Most athletes peak at about the age of twenty-six or twenty-seven. For tennis players, it’s a bit younger; for golfers, a bit older. Most everyone starts to fade by about thirty. There are, however, a few freaks. One of them pitches relief for the Yankees. Another of them won the two-mile at the Millrose Games, at the Armory, on Saturday night.

The runner is named Bernard Lagat, and he’s thirty-eight. He completed two miles, indoors, in eight minutes and nine-and-a-half seconds. That’s the fastest an American has ever run, and Lagat now holds national records in the fifteen-hundred metres, the mile, the three-thousand metres, the two-mile, and the five-thousand metres.