Opinion The 3:59.4 Mile Mark

As if running the mile had only been a challenge, rendered irrelevant the day it was conquered.

On a blustery day in Oxford in May 1954, Roger Bannister, who died on Saturday, ran a mile with preparations which seems perfectly amateurish by contemporary standards, and yet he broke one of the most enduring psychological barrier of the human race. Since the mid-19th century, medical science had believed that the human frame could not bear the stress and when Bannister — ironically, a medical student — ran the Iffley Road track in 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds, the world applauded him as a man who had achieved the impossible.

From remote antiquity, when humanity conjured up Prometheus, it has yearned to believe that it can break free of its bonds. Bannister’s feat seemed to prove that humanity’s faith in itself was not misplaced. It could indeed do the impossible. His record lasted just six weeks, before John Landy of Australia shaved a second off it. But Bannister’s time of 3:59.4 remains one of the absolutes of history, a turning point in our perception of reality, and of humanity’s place in it. It is to athletics what pi is to mathematics, and Planck’s constant to quantum mechanics.

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Bannister almost did not run on the day he made history. There were high winds, and he had been working in a hospital in London. Besides, he had been training much less than an athlete should, despite bunking lectures to make time. After the historic run, he admitted that he had been expecting an American or an Australian to break the four-minute barrier before he could. Curiously, the same year, he hung up his spikes and turned to a career in neurology, in which his research on the autonomous nervous system and degenerative disorders was well-regarded. As if running the mile had only been a challenge, rendered irrelevant the day it was conquered.