I was sitting beside the Hudson River the other day with an old friend who also happened to be a retired 1500m runner. As we sipped our iced Americanos he asked, “Do you miss it?” My answer was, “Not at all! But I can’t help but feel if I was born a few years later that I’d have run a few seconds faster.”

I hope that doesn’t make me a narcissist… or like I’m making up a story that sounds vaguely like a mash-up of several scenes from the first Men in Black movie.

This season is still young, but it’s already been incredibly exciting for distance fans. There have been numerous world records, races to the line, and it seems like every athlete keeps busting down doors to new personal bests. Think I might have to up my phone plan soon with all of the congratulatory texts I’ve been sending out.

We’re living in a golden age of track, it seems, and before I get into the technological factors contributing to that, I gotta at least acknowledge the fact that the driving force is the athletes! They’re just good right now.

But in a sea of talent, there are few athletes in the sport more exciting right now than Jakob Ingebrigtsen. It’s not only his ability to run 3:27.95 that is a pleasure to watch, but the way he does it – from the front. There are still almost two seconds between the Norwegian and the world record, and his biggest challenge won’t be the fitness, it will be the company.

The 1500, more than most races, is about getting into the right race, and any time you’re in a race with Ingebrigtsen, then it has the potential to be exactly that. With Jakob towing the field along, eight men were under 3:30 in Oslo, and intellectual pundits like myself have started to take notice of just how fast the event is running this year.

But why is this happening?

Let’s cross off the obvious ones like the shoe improvements, and wave light technology. We have seen the impact that those technological improvements have had on the NCAA and there is no reason why it would not also extend to the highest level of the sport.

An often discussed reason that championship races are now faster is a sport-wide over-correction to the 2016 Olympic final. Since Centrowitz’s win, the two best runners in the world, Jakob and Timothy Cheruiyot, are regular front runners who have been unafraid to push the pace or show up to race fairly often.

Looking at the results from the past 18 years could hopefully give us some insight as to other factors at play. The most men under 3:35 in a single year is 57, from 2021, and so far this year – it’s mid-June, remember – there have already been 55 men to dip below that same barrier.

The argument in 2021 was that athletes were healthy and hungry after not racing for much of 2020 due to the pandemic. So were they suddenly sickly and/or metaphorically full in 2022 when only 34 men dipped below that mark? One possible explanation is that the window opened for the 2022 World Championships on June 22nd, which is on the early side, and allowed 31 of the 57 men to achieve the standard the season before, in 2021.