5

The man who has made the mile record is W. G. George ...His time was 4 minutes 12.75 seconds and the probability is that this record will never be beaten.

—HARRY ANDREWS, 1903

To the farthest limit he searches out...

—JOB 28:3

BEFORE STOPWATCHES, cinder tracks, and perfect records, man ran for the purest of reasons: to survive. The saying goes that "every morning in Africa, an antelope wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion, or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest antelope, or it will starve. It doesn't matter whether you're a lion or an antelope—when the sun comes up, you'd better be running." There are few instincts more natural than the body in full motion as it races across a field or through the trees. From the beginning, we were all made to run. In days past, when "survival of the fittest" meant exactly this, the only measure of the race was whether the hunted reached safety before being overtaken. Seconds and tenths of seconds had no meaning.

Sport evolved from this competition to survive. In ancient Egypt newly chosen kings went on a ceremonial run, as historian Edward Sears wrote, that "symbolized laying claim to his domain and proved that he was fit enough for the demands of his position." Thirty years after the king's coronation, and every three years thereafter, he was challenged to run the same long distance he had run as a young man. If he failed, he lost his power to rule. Other early societies proved status by skills such as hitting targets with a bow and arrow, lifting heavy rocks, or jumping across streams, but the ability to run faster and farther than others remained a dominant standard.

It is fitting that the first event in civilization's earliest and greatest celebration of sport, the Olympic Games in 776 B.C., was a footrace. A Greek citizen named Coroebus sprinted two hundred yards across a meadow alongside the river Alpheus and was crowned winner with a garland made from the leaves and twigs of an olive tree. Sporting ability was integral to Greek life, and the Greeks were the first to promote what would later be phrased mens sana in corpore sano—a sound mind in a sound body.

Ancient Olympic champions were treated like gods—worthy of worship and great odes. The athletes ran their races naked and barefoot, and as the years passed they instituted ten-month training regimes and specialized in certain distances. Longer races involved running from one end of the stadium to the other and back, the distances varying from stadium to stadium. Success was recorded by how many victories an athlete had claimed over his fellows, not by their times (crudely measured in those days by sundial or water clock). The Romans favored gladiator contests over athletics, but they made two important contributions to the story of the four-minute mile: first, they were devoted to statistics and detailed the results of their sporting heroes (namely chariot racers); second, they were the first to come up with the distance of the mile. Roman soldiers calculated their long marches in mille passus (mille: one thousand; passus: a two-step stride). Given that each stride was roughly two feet, five inches—shorter than average because the soldiers carried over fifty pounds of provisions and weapons—the earliest mile translated into roughly 1,611 yards.

In sixteenth-century England, footmen, who traveled long distances by the sides of heavy coaches, steering their masters away from dangerous spots in the road, were the first to race—often at the bidding of their masters. They used the mileposts, first installed by the ruling Romans, as starting and finishing lines. This tradition developed throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into "freak runs," part of village festivals, where the competitors ran on stilts or carrying a load of fish. Endurance contests, whether walking or running, were also popular.

By the nineteenth century "pedestrians," as the English runners were known, were running on the roads for cash. Events were .often organized by local pubs in order to draw a crowd. Since the mile race was a favorite, it paid to specialize in that distance. The idea of competing for a mile record instead of simply against one's opponent in a particular race evolved gradually from the standardization of the mile at 1,760 yards, advances in timekeeping, and an early industrial society's passion for quantifying everything in sight. It so happened that a quarter-mile grass track fit nicely around a cricket ground or football field, and it was much safer racing there than on increasingly busy roads. Technology, progress, and coincidence had all played a part. Now all the mile race needed was a few fast souls.

Running a mile in less than five minutes was considered the breaking point until Scottish landowner Captain Robert Barclay came along. Famous for his cheerful disposition, predilection for lifting heavy objects, and walking a thousand miles in a thousand hours, Barclay won five hundred guineas by posting a 4:50 mile in 1804. Then, in 1825, James Metcalf, "a tailor by trade, but a pedestrian by profession," who trained by chasing hounds, beat Barclay's time by a margin of twenty seconds. Over the next sixty years various milers chipped away at the record, second by painful second, the best runners earning championship belts for their efforts. Over time the stakes wagered rose into the thousands of pounds.

For most of the nineteenth century the "gentleman amateur" was absent from this scene. This British public school ideal, favored by the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, was indeed a noble thought, but the runners who subscribed to its strict rules were no match for the best of the professionals. That was, until chemistry apprentice Walter George began training seriously and reduced his mile time to 4:18.8 in 1884. Since this was two seconds shy of the record held for the previous eight years by the professional William Cummings, a showdown between the two was inevitable.

To test himself against Cummings, George was forced to forfeit his amateur status, despite having offered his earnings from the races to a hospital charity. After a series of preliminary races in which they both had a share of the victories, Cummings and George faced off for the "Mile of the Century" on August 23, 1886. Twenty-five thousand spectators crowded around a bicycle track to watch George run so fast that he left Cummings unconscious behind him on the last lap. His record of 4:12.8 lasted three decades and set the stage for Paavo Nurmi to introduce the four-minute mile to the world, establishing an irresistible challenge to athletes that would guarantee their place in history.

It was impossible to know who first uttered the challenge of running the mile in less than four minutes. Reports date back to 1770 of an English runner who made the distance from Charter House Wall to Shoreditch Church in the City of London in this time, but even nineteenth-century historians cast a skeptical eye on the account. In 1915, when American Norman Taber broke George's record by less than two-tenths of a second, the track and field world was not set on fire. It was too slim a difference to warrant much more than a passing remark in the record books. Then, on August 23, 1923, Paavo Nurmi, a twenty-six-year-old farm engineer from Turku, Finland, was drawn into a faster first lap than he would have liked by Swedish miler Edvin Wide. Nurmi, who always ran with a large stopwatch in his hand and preferred an even-paced race, kept up with Wide's fast start. By the third lap Wide faded and Nurmi continued the pace. He broke Taber's record by two seconds with a 4:10.4. It was a giant step forward given how long it had taken Taber to reduce Walter George's mark by just a fraction of a second. Suddenly the mile record was in play again, and when Nurmi won gold medals at the 1924 Paris Olympics in the 1,500 and 5,000 meters in the space of forty-two minutes, he looked capable of anything. Joseph Binks, a noted journalist and former British miler, suggested to Nurmi that the mile barrier was within grasp. Nurmi replied, "No, four minutes four seconds, maybe!" Self-deprecation or not, the Finnish miler had put the possibility of a four-minute mile on the table.

Inspired by Nurmi, a new wave of talented milers appeared in the 1930s, and their races packed stadiums around the world. Races at Madison Square Garden rivaled modern-day prizefights. The air was dense with smoke, the crowds rowdy and devoted to their favorite runners, and the stands so close to the track that fans felt the rush of air when the field surged past. The first miler to run four minutes and single digits was Frenchman Jules Ladoumegue. An orphan who first competed in village-to-village races, Ladoumegue competed on pure emotion. Before races he was so agitated that he had to be pulled to the starting line. If a door closed suddenly behind him, he nearly jumped out of his skin. Once he was running, though, he loved the heat of battle and became a national treasure for his efforts. On October 4,1931, he took advantage of a windless, sunny Parisian afternoon and the pacemaking of half-miler Rene Morel to reduce the mile record to 4:09.2.

Jack Lovelock, the New Zealand-born and British-adopted miler with a compact frame and a keen idea of his abilities and limitations, was next to lower the record. In his youth Lovelock had developed his smooth running style by striding alongside a stone wall while a friend on the opposite side chastised him when he saw Lovelock's head moving up or down. On July 15,1933, in Princeton, New Jersey, he ran a 4:07.6 while representing Oxford University against the Americans. After the race the New York Herald Tribune praised his effort: "It was all so easily accomplished, with so little outward evidence of stress and strain, as to make a four-minute mile seem just around the corner." Lovelock never reduced this time, but his Olympic gold medal in the 1,500 meter, his epic races against Glenn Cunningham and Sydney Wooderson, and his insight about training and tactics added to his legacy.

With a time of 4:06.8, Lovelock's rival, the American Glenn Cunningham, seized the mile record only eleven months after the New Zealander had claimed it. The "Kansas Powerhouse" was a legend long before he ran the fastest mile in the world. At seven years of age he and his brother tried to stoke the fire in their small schoolhouse's stove by dousing the coals with kerosene. His brother died as a result of the accident, and Glenn's legs were burned almost beyond repair. During recovery he found walking more painful than running, and an athlete was born. Cunningham learned to work around his disability, and at his first intervarsity mile at the University of Kansas he exploded on the last lap to win the field. His running inspired a generation of Kansas farm boys and gave Americans the hope that the four-minute mile could be theirs.

Sydney Wooderson brought the mile record back to England in 1937. Walter George, now seventy-nine years old, was there to see it. Wooderson, at five feet six inches and 126 pounds, was an atypical miler. When he stepped onto the track in his thick glasses and with the meek demeanor of a solicitor's clerk, he looked the underdog. Once he set off running, however, he was a force of indomitable energy. He dealt with his failure at the 1936 Olympics by staging an attempt to beat Cunningham's mile time. On August 28, 1937, at Motspur Park, he arranged for pacemakers from his athletic club to lead him around the first three laps. Using his famed kick, he handled the last lap alone and registered a time of4:06.4.

Slowly, by investing more and more time and energy in training, milers approached the goal of four laps of the track in four minutes. Six and a half seconds was a long time off, and the small reductions in the record made by the best runners were just that—small reductions. The possibility of seeing "the other side" of four minutes was looking increasingly uncertain.

When Swedish runners Gundar Haegg and Arne Andersson finished their epic battles at the end of World War II, the four-minute mile appeared unattainable. Of the two, Haegg had a more natural, flowing stride, but Andersson trained harder. A year apart in age, they reached their peak at the same time. Separately, they were the finest milers, in fitness and form, possibly to have ever graced the track; racing against each other, they looked to be the best who ever would. Over the course of three and a half years Haegg and Andersson passed the mile record back and forth to each other.

DATE	RUNNER	PLACE	TIME
July 1,1942	Haegg	Gothenburg, Sweden	4:06.2
July 10,1942	Andersson	Stockholm, Sweden	4:06.2
September 4,1942	Haegg	Stockholm, Sweden	4:04.6
July 1,1943	Andersson	Gothenburg, Sweden	4:02.6
July 18,1944	Andersson	Malmo, Sweden	4:01.6
July 17,1945	Haegg	Malmo, Sweden	4:01.4

Their duels inspired great performances, yet the barrier still stood untouched. Journalists and statisticians tried to convince the athletics world that the barrier would inevitably be scaled. They calculated that the average world-class miler could sustain a speed of 7.33 yards per second (or 15 miles per hour). This meant that the difference between Haegg's best time and the four-minute mile was a short twelve yards—less than 1 percent of the race's total distance. That was nothing, they maintained. But others disagreed, and quite publicly. Coach Brutus Hamilton, one of the most revered figures in track and field, published "The Ultimate of Human Effort," listing the perfect records beyond which man could never go for the javelin, the shot put, the 100 meter, the 400 meter, the mile, the 5,000 meter, and the 10,000 meter. Hamilton backed up his analysis with detailed statistics, but many would have considered his word final even if he had jotted these "perfect records" down on a cocktail napkin. To the question, can the mile be run in four minutes flat? Hamilton replied, not quite. The fastest time that would ever be possible, he stated, was 4:01.6. Although Hamilton, who wrote the article in 1935, had been disproved by two-tenths of a second, he still found the idea of anyone running faster difficult to imagine.

Many wanted the bogey to go away, including the 1912 Olympic 1,500-meter champion, Colonel Strode Jackson, who wrote at the height of the Haegg-Andersson struggle: "When we stop this nonsense of running like a metronome and with the watch always in mind, we will get back to real racing, the triumph of one runner over another. That is what racing was meant to be and what it will be when we get the four-minute myth out of the way."

Myth or not, twelve yards or many more, the barrier remained, and with each passing year, as runners attempted to break through its walls and failed, the mile barrier grew in fame. By 1952, as Frank Deford, one of the finest writers to report on the challenge, described, "The Poles had been reached, the mouth of the Nile found, the deepest oceans marked, and the wildest jungles trekked but the distance of the ground that measured a mile continued to resist all efforts to traverse it, on foot, in less than four minutes."

The 1952 Olympic flame had barely been snuffed out in the Helsinki stadium when the editorials and reviews of the games began spinning off the presses. Two points were indisputable: the Finns had proved to be fine hosts of the competition, and more records were broken in these games than in any other Olympics in history. Less than forty-eight hours after the closing ceremonies in Helsinki, another competition was held, this time in London's White City Stadium, pitting a British Empire team against the United States. The stadium had staged an Olympic Games itself in 1908 and was infamous for setting the official marathon distance at 26 miles, 385 yards—instead of simply 26 miles—so that the race would finish in front of Queen Alexandra's royal box. The stadium was now used for greyhound racing and an assortment of other events, including track and field. The Americans beat the British Empire team, as they had beaten the world a few short days before.

In the 4 x 1 mile relays, where four runners from each team ran a mile, Roger Bannister earned the Empire team an early lead. But the second member of his team lost this advantage. Running third leg for the Americans, Wes Santee looked like he would stretch a lead for his team too great to overcome, but John Landy, running in the same leg for the Empire team, managed to close on Santee in the final 440. The anchors for each team traded leads, but in the end the Americans won. It was the first time Bannister, Santee, and Landy had competed in the same race. None of the three would remember much of the other two from that race, retaining neither a memory of a conversation nor an impression of one another's abilities. Yet as these three milers went their separate ways—Bannister back to life at St. Mary's Hospital a short distance by Underground, and Landy and Santee on long flights to their respective countries—they each charted a course in the days ahead that would bring them back together again. It would be a struggle that they and tens of millions would never forget.

Santee flew back with an American team ripe from victory. Although the Soviets had fought well in their events, and for a few days had looked like they might actually win the most medals, they couldn't match the strength of the U.S. track and field team, which won fourteen gold medals and thirteen silver and bronze. Of his teammates, Santee was in the minority of those who did not medal. Watching the 1,500-meter final, knowing he had beaten the second-place finisher Bob McMillen "every time we had stepped on a track," left him feeling empty and helpless as a puppet. He was certain he could have won the race if he had been given the chance the amateur officials had stolen from him in Los Angeles.

Before heading back to the University of Kansas, Santee went to visit his parents in Ashland for the first time since he had ridden away on that unnamed horse. If he was waiting for his father to say how proud he was of his son, Wes left empty-handed. Either his father simply didn't understand what his son had accomplished through his running, or the man just couldn't express any feeling other than bitterness. Either way, his silence stung. Over the past two years Wes had tried to convince his mother to leave his father, but she told Wes that since he had left, his father had mended his "negative ways and stopped being so mean." Regardless, Wes wanted nothing to do with the man.

Back in Lawrence, Santee sat down with Coach Easton, who expressed his pride where Wes's father had not. Easton suggested that Santee could learn a great deal from his Olympic experience, but Santee was less philosophical. It was not in his nature to suffer defeat. In his high school senior year he had lost the mile race in the state finals to Bill Tidwell. Although expected to win, particularly since he had won his sophomore and junior years, Santee refused to be crestfallen. His close friend Don Humphreys was surprised at his indifference. "I couldn't understand how you could be up after losing the mile by a stride or two. I know Tidwell was a good distance runner, but it never occurred to me that he could beat you." Santee explained in a matter-of-fact tone, "Oh, Tidwell, he's not a miler." It took a while for Humphreys to understand this response. Then he thought of a football player who gets knocked down in a game and gets right back up and sets out to return the favor. Santee had that killer instinct. As Humphreys later said, "Guys like that never get whipped in their minds. Even when they get beat, they're not beat."

In Helsinki, Santee felt, he had learned how to fend for himself and compete against the best. He wanted to prove what a big mistake it had been to prevent him from running in the 1,500 meter, and more important, he wanted to show how good he really was. He set his sights on a goal that had always been on the horizon for him: the four-minute mile. In the list of high school prophecies published when he graduated was the following: "Wesley Santee has recently broke the world mile record in a time of 3 min., 58.3 sec. And it should stand for many years to come." Since his win at the Drake University Relays the previous spring, the prediction by sportswriters that he was a sure bet for the world mile record had brought the goal closer in sight. His blistering three-quarter-mile run in New York before leaving for the Olympics made him realize just how close he was. Only days after returning to campus, Santee marched into the office of the University of Kansas newspaper. He had an announcement to make: Wes Santee was going to be the first to run the four-minute mile. For years he had known he was capable. Now his intention was a matter of public record.

John Landy had a different announcement to make when he landed in Melbourne, but one equally telling. Directly after the British Empire versus the United States match, he boarded a flight to Australia. He had declined to join Macmillan and Perry, who, accompanied by Cerutty, were running in a series of competitions in Scandinavia. Landy needed to get back to his agricultural science studies, which had fallen by the wayside as he strove to make the Olympic team. He also wanted to start training again.

Landy wanted to show that his trip to Helsinki had been worth the time and money it had taken to get him there. This desire to redress his failure to qualify in either of his events, a failure that had been met with what he believed was unwarranted criticism, was also woven into his excitement about the prospect of becoming a faster and stronger runner. He felt he had been given the lessons—namely, in improving his stride and his training methods—to reach this new level. Zatopek and other European middle-distance runners had shown him how.

For his stride, he would be helped by a pair of European track shoes he had bought. Landy wanted nothing more to do with the kangaroo-hide track shoes made in Melbourne. They were designed primarily for sprinting on grass tracks. Therefore, the spikes were built up in the front, so much so that it was awkward to lower the heel of the foot to the ground. They required him to run on his toes. In Helsinki Landy noticed that the European middle-distancers, running in spikes with flat soles and a heel, had a smoother, more relaxed stride. Shoes alone, however, would not change his running style: he would have to practice the arm and leg action of the Europeans until it became habit.

But as Zatopek had shown, style was not what separated the Czech from every other distance runner in the world. It was his demanding training, and Landy felt that if achieving fast mile times was mostly a question of working hard, he was willing to make the sacrifice. On the flight back to Australia Landy spent many hours rehashing in his notebook the type of training sessions that Zatopek had discussed with him and other runners. Landy concocted a plan to achieve for himself the kind of fitness that Zatopek revealed in Helsinki. By doing so, he hoped to beat Don Macmillan's national record in the mile—4:08.9—and win the Australian Championships in early 1953.

When Landy arrived at Melbourne's airport, journalists herded around the athletes, asking for their comments on the Olympics and on the future. Some complained of having traveled too far with too little rest. Others denied they were ready to retire. Many defended their achievements or lack thereof. Landy spoke of Emil Zatopek. He explained how the Czech had proven his superiority, earning three gold medals. "He thoroughly deserved his success because he is the hardest trained athlete in the world," Landy said. It was obvious to those who knew the young Australian miler that he meant to claim this distinction for himself. Though his goals had nothing yet to do with a four-minute barrier, unwittingly they had set him on its path, and he would soon show that nothing was safe from his determination.

Of the three runners, Bannister suffered the worst for not having lived up to expectations. Save for a horse named Foxhunter, whose winning jump came eight minutes before the closing ceremonies began, the British would have managed to go the whole games without a single gold medal. For track and field enthusiasts, this single medal provided little solace. They wanted revenge. The press provided an outlet for their anger. "Hang out the crepe and lower the flag to half mast," the Sunday Express bellowed. "Right now I feel like suing British athletes for breach of promise," the People commented. Editorials questioned whether amateurism was dead. Some thought the sooner the British realized this was true, the sooner they would have a fighting chance against the Americans and Soviets. Others defended the ideal but belittled the athletes for a lack of commitment to excellence. Journalist Hyton Cleaver wrote, "Britain was failing to win, not because she was paying the price of amateurism but because she had lost the art of being spectacular."

Bannister was a lightning rod for most of this criticism, and the same journalists who first condemned, then praised, his independent training methods had shifted back again. Their vitriol tormented him. Headlines read, "Bannister Fails!" The Daily Mirror hurt the worst:

Roger Bannister could have won the 1,500 meters if the AAA had persuaded him to compete regularly in Britain. Instead, they ignored the advice of their chief coach, Mr. Geoffrey Dyson, and allowed Bannister to have only one actual race in a year before going to Helsinki.

He ran like a "green" three-year-old thoroughbred having its first race in a classic—running all over the track, on the inside, then the outside, accelerating and slowing up before making his final effort, to finish fourth. We heard wonderful stories in Helsinki that Bannister would win because he had done a world-shattering time in a secret trial before leaving. MAYBE HE DID. ANYONE CAN RUN QUICKLY PAST TREES!

Not only did Bannister have to read about how he let down his country, but he also had to suffer those who stopped him on the street, demanding to know what went wrong. This scrutiny was a difficult thing to bear at twenty-three years of age.

Throughout his life Bannister sensed that he had a "greater degree of self-determination" than others, but the Olympics seemed to rudely disprove this notion. He was human like everybody else. Ridiculed and defeated, he decided that only an ambition greater than an Olympic gold could absolve him of what had happened in Helsinki. He couldn't just walk away from running after such a defeat.

Days after returning from Helsinki, Bannister sent letters to miler Brian Hewson and to Chris Chataway, asking if they would push him in a four-minute mile attempt—not next year, as they might have expected, but now. He still planned on retiring before the start of his second year of medical school. The Motspur Park time trial showed he had the legs for a record attempt, and Bannister wanted to silence his critics with an achievement most thought insurmountable. Then they would know what kind of athlete he was. Even more than answering for his failure, Bannister wanted to capture the four-minute mile to show how one could achieve athletic greatness without the sacrifice of everything else in life. This was the ideal that the Greeks first promoted, that the British later advanced, and that the world was ready to discount. The four-minute mile wasn't an end in itself. Rather, it was a challenge Bannister wanted to embrace as a proof of his theorem of sport and life.

By the end of August 1952, with Bannister exhausted from competitive strain and Chataway and Hewson unable to help him because of other commitments, this challenge had to wait. Though Bannister knew the demands on him at St. Mary's would only increase, retirement from running was out. He had not yet lined up everything he needed for the effort, but he was confident that the moment would come. The four-minute mile had a long history and could wait a few more months to be broken.