Eamonn Coghlan

(This piece is for my latest book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from April 1994.)

MILESTONE MILE. It wasn’t quite now or never for Eamonn Coghlan. But it was sooner, not later. His time to become the first sub-four-minute masters miler was running out.

He had said so himself in a recent New York Times interview. “If I’m not going to do it this year,” the Irishman had told Frank Litsky, “I’m not going to do it. It gets harder as you get older.”

The four-minute barrier had turned back other great milers. Mike Boit never got in shape for a serious attempt after 40. Illness canceled Rod Dixon’s bid. Injury stopped John Walker.

Coghlan had come closer than anyone. But even he had followed nature’s timetable of losing a second or two per year since peaking at age 30.

He also had discovered the truism of masters running – that runners his age (41) get hurt quicker and heal slower. He nursed a chronic hamstring injury, which he called “literally a pain in the rear end.”    

Now his best chance had come. The injury was under control, and the conditions were right. The world’s most skilled indoor miler (he still held the open record, set 11 years ago) would run on one of the world’s fastest indoor tracks. The track in Boston is eight laps to the mile, with a springy surface and wide, banked turns.

He enlisted a world-class rabbit. Stanley Redwine, an 800-meter man, did his job perfectly by  towing Coghlan through three-quarters in just under three minutes.

This left him needing to run a quarter in 60.7 or faster. He would have to do it alone. “If I run 4:00.1 or 4:00.2,” he had said, “I’ll be a million miles away from 3:59.8 or 3:59.9.”

He was hundreds of miles from the big-time indoor circuit he used to run. This event came during a break in a high school meet. The kids cheered wildly for this man old enough to be their father finished in 3:58.15.

Quibblers might protest that this wasn’t an outdoor mile, that it was a patched-together event, that it was paced, that it wasn’t a true masters race. Don’t listen to them. Give Eamonn Coghlan full claim to one of the milestone times in running history.

UPDATE. This mile came almost exactly 40 years after the first runner, Roger Bannister, broke for minutes for the mile.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. Latest released was Memory Laps. Other titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]