and pushing the sport forward;

2.) The last two American Olympic 1500m champs' high school PBs were "only" 4:07 (Cole Hocker over 1600m) and 4:03 (Matt Centrowitz over the mile), so the future world beaters might be lurking further back in the pack;

3.) High school Alan Webb was really, really, really great, and we can always revisit that greatness with via grainy YouTube video.