Last year un an article about decathlon variants I wrote about austrian decathlete D. Distelberger who was planning to complete a 10 minutes decathlon. Unfortunately he had to renounce due to an injury and the attempt never took place.
And then, a few days ago, I ran across a reference to Curtis Beach and his 10 minutes decathlon. The name must certainly ring a bell for the readers of this blog. Beach has one of the very few sub-4 1500 m performances in a 7000+ decathlon, having run in 3:59.13 in 2011. His 4:06.18 from 2015 is probably the best 1500 m performance in a 8000+ decathlon. (His total was 8081 points in that case). And Beach has the best indoor 1000 m heptathlon performance with 2:23.63 from 2012, obtained in a 6138 heptathlon.
This is not the first time Beach is dabbling with super-fast events. In fact he is the winner of the 2019 Thoreson memorial 30-min decathlon. David Thoreson introduced this speed-decathlon variant in 1971 and established the first best performance in that event with over 6000 points. To my knowledge the best performance to date is that of J. Zeilbauer, from 1977, with just over 6700. Beach's performance in the 30-min event was a most decent one: 11.54, 6.70, 11.78, 1.85, 53.26, 16.96, 32.07, 3.65, 40.39, 4:34.09 for a total of 6242 points.
But the 10-min attempt was mind-blowing. It took 10 minutes and 45 seconds, 1500 included! Normally, in a speed decathlon the time allocated is counted up to the start of the 1500 m and the stopwatch starts whether the athlete is ready for the 1500 m or not. In some sense, what Beach did was a 5-min decathlon. (To be fair, since he started his 1500 m at 5 min and 37 seconds the proper scoring of a 5 minutes decathlon would be based on his time over 1500 m increased by 37 seconds, which, is this case, would amount to subtracting 186 from his total). Be that as it may, Beach obtained a total of 3001 points. Of course his performances are rather underwhelming: 16.08, 4.10, 8.80, 1.60, 1:15.80, 21.20, 25.15, 2.74, 32.00, 5:08. He performed all his throws from a standing position and his long jump was, well, I guess you have to see it for yourselves. But one has to take into account that he had to jog all the time in order to reach the various areas in the stadium where the next event was staged. And he was not exhausted at the end of this lightning-fast decathlon.
If you regularly read this blog you know I am a decathlon fan, but things like this would suffice to convince even the sceptics that this discipline has magic.
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