Tania Tan resets indoor 1-mile nat’l record

Tania Tan returned to the races with even more pep in her step as the usual middle distance/long distance runner took to the indoor 1-mile race at The Circuit NYC and broke the CNMI record with a time of 5:22.51.

The event was held at the Armory Track in New York last February 15. The old 1-mile record was her previous run in 2020 at the Armory Last Chance with a time of 6:02.33.

Then, just two days after her record-breaking mile, she competed in the NYRR Night at the Races #4 and set a season’s best in the women’s 3,000m with a time of 10:31.31.

The indoor track is different from the outdoor track, where the indoor track is 200 meters with six lanes, and eight laps equal one mile, while the outdoor track is 400 meters per lap, with four laps making a mile. The indoor 3,000-meter race was 15 laps.

In a zoom interview with Marianas Press, the 23-year-old said that breaking her PR/national record feels good. “It’s always nice to break your own PR. I feel like my main goal going into the race was to break my PR. The one mile event is usually not the event I would usually run. I’m more of like a 5K/10K athlete… so that’s why I just went in to PR and see what I could run and I guess with that came another NMI national record, which was just an extra bonus,” she said.

Tan currently lives in Hawaii as a graduate student at University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and said that she flew to New York despite it being far because she hasn’t competed since the 2024 Micronesian Games in the Marshall Islands.

“The Mini Games are coming up and it’s a good time to start competing again,” she said. “In the U.S., it’s the indoor track season so that’s why one of the only races I could find was on the east coast and it was a long journey.”

Because she went to Fordham University in New York, she said she made it into another trip to also visit friends and former teammates.

As the shorter distance race was the only event available right now, she said she chose to run it and that she felt “it’s good to practice shorter races sometimes, just because I am usually a longer distance runner and I don’t usually run these races… but I just wanted to see what I could run. And since it was going to be one of my first races back, I didn’t want to jump in a race too long yet, so I felt like starting off with a one mile was a good starting point.”

The experience of racing again since last June, she said, “felt kind of weird at first. The indoor track is 200m long compared to an outdoor track—it’s double the distance, and I hadn’t ran in an indoor track in so long, so it did feel kind of weird. But then it was nice to compete again.”

Before the Mini Games in June, she said she will look for more outdoor track races on the west coast.

On her motivation to keep competing, she said, “I want to see how fast I could run. I feel like there’s no better feeling than breaking your PR… and I feel like most people quit their sport after college or even after graduating high school, but I feel like I still have a lot more in me—especially I get to represent NMI in all these cool international events, so that keeps me going.”