On Running The Beer Mile

It’s a bright, blue morning and I’m in the bleachers, trying to look casual while I lace up some Nikes and cover the twelve pack with a spare shirt.

Polite children, tween lacrosse players and geriatric Sunday walkers dot the field. I stretch, taking it all in, and wonder if I will vomit on any of them.

Four Beers, One Mile

The Beer Mile is exactly what it sounds like: a “gastroathletic” competition challenging those brave or foolish enough, to drink a beer every lap of a one mile foot race. Four beers, one mile.

The rules are simple: Beers must be 5% alcohol by volume, or higher. No wide mouths, no shotgunning. If you vomit, an extra lap. In possession of the what, but still confused by the why and how, I reached out to the current world record holder for insight and advice.

And that is how I ended up in running shorts, on a high school campus, with a rack of warm beer.

For The Records

On a windy Thursday in 1954, Roger Bannister ran a (presumably) beerless mile in under four minutes, shattering a widely believed barrier of human physiology. By spectator accounts, cheers drowned out the announcer as he read the official time.

Last year in Marin, California, weeks shy of the 60th anniversary of Bannister’s run, James Nielsen cracked open the first of four Budweisers, drained it in four seconds, and sprinted through another barrier: the five minute beer mile. As Nielsen’s wife clocks his 4:57 finish, the cell phone footage records an empty college track, silent except for her giggly excitement and Nielsen’s heavy breathing; The payoff for a year of training. It’s a strangely beautiful and intimate moment for a world record, especially in light of what was to come.

The next morning, Nielsen uploaded the video and threw it on Facebook, thinking maybe a couple hundred people would watch it. Then he left for work. That night, he says, it was on ESPN.

The video has nearly a million and a half hits on YouTube and has gotten Nielsen coverage everywhere from The Wall Street Journal to Runner’s World.

Half-Drunk History

The Beer Mile’s roots go back to at least the 1980s as an end-of-season steam release for collegiate runners. In the beginning, rules were decided on the fly, records were anecdotal and regulations varied wildly.

So how did a vanguard of half-drunk, occasionally underage runners create a phenomenon? Bill Butler of Beermile.com, the de facto authority on the race, credits the internet and social sharing. Once online, rules and times could be recorded, and perhaps more importantly, shared. Today, his site hosts over 90,000 entries and has seen traffic double each of the last three years. Butler says the next logical step is mainstream popularity, and maybe even the Olympics. To hear him tell it, the Beer Mile might just need a rebranding, in much the same way that the Olympic Biathlon competition was once known simply as Norwegian military patrol training.  

Meeting the disapproving glares of parents with cheerful good mornings! and a—I hope—disarming wave, I set four beers on the side of the track, and rehearse the champion’s three pillars of advice:

Warm beer is Your Friend
The warmer the brew, the more CO2 you release when cracking the tab. The more you release, the less you consume, which brings us to…

Burp It Out
The alcohol in beer isn’t what gets you—it’s the 48 ounces of foam frothing around in your gut. Burp out as much as you can in the first 10 seconds after each beer.

Technique
Start the can at a 45-degree angle to help with air displacement, before proceeding to full tilt. Oh, and practice chugging while winded.

The first Budweiser goes down easy and I’m off. I know I’m no record breaker, but I start to think I’ve got a shot at this thing. The second beer is slower, but manageable. The third is the tipping point.

I begin to get the nausea. I begin to get the fear. My pace slows to a crawl as I frantically scan the field for an inconspicuous spot to resurface the brews. None reveals itself, and there is no choice but to continue. The fourth beer and lap take place in hellish slow motion, but some primordial instinct pushes me onward.

Just under twelve minutes later, I make it. I make it and I don’t vomit. And even though my time is more than double what James Nielsen threw down, I still feel an odd sense of pride. I set no records, completing a relatively obscure competition with only a bare minimum of competency, but I did it. Back in the bleachers, laughing over cell phone footage, I enjoyed the sun, ate a sandwich and thought about how I will never, ever run the Beer Mile again.

(This article was originally published in edited form on Liquor.com, April 2015)