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iRun for beer Daryll Smith, Ontario

Canadian runners are not the favourites to win the Olympic marathon. No Canadian has won the Boston Marathon in a quarter of a century. And no Canadian has ever been the holder of the fastest recorded time in the mile.

But one Canadian runner has a stranglehold on the world record in another event: the Beer Mile.

What’s the Beer Mile? It’s as simple as this: A mile is roughly four laps of a standard 400-metre track. In the Beer Mile, you drink a can of beer before each lap. Four beers, four laps.

And Jim Finlayson, a two-time Canadian marathon champion, has done it faster than anyone in the world. You know the once-elusive four-minute mile? Finlayson, of Victoria, B.C., is closing in on the five-minute Beer Mile. Finlayson’s world record performance of 5:09 is more than half-a-minute faster than anyone else.

I know this for a fact: I couldn’t do one or the other in that time. Running a mile or drinking four beers would take me a lot longer than five minutes. Finlayson can do both. Not bad for a guy who stumbled upon the event only a couple of years before his world-record performance.

In 2005, Finlayson entered the Dave Smart Tribute Beer Mile, a fundraiser for a foundation named in honour of a Victoria triathlete who died at thirty-three of melanoma.

“I had no idea what to expect,” says Finlayson. “I entered for fun and I figured I would just go as hard as I could and see how it turned out.”

It turned out very well. Finlayson finished first with a time of 5:13, much faster than the world record of 5:40. But he drank his favourite beer, Guinness, which has a lower alcohol content than allowed in the rules, so his time wasn’t official.

(Yes, there are some very specific rules for the Beer Mile. Basically anything you can think of that would make it easier to chug beer when you’re out of breath – everything from light beer to wide-mouth bottles to shot-gunning – is prohibited. Oh, and you have to bring all the beer with you to the finish line. If you throw up, you run a penalty lap.)

“I was surprised at how well I was able to adapt to both parts of the race,” says Finlayson.

Event organizers encouraged him to race again the next year with an approved beer so that a world record could be set. But he didn’t decide to enter until the day of the race.

“I wasn’t planning on doing it,” he says. “But then I just couldn’t not give it a try.” So he stopped by the liquor store and picked up a six-pack.

“I asked the guy in the store, ‘What’s the closest thing to Guinness that has five per cent alcohol?’ He gave me Keeper’s Stout. I found it pretty fizzy, but it counted.”

Finlayson finished in 5:20 and set a new record.

In December 2007, he started thinking about another attempt.

“Two weeks before the race, I was really excited about it. But then I started having second thoughts. I was actually getting a bit nervous. What if it goes horribly wrong this year?”

Once again, it was a last-minute decision. After a practice run the night before with a new drink – Granville Island Winter Ale – Finlayson broke his own record in front of a field of more than seventy-five runners and a boisterous crowd of about a hundred people.

Finlayson says he’d like to take a crack at breaking five minutes. But even so, he has mixed feelings about being the world’s fastest Beer Miler.

“I feel good and I feel embarrassed at the same time,” he says. “There’s definitely some pride there. But having that beer label attached to it, I’m not really sure how I should feel about it. Sometimes I feel that as runners, we should be leading this clean lifestyle, but you can be an athlete and still enjoy a beer.”

Sometimes you can even do both at the same time.