The Four Minute Mile

I have just finished The Perfect Mile by Neal Bascomb. Bascomb is an American author with no seeming link to track but he sure understands this story well. He weaves a great story about the attempts in the late forties and early fifties to break the four minute mile barrier. (The photos are of Roger Bannister, Wes Santee and John Landy who each have a part in the story).

By now there have been more than 1000 sub-four minute miles but in 1954, and slightly before there were three most likely runners to dip under a minute a quarter - Wes Santee who ran for Kansas, Roger Bannister a medical student from England and John Landy a student from Australia. Bascomb has a wonderful skill in interposing the three stories. All three, despite what the AAU eventually said about Santee, were true amateurs. The story goes back a long way. In 1934, American runner Glen Cunningham ran a 4:06 - so it took 20 years to shave off those final six seconds.

Each of the three had different challenges. Santee came from a very tough background. He left his home right before coming to the University of Kansas and got his education fundamentally because of his skill on the track. In the 1952 Olympics, in a series of bizarre rulings the committee that controlled spots on the team prohibited Santee from qualifying in both the mile and the 5000 meters. They seem to have made the ruling up for an inexplicable reason. Santee eventually ran a 4:00.5 but could never break the barrier. The AAU also seems to have had a grudge against Santee. They barred him from amateur competition right before the 1956 olympics because of appearance fees, even though many of those fees came from AAU officials who wanted to get Santee to appear in their meets to build the gate.

Landy, fell under the influence of a number of track stars including the legendary Percy Cerutti. He seems to have gotten inspiration and advice from both Emil Zatopek and Paavo Nurmi. He took Cerutti's intense training theories and added to them. He successfully wiped out Bannister's first four minute mile about six weeks after Bannister broke the barrier. But then in an ironic twist when Bannister and Landy were matched up in the Empire games in Vancouver in August (in something billed as the Miracle Mile), Landy cut his foot badly and ran the race with four stitches in his foot, after stepping on a flashbulb. Bannister out kicked him and won the race - but it was the first time that two runners broke four minutes.

Bannister was the most interesting of the three. When he was making his attempt he was also a medical student. So his time for training was restricted. It was said that he would use his lunch hour to go out and do ten interval quarters 400s (at a 60 second pace) and still have 14 minutes to eat his lunch.

Each of the three competitors had a lousy time in the Helsinki Olympics and each went on to have successful careers after they retired from competitive running. The sports bureaucrats don't come off well in this book. They should not. It is shameful what the AAU did to Santee.

The current record for the mile is 3:43 - meaning that in the last 54 years the record has been reduced by 16 seconds. It took about the same time to go from 4:16 to below four minutes (a runner in 1913 ran a 4:13).

Bascomb has a great skill in building the excitement of the races he writes about but also in explaining how these three very different people attempted to conquer the four minute standard. You get a good understanding of the characteristics of these three but you also get a good understanding of how the attempts to break this "barrier" influence issues in society that a greater than simply sports. This is a good book, regardless of whether you care about how tough it is to run the distance.