Roger Bannister Broke the Four-Minute Mile Between Lectures
Bannister was a medical student when he ran the mile in 3:59.4. He trained at lunch on hospital wards and did no weights.
On May 6, 1954, at Iffley Road Track in Oxford, Roger Bannister ran the mile in 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds. He had two pacers — Chris Brasher for the first two laps, Chris Chataway for the third — and a windy spring afternoon that he'd nearly called the attempt off over.
Bannister was 25 and a medical student at St. Mary's Hospital. He trained for about 30 minutes a day, usually at lunchtime, around his clinical work. He had no coach, no nutritionist, no sports science team. His diet was English postwar normal. His training logs, published later, show runs in work shoes and the occasional lunch of a jacket potato.
The four-minute mile had stood as an apparent physiological barrier for decades. Gunder Hägg of Sweden set a world record of 4:01.4 in 1945 and held it for nine years. Physiologists debated in print whether the human body could run the distance any faster. Bannister shaved 1.6 seconds off and kept going.
What followed was stranger. Exactly 46 days after Oxford, Australian John Landy ran 3:57.9 in Finland. Within three years, at least a dozen others had broken four minutes. The barrier had been, at least partly, a belief.
Bannister retired from competitive running a few months later, qualified as a neurologist, and spent forty years publishing research on autonomic function. The mile was, in his own retelling, a weekend hobby that got away from him.
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