Although his competitive running career is behind him, Patrick McGregor, 26, is again hitting the track regularly. Daily, in fact.
Once during every 24-hour period, no matter where he is, the assistant track coach at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, finds a track and puts himself through the test of running a sub-5:00 mile.
It’s a habit McGregor started on January 2, and he’s zeroing in on his initial goal of 105 straight days. Should he do so, he will eclipse the achievement of his high school coach, Devon Hind. Provided all goes well, McGregor will better Hind’s record on Sunday, April 16.
McGregor has an impressive running résumé. He was a seven-time high school state champion in Alabama, and he was twice second-team All-American at the University of Texas. He graduated in 2013, then lowered his mile PR to 3:58.7 while running professionally for the NJ/NY Track Club in 2014. He then decided to hang up his spikes and pursue a coaching career, and he has already seen success with that, too. Karisa Nelson of Samford won the NCAA indoor mile title in March.
A major factor in that decision was the influence of Hind, who coached McGregor at Hoover High School just south of Birmingham and still coaches there.
“Coach Hind has been a mentor for me in a lot of ways,” McGregor said. “He’s not one to really talk a lot about what he’s done, and that speaks volumes about his integrity and the person he is.”
One thing Hind never actually mentioned to McGregor during their coach-athlete relationship was the streak of 104 sub-5:00 miles he logged in the fall of 1979, a couple years after Hind wrapped up his own running career. While at the University of Alabama in the mid-1970s, Hind ran 8:48.5 for the 3,000-meter steeplechase (still No. 7 on the school’s all-time list) and ran 4:03.1 for the mile.
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“One day I decided to see if I could still break five [minutes] in the mile,” he said. “I went out and ran 4:59. It was all I had. And I thought, ‘Okay, this is ridiculous. I need to get back in shape.’”
Hind, now 61, couldn’t devote a lot of time to training as a new coach. But he returned to the track the following day and managed another sub-5:00. He did it again the next day, and the next.
“I thought I’d just see how many days in a row I could break five,” he said. “I didn’t set out to do a hundred in a row. I was just like, ‘Let’s see if I can do this tomorrow.’ And I just kept it going until I couldn’t go any more.’”
Hind eventually failed on day 105, a few days after Christmas. He had returned to Michigan to visit family over the holidays, where bad weather in his home state sabotaged the sub-5:00 streak. “I didn’t have access to an indoor track, so I was going to my old high school track and shoveling it off,” Hind said. “There’d be four to six inches on it and blustery winds and all that mess. A couple of days I made it in those conditions. The day it ended, I ran 5:01 three times in a row. And that was it, my streak ended at 104.”
McGregor learned of Hind’s streak when reading through letters in his coach’s book, Running in the Cold, a collection of Hind’s notes to his Hoover High teams. Specific mention of the streak is made in a 1993 letter, in which Hind conveys to his athletes the perils of making excuses.
“In the letter, Coach Hind talked about how he had excuses at his fingertips to not do his mile any given day,” McGregor said. “How he didn’t have the proper equipment or a good track. And that’s the thing—when it comes down to it, you’re the only person who can really hold your feet to the fire. If you want something, you need to go get it.”
One of the big keys to keeping the streak going, McGregor has found, is been taking it one day at a time. “Some days you feel good; other days you feel bad,” he said. “But you have to compartmentalize something like this and not look at the big picture. Also, there’s a tendency to just do whatever you have to to break five minutes, and you may not stretch or anything like that. But it can kind of catch up to you, so you’ve got to be careful to stay healthy along the way.”
Regardless of where he travels with his teams, McGregor is mindful of the time of day back home in Birmingham, as he must log his daily sub-5:00 mile before midnight central time. There have been some early morning efforts and a few long past dark, but so far he’s checked off each day on the first try. His best mile during the streak was 4:27 at Stanford University the first weekend in April, as first reported by Flotrack. (By comparison, Hind hit a 4:16 during his streak almost four decades ago.)
Might McGregor pop a fast one for No. 105 on the 16th? He’s not really looking for a lot of hoopla. “This isn’t about notoriety for me,” he said, “and I just hope in the end it’s helping my kids’ running in some way, that they’re motivated by it. I’d like to keep it going as long as I can but it does kind of consume your life a little bit. So, when it doesn’t feel right I won’t do it anymore.”
