Sub-5
April 28, 2014 4:35 PM   Subscribe

 


You know, kids, the word "hero" gets thrown around a lot these days, but I feel confident in saying that James Nielsen isn't a hero. He's pretty bad-ass, though.
posted by Etrigan at 4:47 PM on April 28, 2014 [9 favorites]


from tylerkaraszewski's link:

Hard ciders and lemonades
will not suffice.


... like that would make it easier.
posted by RolandOfEld at 4:49 PM on April 28, 2014 [1 favorite]


I ran my first beer mile this winter and I think I finished around 11 minutes. It was much harder than I thought it would be. Now in an effort to improve on that, I am off to begin studying the anatomy of the esophagus and the upper sphincter.
posted by z11s at 4:50 PM on April 28, 2014 [3 favorites]


Wow. He didn't even use a pacer like Bannister did.
posted by GuyZero at 4:55 PM on April 28, 2014 [1 favorite]


Needed more Chariots of Fire.
posted by kmz at 4:58 PM on April 28, 2014 [1 favorite]


Probably loaded up on Fleischmann's Yeast first.
posted by 2bucksplus at 4:59 PM on April 28, 2014 [21 favorites]


Needed more Chariots of Fire.

More like Chariots of Hops. A vodka shot mile would call for chariots of fire.
posted by localroger at 5:01 PM on April 28, 2014


Well I've got half of this challenge down pat.
posted by octothorpe at 5:04 PM on April 28, 2014 [18 favorites]


I want to see his training montage.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 5:07 PM on April 28, 2014 [2 favorites]


This is amazing. I like to think of myself as being pretty high on the beer/running curve (19:22 5k PR, truly heroic amounts of beer every week, not a brag, this is gonna catch up with me soon) but someone always comes around to remind you that you're but an amateur.
posted by ftm at 5:11 PM on April 28, 2014 [1 favorite]


At my best, without beer, I can run just under a ten minute mile. Around 3/4 of the way through that, I usually start thinking "Why on Earth am I doing this?" but manage to force myself to keep going. Watching this guy run... and with carbonated liquid in his stomach (never mind alcohol)... its inspiring.
posted by Joey Michaels at 5:14 PM on April 28, 2014


Ah running and drinking/eating. Good times. My best for the beer mile was around 5:30(final lap was 63 seconds). A couple teammates beat me senior year though. I truly came into my own with the 4 x donut( yeast, double chocolate, powdered sugar, jelly) where I have never been defeated. Best time somewhere around six minutes.
posted by rockindata at 5:17 PM on April 28, 2014 [4 favorites]


Wow, that beer 2 miler from tylerkaraszewski's link would make you drunk.
posted by Literaryhero at 5:22 PM on April 28, 2014


See also: Hash House Harriers. One of my favorite random things to read on the Internet is the weekly update column for the Ascension Island hashers. 880 mostly British expats sitting on a rock in the middle of nowhere doing SIGINT work. Of course they have a running problem and a drinking club to manage it.
posted by Nelson at 5:23 PM on April 28, 2014 [5 favorites]


Budweiser Strong.

*ribbon*
posted by maryr at 5:23 PM on April 28, 2014


Brutal!
posted by ph00dz at 5:24 PM on April 28, 2014


On-on!
posted by Arbac at 5:26 PM on April 28, 2014


I'm not in the best shape anymore... Not near the top of my game.

I think though, with some training (a few months) I could do this. (without the running part, of course).
posted by el io at 5:28 PM on April 28, 2014 [3 favorites]


rockindata: I truly came into my own with the 4 x donut( yeast, double chocolate, powdered sugar, jelly) where I have never been defeated. Best time somewhere around six minutes.

I would only consider doing this if I the distance my projectile vomit covered would be included in my total distance.
posted by Joey Michaels at 5:32 PM on April 28, 2014 [1 favorite]


The map of Ascension Island looks like some sort of British Purgatory / Heaven, depending on your inclination.

English Bay
English Beach
Boatswain Bird Island
Cricket Pitch
Royal Airforce Base
Golf Club
Tennis Court
English Bay Road
New Cemetery
Botanical Gardens

...and more or less arse all else. Well, I suppose there's NASA road and Old NASA Site if you want a little Colonial flavour to your island paradise \ prison.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 5:44 PM on April 28, 2014 [1 favorite]


I appreciate the presence of the Clydesdale division. Never in my life have I been other than slow, fat and misproportioned for any athletic endeavor. But the 11:48 beer mile feels entirely within my grasp.
posted by wotsac at 6:02 PM on April 28, 2014 [4 favorites]


My best beer mile was around 7:11. I've seen some monsters run sub-6 beer miles from my college track team.

I always felt if I had known that you were allowed to puke after you hit the finish line I could've pushed it under 7.

They didn't mention the rules I remember: if you vomit, you have to do an extra penalty lap. But penalty laps are capped at one, so if you're gonna puke, just keep puking.

That is highly impressive - especially his ability to keep it down afterwards.

He's a little older. I'm sure if you got someone in their late 20s who could push out a bunch of 60-second 400s (definitely doable) and hit those 10-second beer-splits (anything around or under 10 is a respectable chug time) you could could realistically shave 15-20 seconds off of that. But I think the human limit of beer mileage is somewhere around the 4:30 mark.
posted by faceattack at 6:18 PM on April 28, 2014


He did not recycle the beer can.
posted by srboisvert at 6:21 PM on April 28, 2014 [1 favorite]


Also - the winner of the first beermile I ever attended/competed was a sprinter who was also a teetotaler at the time, so he did a chocolate milk mile: 500ml containers of chocolate milk per lap instead of your typical 330ml beer can.

He iced everyone with like a 5:45 or something, but was puking like a dog for the rest of the night.

You can slam milk faster because it isn't carbonated, but I can tell you from personal experience that trying to choke down two liters of chocolate milk when you're sitting around with nothing else to do is a mission that'll take even the strongest of stomachs around 20 minutes, let alone trying to throw fast 400s into the equation.

But yeah - any nonalcoholic masochists looking for booze-free alternatives are free to do the (chocolate or not) milk mile. FYI: you may not be invited back to whatever track you use to race that one.
posted by faceattack at 6:30 PM on April 28, 2014 [2 favorites]


from tylerkaraszewski's link:

Hard ciders and lemonades
will not suffice.

... like that would make it easier.


and

Probably loaded up on Fleischmann's Yeast first.

I did a beer mile twice in college (although at that time I think we called it the "four by beer") and by far the worst part of it was not the alcohol content but the carbonation. Chugging that first beer was no problem (well, no problem when you're in college), but the key was to try to burp out all of the carbonation during that first lap because the real pain starts when that second beer hits your half-bloated, half-cramped stomach.
posted by alidarbac at 6:33 PM on April 28, 2014


Even the thought of the milk mile makes me sick. My cousin in high school did something called the burrito mile. Blech.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:44 PM on April 28, 2014


I guess I didn't consider folks switching to still cider but yea that would be 100% a different thing. I guess I was just saying that switching to some Magners or something didn't seem like it'd be that much different of a race in my mind.
posted by RolandOfEld at 6:53 PM on April 28, 2014


I propose a new contest - a combination of "Edward 40-hands" and the beer mile: Edward 440-hands - where you run a mile while drinking the two 40s duct taped to your hands.
posted by 445supermag at 7:01 PM on April 28, 2014 [10 favorites]


The wikipedia has something like that in the beer mile page (well, sort of). A 4x400 relay race. 4 people do 100 yards each, passing a 40 to each other. It has to be finished by the end of the relay race.

There's a german race also... 2 people between them carry a crate of beers (seems like 20-25) and run 10k. They have to be done with the beers by the end.

Also check out Tour de Donut. You race 65 miles for time, and each donut you eat subtracts time off your total. It is common for the winning time to be negative.
posted by RustyBrooks at 7:07 PM on April 28, 2014 [2 favorites]


Honestly, what is most impressive about this video is how much his wife is encouraging this.

The next time Mrs Bartfast tries to put a stop to one of my cockamamie plans, I'm going to show her this. "Honey, *this* is what's possible. Now hand me the 5/16ths socket, I gotta get the nitrous mixture just right on the moped."
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 7:56 PM on April 28, 2014 [9 favorites]


He didn't do the over-the-head pour with the first beer.
posted by telstar at 8:00 PM on April 28, 2014


Papyrus though?
posted by Zerowensboring at 8:32 PM on April 28, 2014


That's insane. I've done a few beer miles (8 minutes plus change here) and it's substantially harder than you'd expect. You are fighting puking the entire second half, and it does in fact make you drunk before the end. I wonder if the guy is a hasher.

It's good to know which beer he used. I'll make sure to take advantage of that the next time we do a beer mile here.
posted by Mitrovarr at 8:53 PM on April 28, 2014


The most surprising thing about this is his wife's involvement and encouragement. Usually wives try to keep their husbands from doing stupid-ass shit.
posted by jacquilynne at 9:13 PM on April 28, 2014 [2 favorites]


She probably has like $1k in side bets on this. I would if I'd been watching him train.
posted by fshgrl at 9:33 PM on April 28, 2014


@roomthreeseventeen, please let us know when the Renaissance Mile is similarly documented: (1 mile, solve a Rubik's cube, drink a 40oz of malt liquor, dunk a basketball on a 10' rim, play Chopin's Minute Waltz, eat a pint of ice cream, any order)
posted by snowbuffalo at 9:58 PM on April 28, 2014 [4 favorites]


I helped my buddy organize an end of season beer mile competition between our univeristy and rival instate univerities cross country team. The men's winner ran sub 6. The biggest problem is the combination of cold and carbonation.
posted by nestor_makhno at 10:15 PM on April 28, 2014


Are you allowed to crush the can? Nowhere in the rules did I see anything against that. Because I have the feeling that several friends of mine who can drink beer really, really fast and just pack it in there would beat most of the people who can run fast minus the beer part, except the seriously olympically fast people.

I wanna set up a competition on this among my friends now...
posted by emptythought at 12:51 AM on April 29, 2014


The mile was clocked in 4:21 without the chugging. He was DIII 5k champion, so he's pretty fast to begin with.
posted by professor plum with a rope at 1:36 AM on April 29, 2014


SLYT warning, please people!
posted by jfwlucy at 1:44 AM on April 29, 2014


Germany has a "Kastenlauf", where a team of two has to bring along a beer crate ("Kasten") usually consisting of 10 liters (340 oz) of proper beer and empty it together. You get "penalty beers" for spilling one. Usually combined with some kind of tasks/quizzes at checkpoints. If I remember correctly, there have been casualties.
posted by pseudocode at 5:33 AM on April 29, 2014 [3 favorites]




A friend did a charity event at SFU called the Jogger Lager. Run a mile, drink a beer. See who can make it the farthest. He came in second, at 26 miles.
posted by vansly at 7:22 AM on April 29, 2014 [2 favorites]


In Rhode Island there is a charity race where runners drink a Narragansett beer and eat a local hot dog, the Grog & Dog Jog:
The annual Grog & Dog Jog took place at the Wild Colonial this weekend. 80 teams of 4 ran a mile and a quarter, then downed a ‘Gansett and Saugy. All to benefit the Rhode Island Community Food Bank"
(Saugies, BTW, are kind of gross.)
posted by wenestvedt at 7:31 AM on April 29, 2014


The funniest thing in the Beermile.com FAQ is this: "The total time is often used as a measuring stick of competency." Employing a non-standard definition of "competency" that I've never seen before and hope never to see again.
posted by Flexagon at 9:03 AM on April 29, 2014


Great, now I have to try this. Thanks in advance, MetaFilter.
posted by TheRedArmy at 1:19 PM on April 29, 2014


The Beer-Every-Mile SF Half Marathon: 13 Beers in 13 Miles

"TURN DOWN FOR WHAT!" cried toad...
posted by emptythought at 2:30 PM on April 29, 2014


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