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That seems like what that data would indicate and is pretty consistent with casual observation. On the other hand, those top 1% times look suspiciously slow to me. My wife's mile time is like a minute faster than that putative 1% and she's never particularly close to the top of local races. Maybe these are supposed to be the top 1% across the entire population, regardless of age or training? Hey @rae, where did the numbers come from? I'm not trying to be argumentative, I'm genuinely curious because I've previously had this conversation with people about where exactly I think I rank among runners in the general population and those numbers would imply that I'm much, much higher than I would have thought.
They looked suspiciously slow to me as well until I thought about it. I ran XC in high school and I usually hit the mile mark in a little over 6 minutes while pacing myself for 5k on a hilly course (hills take their toll because not only are you slower going up them but you have to pace yourself before you get to them and you're gassed coming off of them). Had I been running a straight mile on flat pavement I probably could have shaved a good 30 seconds off my time. My 5k times were usually in the low 20s and I never broke 20 minutes, which meant that I was barely good enough to qualify for varsity and my times never counted towards the team score.
But I ran all the time. Several years later, after a summer I spent almost entirely outside engaged in some form of athletic activity but during which I had made a pact with friends to never run unless it was one of three times reserved for emergencies, I decided to go back to the park where our XC meets were held and run a mile on flat pavement. I can't remember my exact time, but it was definitely over seven minutes and probably over eight. Long enough that I was disgusted with myself, despite otherwise being in close to the best shape of my life. A reasonably fit person who doesn't run all the time is going to have better times than an unfit person but it's going to be difficult for them to beat a person who actually trains, even if that person isn't really any good.
Now go to your nearest Wal-Mart and take a look at you average American. How many of these people do you think could run a mile in 6:30 or faster? Keep in mind that even reasonably fit teenagers probably won't hit this unless they run all the time (there were plenty of reasonably fit teenagers on my XC team who couldn't hit this even though they did run all the time). So while that number may seem ridiculous at first glance, it's at least plausible.
I think you're right and I've just gotten too used to numbers in the running world and always comparing myself to guy the in front of me rather than the people behind me. I just went back to Strava to go look at where I was when I first started running, and yeah, it turns out that an all-out mile for me back then was apparently just a bit faster than 8 minutes. This is easy to forget because even a few months later, I was a shade over 35 minutes for an 8K. That was off of what I would consider very light training, but it's still quite a lot more than most people are doing. I just recently helped a buddy pace his first sub-20 5K and that was for a 145-pound guy that's had a couple years of running, including a full marathon cycle behind him. I forget that getting down to those sort of paces takes real, distance running-specific training for most people. So sure, I can buy that only one in a hundred men in the United States can lace 'em up and run a 6:30.
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Those look like percentiles for general population to me, though I have no idea of the source. For college aged population the Health related physical fitness test manual by the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance has some tables. For the 1980's era publication it puts the 99th percentile male college student norm at 5:06, 99th percentile female norm at 6:04, 80th percentile male 6:05, 50th percentile male at 6:49, and the 50th percentile female at 9:22. The exact percentile levels are very sensitive to selection, there's a 30 second gap in the 99th percentiles they give for different college aged males for example.
Eyeballing these, they still just make a ton more sense to me. If I was looking at a random college-aged sample, I would expect an average guy to be able to gasp out a sub-7 mile, a pretty fast guy to be right around 6 minutes, but only guys that either ran, played soccer, or did some other endurance-heavy sport to get close to 5 flat. The women's numbers look really slow, but most women (even young women) aren't really in any kind of running shape, so that makes sense. I would think looking at college-age numbers are more instructive for discussion of athletic ability because there isn't much reason to care how fast the septuagenarians are (although I bet it predicts their remaining lifespan pretty well).
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