In five months, he brought down the average time he could run these intervals from sixty-three seconds to fifty-nine.īannister was racing more than just the clock: two other runners, Wes Santee, an American, and John Landy, Australian, were nearing the four-minute mile. During lunch breaks, he would run ten of them, stopwatch in hand, punctuated by two-minute breaks. So he focussed on his quarter-mile splits. He studied running’s physiological demands, measured his own oxygen-consumption levels, and produced papers with titles like “The Carbon Dioxide Stimulus to Breathing in Severe Exercise.” Bannister discovered that running consistent lap times demanded less oxygen than varying the pace. He seemed young.īannister explained that his failure to win medal in the fifteen hundred metres at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics ignited his two-year quest to break the four-minute mark-a plotline that the producers of “Downton Abbey” recently announced they plan to adapt for a BBC miniseries.Ī medical student at Oxford, Bannister took a cerebral approach to the four-minute barrier. Bannister’s competitive spirit was flickering, and the crowd laughed. The current record is just over three minutes and forty-three seconds, though during the talk Bannister flung his long hands up and insisted that runners have only shaved thirteen seconds off his time (three minutes fifty-nine and four-tenths seconds), since the modern surface is worth four seconds in comparison with the cinder track that he had run on. He took his seat near an old pipe organ, then unstrapped a black dress watch and placed the timepiece on a table, its face turned away from his.įewer people have run a sub-four-minute mile than have climbed Mt. ![]() ![]() (Days later, he would reveal to BBC Radio Oxford that he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2011.) Addressing the small crowd, he said it was a great irony that, as a clinical neurologist, he was having difficulty walking. Bannister entered from the rear of the church, leaning on crutches with forearm supports that bunched his black suit sleeves.
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