CHUG, BURP & BREATHE
Bellemore wins beer mile
The world may steal our curling and hockey supremacy from time to time, but there is one sport in which Canada is indisputably No. 1: Running a mile (1.6 km) while chugging four beers.
On Saturday night in San Francisco, Windsor’s Corey Bellemore once again broke the world record for the beer mile, completing the ordeal in four minutes 33.6 seconds. It breaks a previous world record, also held by Bellemore, of 4:35.35, which he set in the U.K. in July 2016.
The Canadian’s time is so fast that it comes close to rivalling the record that once stood for running a beerless mile. In the 1850s, Englishman Thomas Horspool briefly claimed the title of world’s fastest mile runner with a time of 4:29.
Bellemore’s beer mile is also faster than the women’s mile record that stood for much of the 20th century. Only in 1973 did Italian sprinter Paola Pigni bring the women’s world record down to 4:29.5. It now stands at 4:12.56, a record set by Russia’s Svetlana Masterkova.
A proper beer mile consists of four quarter-mile laps of a track, each of them preceded by the downing of a beer. The clock is running throughout, so the able beer miler is judged partly on the quickness of their drinking.
They must also avoid vomiting, which necessitates a penalty lap.
While beer miling may have once been the domain of pot-bellied weekenders, it has now been taken over by legitimate runners eager to master the gastrointestinal challenges of mixing vigorous exercise with carbonated alcohol.
Bellemore, for one, can normally be seen running for Canada at alcohol-free events such as the recent Francophone Games in Cote d’Ivoire. His personal record for a beerless mile is 4.01, although as he told the Postmedia News, “we don’t do many miles in Canada.”
His new beer mile record was set Saturday night at San Francisco’s Kezar Stadium during halftime at a San Francisco Deltas soccer game.
A Facebook video of the run records Bellemore’s clear dominance over the other competitors. As other runners visibly struggled to choke down their brews, the Canadian smoothly chugged his four bottles of Flying Monkeys amber ale without a twinge of discomfort.
Bellemore, who appears to be a man of few words, greeted the victory by addressing the cheering San Francisco crowd with a softspoken “thanks a lot to everyone.”
Irish runner Cathal Dennehy was in Saturday’s race with Bellemore, and in a subsequent article for Runner’s World described feeling his body shut down by the onslaught of foamy beer.
“Breaths became shorter, more frantic, the need for oxygen in the muscles now greater than before,” he wrote.
In a clear illustration of Canada’s relative supremacy in beer miling, Dennehy came in 52 seconds behind Bellemore and still managed to snag the Irish world record for a beer mile. “Despite my nation’s long and proud tradition in both miling and drinking, it was apparently the fastest ever by an Irishman,” wrote Dennehy.
One of Bellemore’s secrets is that he runs with a bottle opener, thus allowing him to save precious fractions of a second with a wellrehearsed flick of the cap. All it takes is a second of cap-fumbling, and the record is lost.
“Honestly, it’s just about getting it down as quickly as you can, continuing to move in the chug zone, get out the carbonated burps and keep your laps fast” he told the Postmedia by email.
“All I am thinking about during a beer mile are those simple things — run fast, chug fast, burp and breathe.”
BeerMile.com is the globally recognized arbiter for beer mile records. Of the top 10 titleholders for the men’s beer mile, four are Canadians. The others: three Americans, two Australians and a Brit.
In the women’s category, however, the sport has been seized by the U.S. American women occupy the top four spaces for the beer mile, with North Vancouver triathloner Kirsty Jahn in fifth place with a time of 6:38.38.