The “Norwegian Method” Is Still Changing Endurance Training

The “Mile of the Century”—of the twentieth century, that is—was a duel between John Landy and Roger Bannister at the 1954 Empire Games in Victoria. The two men were, at the time, the only two sub-four-minute milers in the world: Bannister had beaten Landy to the punch by 46 days, but Landy was the reigning world record holder. Their end-of-season clash was as heavily anticipated as any heavyweight boxing duel. Landy led until the final bend, at which point he famously glanced over his left shoulder at precisely the moment that Bannister surged past on his right.

The mile of the current century, at least in terms of pre-race hype and intriguing storylines, took place on Saturday at the Prefontaine Classic track meet in Eugene. It was a gigantic multidimensional grudge match between Jakob Ingebrigsten, the blunt-speaking Norwegian wunderkind who won the 2021 Olympics at the tender age of 20 and whose training methods have sparked wholesale upheaval in the endurance world, and almost every runner who has beaten him or come close to it in recent years—most notably Josh Kerr, the Scotsman who upset him at last…