An Olympian ran a sub-4-minute mile with a dog he just met. Did they set a world record?
As a display of both human and canine athleticism, the video of Anthony Famiglietti of Mooresville hauling keister along the asphalt path tethered to Bailey is breathtaking.
The 40-year-old Famiglietti — a two-time Olympic steeplechaser and one of fewer than 1,600 men in history to officially break the 4-minute mile barrier — wows lesser runners (and that’s virtually everybody in Charlotte) by making a blistering pace look effortless. Bailey, a 4-year-old rescue believed to be a Border Collie-Whippet mix, impresses dog owners by sprinting for nearly 4 minutes without stopping to sniff a single blade of grass.
They’re in near-perfect lockstep with each other, in a way that might make you think they’ve been running together for years.
But in fact, Famiglietti just met Bailey for the first time this past Saturday afternoon at Fisher Farm in Davidson. And within minutes after Famiglietti shook Bailey’s paw, the two became fast friends, literally: They set out hurtling along the greenway at 15 miles per hour on their way to ticking off a mile in 3 minutes and 59 seconds — which appears to be a new world record for a human-dog pairing.
Or ... is it? And do Famiglietti and Bailey’s owners even care whether it is?
How fast can she go?
Bailey has plenty of running experience, having logged hundreds if not thousands of miles since Katie Rose and her husband, Jason, adopted her from Friends of Stanly County Animals’ Rescue on New Year’s Day in 2016. But while the Roses are reasonably speedy — they both can flirt with a 6-minute mile at maximum effort — they say it’s easy to tell that they’re holding Bailey back even at that pace.
Eventually, they started kicking around the idea of recruiting the fastest person they could think of to run with their dog, just to see what kind of runner Bailey really had inside of her. And the fastest person they could think of was Famiglietti, a living legend in the local running community for his Olympic credentials but also for his knack for popping up unexpectedly at little local 5Ks and winning by a half mile.
The only obstacle to get around? They didn’t know him. So it seemed far-fetched to imagine an elite-level athlete risking tripping over a dog or a leash just to satisfy a stranger’s curiosity.
Yet, in early January, the Roses found themselves at the gym/shop he co-owns with his wife, Karen, on Main Street in Mooresville (called Reckless Running, it doubles as a storefront for his apparel line of the same name and a training center for elite high school runners that he coaches); Jason was there to pick up a shirt he’d won, and Katie was buying a pair of arm warmers.
In walked Famiglietti. The Roses just went for it.
“We were just kind of joking, like, ‘Hey, this would be neat for you to run with her’ — not thinking that he would really take it serious,” Katie Rose says.
Little did they know Famiglietti had some lofty goals involving the mile distance for 2019, and that he would soon be willing to think outside of the box to give his training an extra jolt of motivation.
Seeking glory beyond 40
Famiglietti — who pretty much everyone refers to, simply, as “Fam” — was a track and cross-country star at Appalachian State and the University of Tennessee back in the ’90s, then represented the U.S. in the 3000-meter steeplechase at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens and again in 2008 in Beijing.
At age 27, he ran a 3:55 mile, and at age 28, posted a personal-best 13:11 5K time. More than a decade later, he’s still running professionally, hellbent on becoming the fourth man in history to break the 4-minute mile barrier after turning 40 years old.
(Famiglietti hit the milestone age on Nov. 8. The three other fortysomethings who accomplished the feat, according to Outside, are Bernard Lagat, Eamonn Coghlan and Anthony Whiteman.)
But on Halloween, just over a week before a planned attempt on the track to celebrate his birthday, he broke his toe while horsing around with his son on the trampoline in their backyard. Then last month, shortly before his first race since that injury, he hurt his hamstring.
He decided to run the Camel City Invitational in Winston-Salem on Feb. 1 anyway — since it was his last shot before the deadline for qualifying for the USA Track & Field Masters Indoor Track & Field Championships next month — but after going through the half in 2 minutes flat, his leg gave up on him and he limped to a 4:19 finish.
Four days later, he reached out to the Roses.
“My hamstring finally came back, so I was like, ‘I’m gonna do a mile time trial,’” Famiglietti says. “And then I was like, ‘Well, no one’s gonna be out there ’cause nobody really cares but me, so why don’t I call and see if the dog will come. ... I never would have considered running with a dog before they came in.”
Three days after that — last Saturday afternoon — he met Bailey for the first time.
A perfectly hatched plan
Famiglietti doesn’t own a dog, and had never run with one before. But what he lacked in experience, he made up for with preparation.
He found the flattest terrain possible. He used a surveyor’s wheel — the kind used to measure distances with pinpoint accuracy for road races seeking official certification by USA Track & Field — to mark off the mile, and he made sure it ended at a T intersection, thinking it would help signal to Bailey that it was time to stop when the distance had been covered.
He recruited a friend to take video of the attempt while trailing the pair on a BMX bike. And he brought another bicycle for Katie Rose, who would serve as a rabbit of sorts by riding up ahead of them while staying in view, so that Bailey could concentrate on a familiar presence.
There were the expected pleasantries when the Roses showed up — some sniffing by Bailey, some petting by Famiglietti — but they didn’t waste much time getting to it.
“She can be a little shy around new people,” Katie Rose says. “But ... when he was warming up a little on his own, she got really excited about it. She started barking and crying ’cause she wanted to go run. So when he came back and got her to do a few strides (short warmup sprints) with him, she was really excited to go.”
Though Bailey’s a smaller dog — about 25 pounds — Famiglietti says he could feel that she was pulling him along a bit for the first quarter-mile. After that, he says, she settled into a groove. The only hiccups were: One, whenever his friend recording the video would stop pedaling, his bike would make a humming sound that seemed to distract Bailey a little; and two, about halfway through, a drone being operated by another friend came within a few feet of them at about eye level and ever-so-briefly caused Bailey to change course.
Otherwise? Again, it was almost like they’d been running together for years.
Famiglietti nailed his goal of going sub-4 with less than a second to spare, and heaped credit on Bailey: “I went way faster than I would have otherwise. The dog keeps you honest. ... If I started to slow down, the leash would tug, and then I’d have to pick it up. So it made me commit to the run. And having that early boost in the beginning made it easier to have strength towards the end.”
At the same time, he’s quick with a reminder that it also wasn’t as easy as it might have looked.
“If it was, I could just tie myself to the back of a Jeep and tell him to go 16 miles per hour,” Famiglietti says, laughing. “It just doesn’t work that way. You still have to be really fast. You’ll just get dragged. That was my fear, too, like if she was really gonna take off, and do a quick left turn, and I would just like wipe out and get dragged.
“But that dog is smart. She stayed right on trail and followed Katie the whole way. It was awesome.”
’It’s official enough for me’
As for the whole world record thing ...
A spokesperson for Guinness World Records tells the Observer that this would indeed be a new category, and as with any claim to a new record title, the Roses or Famiglietti would need to submit an application that could take 12 to 15 weeks to review and verify.
Guinness also adds this note: “Our standard policy is that we do not endorse, sanction or encourage attempts for record titles which place unnecessary pressure or stress upon animals, as we cannot always guarantee that the animal(s) involved are taking part in the record attempt of their own free will.”
To which Katie Rose offers this response: “Well, one, we would never, ever let Bai do anything that would cause her harm. Two, we’ve run with her enough to know she likes to run and she likes to run fast. Three, I was on the bike in front and kept my eye on her to make sure she wasn’t being pulled along. She wasn’t. If she had been, the run would have stopped. Four, she wasn’t even winded at the end and proceeded to run more with me.”
And even before they’d been made aware of Guinness’ stance, all parties seemed to be leaning toward not submitting anything official.
“It’s official enough for me,” says Famiglietti, pointing to a Runner’s World story about a man who ran a 4:13 mile with his dog at a race in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 2016.
“I mean, it’d be really neat if Bailey had a verified world record,” Katie Rose says. “That’d be a great little thing to help (people see the value of) rescued animals, to be able to say, ‘Here’s this little dog that was a stray that was discarded, and now she has a world record.’”
However, she says: “Our intention was never to have a Guinness World Record, but to see how fast Bailey could run.”
This story was originally published February 13, 2019 at 9:02 PM.
