Miami Mayor and Presidential Candidate Dragged for Tweet Bragging About His 5K Race Time: 6th Out of 16?

(AP Photo/Michael Owen Baker)

Miami Mayor and Republican presidential candidate Francis Suarez wants potential voters to know that he’s physically fit for the job, so he’s bragging about his 5k run time. Other runners aren’t that impressed.

Suarez, who announced his run with a video of him literally running, is an avid runner, probably way better at running than foreign policy. So when he placed 6th in a 5k recently, he was eager to share his physical prowess on social media:

Name another presidential candidate who can place 6th in a 5k with a 24 and a half minute run time.

Go.

As someone who doesn’t enjoy running and has never completed a 5k because I’d never volunteer for such a thing, I turned to math to find out if this is a good time. A 5k is about 3.1 miles, which means Suarez ran about an 8ish-minute mile. It’s by no means bad. It’s about the average for someone who is not a beginner, but not really an expert, also taking into account age, general health, etc. And depending on how many people ran in this 5k, 6th place may not be too bad at all.

But political reporter Aaron Blake of The Washington Post found out the context for this “brag” by Suarez and discovered it’s not all that much to brag about:

As someone who runs around an 8-minute mile, I was like, “That’s good enough for 6th place!?”

Turns out it was 6th *in his age group.*

Out of 16 people.

As someone who runs around an 8-minute mile, I was like, “That’s good enough for 6th place!?”

Turns out it was 6th *in his age group.*

Out of 16 people.https://t.co/VdI7bfGBDW https://t.co/ah2dhZPEa2

— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) July 4, 2023

Ah. Well, that’s less impressive. And Twitter was, naturally, not impressed with many pointing out that 1. this is not an impressive run time, 2. former Democratic presidential candidates Beto O’Rourke and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg both cleared that time, and 3. no one cares how fast their presidential candidates can run.

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