How Amish culture created Indiana’s first high school boy to run a sub-4-minute mile

• Noah Bontrager is the first Indiana high school boy to run a mile in under four minutes.
• The 18-year-old from a small school in Shipshewana credits his work ethic to the local Amish culture.
• Bontrager ran a 3:59.48 mile at the New Balance indoor nationals in Boston, setting a meet record.

TOPEKA, Ind. – Indiana’s first high school boy to run a sub-4-minute mile is not from Indianapolis or its collar counties. Nor from the population centers outside Chicago, Cincinnati or Louisville, Ky.

Noah Bontrager has instead been influenced by the Amish culture of the state’s northeast corner. The 18-year-old lives in Shipshewana and is a senior at Westview High School, enrollment of 343, almost small enough to be in the smallest of Indiana’s four basketball classes.

The LaGrange County school is 15 miles south of the Michigan border, located on County Road 600 W., where horse-drawn buggies clip clop along the pavement. The track is fenced off from farmland. Horses graze nearby, and a cow once delivered a calf in an adjacent pasture, right in the middle of practice.

Running has evolved since 1954, when Roger Bannister first broke the 4-minute barrier at Oxford, England. Now it is a sport of high tech, featuring propulsive supershoes, biomechanic analysis, wavelights for record attempts, and the Strava app tracking workouts,

Yet tech doesn’t break records. Runners do.

This sport rewards simplicity and industriousness, two characteristics of the Amish lifestyle. Bontrager said he marvels at junior high runners who do chores before school, attend classes and track practice, then do more chores after school.

“I like to say they work all day. I think I got that from them,” he said. “And from my mom and dad.”

Bontrager is a Swiss-German Mennonite/Amish family name, originating from the German Bornträger, meaning transporter of liquids.

Noah’s paternal grandmother, Judy Bontrager, died in 2020 after a seven-year fight against pancreatic cancer. She once set trusses on a barn while a softball-sized tumor grew inside her.

Noah’s grandfather, Josey Bontrager, had dyslexia and never learned to read. He started a small-scale manufacturing business, Shipshewana Hardwoods, in the early 1970s. He built it into a company that became PalletOne, which was acquired for $232 million in 2020. Noah’s father, Lyle, still speaks Dutch to the grandfather.

“How do you build a multimillion-dollar business when you can’t read. How do you do that?” said Lyle, who is Westview’s cross-country coach.

“Stuff like that is ingrained inside of him somewhere. Just determination and grit.”

How Noah Bontrager became Indiana’s first high school boy to run a sub-4-minute

During the 2000s, other Indiana boys had ambitions to run a sub-4-minute mile: Austin Mudd, Cole Hocker, Lucas Guerra, Kole Mathison, Martin Barco. None made it, with Mudd’s outdoor 4:01.83 standing as a state record since 2011.

Bontrager had thought about it for a couple of years. At state last year, he set a 1,600-meter meet record of 4:02.60, equivalent to a 4:04.02 mile. Yet it was startling when he actually broke through.

For one thing, he was ill at the end of cross-country season, finishing second at state, behind Springs Valley’s Calvin Seitz. Bontrager was 43^rd in the Brooks nationals Dec. 13 at San Diego – close to last place – and was 78 seconds behind winner Jackson Spencer of Herriman, Utah. It was such a pitiable run that Spencer consoled Bontrager afterward.

For another, Bontrager said skeptics didn’t think he should run the mile March 15 at the New Balance indoor nationals.

“Really, the mile? You should do the two-mile,” they told him.

Bontrager, a drummer, had a concert on Friday of the two-mile and declined to abandon Westview’s band. He would chase the dream on Sunday.  Except when he arrived in Boston, meet officials told him he might not be racing the top milers. Maybe the second-to-last heat, they said.

One runner dropped out, and Bontrager was in the fast heat. He was all-in.

He was in third with 400 meters left, then seized the lead by running the last two laps in 58.57 seconds. Usually undemonstrative, Bontrager thrust his right index finger in the air as he broke the tape. His time – 3 minutes, 59.48 seconds – was a meet record and made him No. 7 on the all-time high school indoor list.

Sitting with his father in a restaurant afterward, enjoying a “juicy hamburger,” he was still processing it all.

“I was kind of in shock, even three hours after,” he said.

Perhaps more shocking?

In three subsequent meets, all in the Indianapolis area, Bontrager has sent vibes that sub-4:00 is just one step on a long journey. He could be on a world stage as soon as August.

Multi-sport athlete

Growing up, Bontrager was immersed in running culture but wasn’t confined to that. He played youth basketball and baseball, including a travel team with the latter. His peers went on to reach the Class 2A state basketball title game this year and baseball semistate last year.

“I do actually have hand/eye coordination, unlike the stereotypical runner,” he said.

His parents, Lyle and Erin, are former runners who were track coaches at the junior high. Noah discovered he was better at running than at other sports. Running was “the norm,” he reasoned. At Westview, it was.

Westview’s track coach, Matt Jones, and Lyle Bontrager are cousins.

Jones was seventh in the 1988 state cross-country meet, leading the Warriors to fifth as a team. Besides coaching, he is an electrician in the recreational vehicle industry and farms 350 acres.

Another Westview runner, Andrew Begley, was a four-time state champion in the mid-1990s before joining NCAA championship teams at Arkansas. Westview was third in the state in cross-country in 2017, behind champion Carmel, whose enrollment was 13 times greater.

And when Bontrager was an eighth-grader, he helped Westview  win a state title in middle-school cross-country.

“Jumping the fence” is a phrase used to describe an Amish person, often a teenager, leaving the lifestyle to live in the modern world. Following the 1972 Supreme Court ruling in Wisconsin v. Yoder, Amish children are exempt from compulsory high school attendance.

Noah and three siblings were not raised Amish. Their Christian faith remains foundational, even though the parents attend one church and Noah another.

“He will give glory to God for the gift he’s been given,” his mother said.

No one in the family has graduated from college. Noah is committed to Notre Dame. His brother, Cole, 19, who ran 1,600 meters in 4:32 in high school, is a freshman at Rose-Hulman Institute.

Outsprinting the treadmill

Determination and grit – and talent – aren’t solely responsible for Noah Bontrager’s rise. Although his father and Jones are eager for him to join a sophisticated regimen at Notre Dame, it would be hard to identify better high school coaching.

No wonder Bontrager said he trusts in the training.

He runs perhaps 55 miles a week in the fall, 45 in the spring. He doesn’t do junk miles – i.e. slow runs for volume. Weight training is reflected in the pecs on his 5-8, 130-pound frame.

One workout is two sets of three-mile tempo runs at a 5:05-mile pace, with two minutes of rest between sets. For context, that is fast enough to be all-state in cross-country once, then twice, all in less than 33 minutes.

He did such a workout on a treadmill on a recent rainy day, then finished with 300-meter sprints. The machine maxes out at 16 mph. He was outsprinting the treadmill.

“His workouts are unreal,” Jones said. “Whatever I throw at him, he just does.”

Similarly unreal has been Bontrager’s assault on records:

>> March 28, Fall Creek Pavilion. He set a small-school meet record of 9:08.35 in the 3,200 at the Hoosier State Relays, running the last 800 in 1:59.33. Eighty minutes later, he ran a 1:50.88 anchor to bring Westview from ninth to fourth in the 4×800 relay.

Remember his devotion to band? He played drums until the third quarter of Westview’s 2A basketball title game against Parke Heritage at Bankers Life Fieldhouse that day, then hustled to the track.

>> April 17, Franklin Central. He set a Flashes Showcase record of 4:02.48, winning by six seconds. It was fastest mile ever run by a high schooler on Indiana soil.

>> April 24, Carmel. He ran the 3,200 in 8:42.18, just a tenth off the state record, closing in 57.89 – or eight seconds faster than Seitz’s last lap.

Bontrager could repeat his double win in the June 5 state meet at North Central. But he might skip the 1,600, focusing on a fast time in the 3,200. (Fastest in the nation is 8:31.80 by Spencer.)

Beyond that, there is the 3,000 in the under-20 nationals June 18-19 at Eugene, Ore. That selects a team for the U20 World Championships, set for Aug. 5-9, also at Eugene.

“That’s the goal,” Bontrager said.

He once thought he was no sprinter, but that was dispelled when he ran 400 meters in 49.78 two days after the Hoosier State Relays.

International racing requires closing speed. He has that now. He already had the worth ethic.

That’s a way of life around here.

Contact David Woods at dwoods1411@gmail.com.