The world speeds by in a blur, whether we want it to or not. Odds are, you’re as likely to be reading this on a phone or a computer as staining your fingers with ink. Pitchers don’t throw 300 innings a season anymore. BlackBerries are almost as extinct as the northern white rhino. Nobody has called Sports Phone for a score update in 26 years.
So maybe it is entirely unsurprising that in order to know that the world record for the one-mile run was broken this weekend — shattered, actually — you would’ve had to make it a priority to know.
Maybe you would’ve had to be familiar with a Scotsman named Josh Kerr, who has been obsessively stalking the record, which stood since July 7, 1999 (when Sports Phone might’ve still been able to alert you that Moroccan Hicham El Guerrouj posted a time of 3:43.13).
Maybe you needed to know enough to tune in to the FloTrack livestream to see if Kerr could fulfill what he’d dubbed “Project 222” — as in, 222 seconds (or 3 minutes, 42 seconds) — and embrace what was once considered the singular athletic achievement in all of mankind.
