1500 metres
middle distance running event
The 1500 metres or 1500-metre run is the foremost middle-distance track event in athletics. The distance has been contested at the Summer Olympics since 1896 and the World Championships in Athletics since 1983. It is equivalent to 1.5 kilometres or approximately 15⁄16 miles. The event is closely associated with its slightly longer variant, the mile run, from which it derives its nickname "the metric mile".
The demands of the race are similar to that of the 800 metre run, but with a slightly higher emphasis on aerobic endurance and a slightly lower sprint speed requirement. The 1500-metre run is predominantly aerobic, but anaerobic conditioning is also required.
Each lap run during the men's world-record race of 3:26.00, run by Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco in 1998, averaged just under 55 seconds per lap. Since El Guerrouj, only three other men in history have broken the 3:27 barrier; Bernard Lagat, Asbel Kiprop, and Jakob Ingebrigtsen. El Guerrouj remains the only man to break the 3:27 barrier more than once, having done so five times.
1500 metres is three and three-quarter laps around a 400-metre track (or seven and a half laps around an indoor 200 m track).
“1500 metres” enters the record as middle distance running event. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what metres, middle and distance can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“1500 metres” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, metres, middle and distance provides the most credible route into that argument.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q191691. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1500, 1896, 1983 and 1998.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “1500 metres”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow 1500 metres primary sources, 1500 metres archive and metres research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “1500 metres”?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “1500 metres” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.