Roger Bannister Broke the Four-Minute Mile in His Lunch Break

Roger Bannister was a 25-year-old neurology trainee at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, when he ran the first sub-four-minute mile. The race was on May 6, 1954, a Thursday, at the Iffley Road track in Oxford. The wind was 25 mph, gusting; the cinder lane was damp. Bannister's training had been famously sparse — he ran on his lunch breaks, fitting interval work between hospital shifts. He almost called the attempt off in the morning. Then the wind dropped just before 6 p.m. and he changed his mind in the dressing room.

The pacing was carefully arranged. Chris Brasher took the front for the first two laps, hitting 1:58 at the half. Chris Chataway took over for the third, finishing the lap at 3:00.4. Bannister ran the last lap alone in 58.9 seconds. He crossed the line and collapsed into the arms of his coach Franz Stampfl. The announcer, Norris McWhirter — later a Guinness Book of Records co-founder — drew out the result: 'Time: three minutes, fifty-nine point four seconds.' The crowd of about 3,000 erupted before he finished the rest of the announcement.

The record did not last long. On June 21, 1954, the Australian John Landy ran 3:57.9 in Turku, Finland. Bannister and Landy met at the Empire Games in Vancouver that August, an encounter known as the Miracle Mile, and Bannister won by a stride. He retired from competition four months later to pursue medicine full time.

A four-minute mile had been considered a physiological barrier for decades. Physicians had argued that the human body could not sustain that pace and survive it. Within three years of Bannister's run, sixteen other athletes had broken four minutes.