Running: Bannister's barrier stands test of time

Monday, June 12, 2006 - 01:50 PM

Laban Rotich didn't like Saturday's cold temperatures.

And as a result, the elite Kenyan middle-distance runner won't need a two-car garage.

A year ago, Rotich won a car for breaking the four-minute mile at the Cambridge Classic Mile. But Saturday was not his day.

"When you're running in cold weather," Rotich said, "your muscles become tight."

With a Mercedes-Benz on the line, Rotich won the elite men's mile at Galt Collegiate as he edged out Cambridge's Nathan Brannen by a half-step.
But he needed to crack four minutes to win the car and his time was four minutes, 9.1 seconds. On the women's side, Cambridge's Carmen Douma-Hussar won the mile in 4:38.10, well off the standard of 4:30 needed to win the car.

It was a fun homecoming for Brannen and Douma-Hussar, who completed U.S. college careers at Michigan and Villanova, respectively.

Brannen said it was his first time running in front of local fans since his Preston High School days of 2001. "Before the race, I was listening to everybody yell my name," Brannen said, "and I had to go to the backstretch to do my strides because I was getting pretty emotional listening to everybody basically go nuts for me."

Brannen said the 20 km/h backstretch headwind was difficult.

"The last two laps were fast," he said. "Other than that, it was real slow and easy. They wanted to beat me and I wanted to beat them and the real big thing for me was to win in front of my home crowd, not just break four.

"Definitely, mark my words, I will come back here and break four."

Douma-Hussar was surrounded by friends, family and autograph seekers after her run. "I was trying to remember if this is the first time I actually ran a race in Cambridge except for cross-country races, so it was neat to run here," said Douma-Hussar, a Woodland Christian School graduate.

"In the end, we're all here because it's such a neat event. We love to race whether there's a car offered or not." Brannen and Douma-Hussar leave soon to compete for a few months on the European circuit.

It was the third annual Classic Mle, commemorating Roger Bannister's first-ever four-minute mile in 1954. In the women's high school mile, Lindsay Carson of Southwood in Cambridge won in 5:02.07.

In the men's high school mile, Kichener Grand River's Kyle Dekker was eighth in 4:32.9. Dekker, who is heading to Tulsa University, was nearly six seconds off the pace set by Toronto's Mark Davidson, also of Tulsa, in 4:27.0.