The speed required to run a four-minute mile is dizzying – a sprint of at least 24.2 kilometres an hour over the mile. Bannister's dash into history as "one of the great runs of all time." The feat still awes those who came later.īriton Sebastian Coe, who set the mile record three times – his best was 3:47.33 in 1981 – has described Mr. Bannister ran in leather shoes with heavy spikes, on a cinder track that would seem like quicksand to athletes these days. Bannister again eclipsed the four-minute barrier in a fabled race against Australian John Landy, dubbed the Miracle Mile.īy the standards of a competitive recreational runner today, it was a tiny amount of training. It was the much the same three months later, in the summer in Vancouver, when Mr. Bannister's feat was on front pages worldwide. If I faltered, there would be no arms to hold me and the world would be a cold, forbidding place because I had been so close." He would later write, "the arms of the world were waiting to receive me. The final strides had felt never-ending and he fell into the arms of officials afterward, exhausted. Bannister stretched the limits of human endeavour by running the mile in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds. The day was inclement but through the afternoon the rains and winds eased. Bannister worked a morning shift at a hospital in London and took a train to Oxford. Bannister said in an interview with The Globe and Mail in 2014, six decades after his record run. "I knew that I had sub-four minutes inside me, somewhere," Mr.
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