Nathan Schiller

For the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, the New York Times put a sprinter, a middle-distance runner, and a marathoner on the world’s fastest treadmill, which is located at the Locomotor Performance Laboratory at Southern Methodist University in Texas and tops out at 90 mph, and analyzed the differences between running fast and running far. 

Near the end of the piece, the interviewers ask the runners to respond to the word “800,” as in, the 800-meter race. TyNia Gaither, the 100-meter sprinter, calls it “psychoticness.” Jared Ward, the marathoner, remembers “being sick after racing.” And Olivia Baker, the 800-meterer, says she wishes she were faster so she wouldn’t have to run the 800.

Why the alarm, the foul taste, the cheeky self-loathing? Because the 800 is a uniquely painful racing distance, in that it requires runners to use their aerobic and anaerobic energy systems simultaneously. 100-meter sprinters are purely power generators. Marathoners endure with economy of stride. 800 runners do both: sprint at the fastest possible speed that will allow them to last two laps of the track.

All fast running hurts

Pretty much all the running I’ve done since age 17 has been long slow stuff, marathon distance and above. And before age 15, I’d run more than a few miles only when my soccer coach made me. But the two years in between, I was on the track team, and the 800 was my race. 

Brush up against your physical boundaries and you’re bound to feel something. I raced the 100 and 200 meters one time each, for fun, and I remember the unprecedented way my joints creaked as I tried to propel my body faster than ever before, without any training in or knowledge of form and mechanics. I was lucky not to injure myself.

It’s not like I didn’t know what sprinting felt like. But I played sports, and ball-centric games compel you into a near-infinite array of explosive multi-directional movements of uncertain length at uncertain times, and that distracts from fatigue. Playing soccer, for instance, you don’t feel the pain of motion until you’re so spent that you can’t complete routine plays. But pushing through the pain has no payoff. A lackadaisical sprint is waste; an errant pass is counterproductive. When fast running hurts, you sub out.

Endurance running has its own version of this, except for the replacement part. One time, during a 50-mile trail race in the August humidity outside Boston, I paced myself poorly and had fully cramped legs at mile 33. Every step became excruciating, and every mile I thought I would quit. Instead, I adjusted to a straight legged shuffle and laughed and gritted through the absurdity. 

The 400 meters: purity 

To talk about the 800, I need to talk about the 400. I find the 400 to be the purest, rawest distance. Running tracks are elegantly simple: two 100-meter straightaways connected by two 100-meter curves, a perfect quarter mile. (Indoor tracks tend to be 200 meters, with 10-degree banked curves). The 400’s one lap, and thus is the only track race that ends precisely where it begins, no shorter or farther.

The 400 was my junior race; I couldn’t get ambitious with it because I couldn’t sustain my straightaway speed for that long. My teammates and I liked to say that humans are capable of sprinting for 300 meters only. But physiology isn’t that simple; we just needed an explanation for why our bodies burned with lactic acid the final 100 meters. On the homestretch, I was rarely running as much as staving off collapse. Smart pacing meant that that feeling might last only a few seconds. Poor pacing could mean twenty seconds of misery and an embarrassing finish. (Hard to say which is worse.)

The 800 meters: an awkward distance missing a myth

It would be underselling the agony of the 800 to say that it is merely the 400’s misery times two. The second lap doesn’t double anything but the distance. (Doesn’t halve the mile either.) When you’re sprinting for endurance, speed isn’t everything, yet strategy and tactics are narrow. The first time I raced the 800, I wanted to conserve energy, so I went out comfortably and finished hard. My coaches told me I should have run it a lot faster, and at the next meet, I cut my time by ten seconds. The next race, I shaved off another five. And then I settled into that sweet spot of illusions and realities.

In time-based speed sports, the clock contains immortality. Competition counts—winning is satisfying, striving to win is exciting; racing events can breed camaraderie and culture for everyone, and unlock money for pros—but it’s relative to schedules, regions, injuries, climate. The sport of men’s running exists on myth: the 10-second 100 (broken by Jim Hines, in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City), the four-minute mile (surpassed by Sir Roger Bannister, Oxford, England, 1954), the two-hour marathon (proved possible by Eliud Kipchoge in an unofficial event in Vienna, Austria, in 2019).

Athletes can transcend threshold with performance—Jesse Owens showing up Hitler at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Michael Johnson’s 200/400 sweep at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta—but the first to break a time barrier gets etched in stone. Casual fans instantly understand these measurements, and runners relate to their seductive mix of the existential and the arbitrary, as any marathoner who has missed qualifying for the Olympic Trials by two seconds can testify. 

Combined, these elements fuel the fact that the barriers are more psychological than physical. Hines’s 9.95 (which was the first electronically-timed sub-10; he, Charlie Greene, and Ronnie Ray Smith had done it timed by hand a few months earlier, on the Night of Speed) stood for almost 15 years before sprinters began steadily lowering it, hundredths of a second at a time, until 2009, when Usain Bolt, technology in flesh, plunged it out of reach for a half-generation and counting. In women’s track, Florence Griffith-Joyner’s 10.49, run in the quarterfinals of the Olympic Trials in 1988, has stood for a third of a century and counting; 10.61 is the closest anyone’s come, Griffith-Joyner included.

The mile and the marathon operate not dissimilarly. Four minutes for four laps was thought impossible until Bannister did it; hundreds have since done it. Kipchoge expects the same to occur with the two-hour marathon. The 800, by contrast, needs special attention. Remember the most amazing 800 in history? At the 2012 games in London? David Rudisha’s 1:40.91? That was a trifecta: an Olympic gold that set the world record and broke a barrier. Even the elites, whose PRs couldn’t get them on the podium, were stunned. But “1:41 800”? Nothing household about it.

If the 800 becomes popular in this country, it seems promising that Athing Mu will be the instigator. Mu is from New Jersey and 19 years old. She just ran a 1:55.21 in Tokyo, leading start to finish, just like Rudisha did, and netting her own trifecta: Olympic gold (the U.S.’s first in 53 years), personal record, U.S. record. She seems well-position to chase the 1:53.28 world record, but so have a handful of other runners since 1983. 

The two-minute 800

In high school boy’s track, the 800’s a little different. Breaking two minutes is a sort of rite of passage, and often a state championship qualifier. (For context, the U.S. high school boy’s 800 record is 1:46.) Throughout my first season, I developed an airtight logic to predict that I would do it. In the 400, 60 seconds had become my output at relative relaxation. If I shifted up a half-gear, a 58 or 57 wasn’t that much harder. Why not start the 800 like a breezy 400, build a five-second cushion, and coast to the club?

The reason why not was the second lap. Or, more specifically, the backstretch on the second lap. That’s where the race really begins. The first 500 meters are important, of course. But every second you bank or forsake throughout that 500 becomes two or three that can destroy you in the final 300, when you’re working twice as hard to generate a fraction of the power and losing space by the step.

Another way of putting it is that a successful 800-meter race assumes a near-perfect lap-and-a-quarter. Coming around the curve, you need not be leading or precisely on pace. You just can’t be about to fold. You’ve got to have gas for a surge or a kick. If you can’t summon that strength, then, by definition, everything is about to go terribly wrong. 

But the 800 tends not to induce the sudden onset, tough-it-out, muscle-locking pain of the 400 (though it can). It’s far more insidious than that. It’s a realization, at some point over those final 300 meters, that I’m sprinting but I’m barely moving. 

The futile quest for an impossible goal

My bad races were screw-ups and betrayals. One time, at a big regional night race, I planned to stick to the leader no matter what, only to watch that guy gallop far ahead of me off the line. Another time, at a big regional race in searing sunlight, I made the final turn on pace for a PR, only to feel my legs turn to molasses. There were also less-damaging experiences, like when I raced the first meet of my junior season without training. All I remember is lying on the ground afterward, unable to move for fifteen minutes, then stumbling to the bathroom and puking.

My good races were identical to one another. I’d go out in 61 or 62 or 63 and feel strong entering the backstretch. I’d make a move, certain I was closing in on a negative split. Then I’d hear my time and do the math: a 67, a 68, a 69 on the second lap. I’d done all the workouts. I wanted to be faster. Why wasn’t it working? 

Maybe because I was more excited analyzing the pain discrepancies of the 400 and 800 than exploring extracurricular means—radical strategies and tactics, innovative diets and offseason workouts—of material improvement. Maybe because I was staying in shape for soccer season, not trying to mold myself into a future mediocre college club runner. 

Maybe also because the closest I came to two minutes was probably 2:05. I say probably because that race was a leg of a 4×800 relay, not a dash, and thus not properly timed. I may have hit 2:06 or :07 or :08, then or in another race, but I forget. Mostly I cruised to 2:11s, :12s, and :13s, and dropped to 2:09 for races like the city championship. I’d stumbled into my sweet spot, and it was comfy, but not comfy enough. When my coach, also my former chemistry teacher, asked whether I was returning for senior year, I told her I had no intention of spending my final weeknights and Saturdays of high school in pain. She didn’t protest.