Suddenly, people outside the collegiate running scene started talking about the beer mile.

If you look at the submission numbers from Beermile.com, almost 60,000 individual entries have been logged since 1996. Half of those are from the last four years, with nearly 10,000 attempts in 2014 alone. Times have come in from eight Canadian provinces and all 50 states, as well as places like New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden, and even a cruise ship off the coast of Belize.

With its rising popularity, a former two-time 5,000-meter NCAA Champion named James “The Beast” Nielsen went and broke the former men’s record in April, finishing in 4:57.1. It was only a matter of time until the women’s record would be contested. All it took to inspire that attempt was the announcement of the inaugural Beer-Mile World Championships, to be held in Austin on this Wednesday, December 3, and hosted by Flotrack, a popular website that covers track and field.

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Chris Kimbrough was an unlikely candidate to pursue the beer-mile record. Her six children notwithstanding, she didn’t run in high school or college. It wasn’t until her mid-30s that she got into running, but it didn’t take her long to discover she had some talent. She qualified for the 2008 U.S. Olympic Trials in the marathon and between subsequent pregnancies, collected several national titles in the masters division in 10K and 8K events. “I really loved running right away,” she told me. “Having kids and staying home, it gave me something outside of being a parent to set goals for and have time to myself.”

Having watched Kimbrough compete for years, Jack Murray, owner of the event company organizing the beer-mile world championship event, encouraged her to do a trial run and see if she could score a time fast enough to qualify for the elite field. “She’s just built for distance running and is super competitive,” he said. “I knew she was fast and I knew she liked beer; what I wasn’t sure of is if she could chug beer.”

Kimbrough herself was equally uncertain of her aptitude for chugging, but she figured, why not try? Hoping to avoid advertising that she was considering entering the event, she set out to log an attempt on November 2 at the local middle-school track near her home with only her husband to man the stopwatch and a couple friends to videotape for proof.

Watching the video, one can’t help but marvel at Kimbrough loping effortlessly around the oval that first lap, apparently unfazed by the carbonated ale sloshing around her gut. It takes her 18 seconds to down the second beer before taking off for her next lap. She comes through the half-mile mark in 3:07, well ahead of the women’s world-record pace of 6:42.

She chugs the third beer in 17 seconds before springing into her third lap. By the time she wheels around for her fourth and final beer and lap, her husband reads from the watch, “4:46, 4:47” as Kimbrough pops open her last beer.