Milers in Step With One Another
Two New Yorkers Face Off in Wanamaker Mile After Sharing Olympic Dreams Along Maine's Trails
Kyle Merber and Erik van Ingen will be part of an elite field Saturday night in the Wanamaker Mile at the Millrose Games. Merber, a senior at Columbia, and van Ingen, a senior at Binghamton, are sub-four-minute milers who harbor Olympic dreams, and their friendly rivalry dates to their days as schoolboy standouts—Merber at Half Hollow Hills West High School on Long Island, van Ingen at Marathon High School in central New York.
Binghamton University
Erik van Ingen, seen here at the America East Conference indoor championships, will run at the Millrose Games on Saturday.
But their familiarity with each other goes much deeper than that, and van Ingen has 100 hours of documentary film footage to prove it.
When Merber, van Ingen and three of their friends trained together in rural Maine for five weeks this summer, van Ingen filmed the entire experience. He's producing a documentary about it entitled "The Real Maine," which he plans to release this spring on his web site, therealmainemovie.com.
