The Four Minute Mile.
Sir Roger Gilbert Bannister is the first human to run the mile under 4 minutes time.
Up until he did it in 1954, most people thought the four-minute mark was impossible to break.
They thought the human body couldn’t physically go that fast.
No one could run a mile in less than four minutes.
It was impossible.
Yet Roger Bannister was crazy enough to give it a try.
So On 6 may, 1954 Bannister spent the morning at the hospital wards. He was studying medicine there. During the lunch break of his medical classes he ran the first “Sub-4 minute Mile” in the history of mankind. This was at the Oxford track.
” It was a new English Native, British National, All-Comers, European, British Empire and World Record. The time was three…” The cheers of the crowd drowned out the exact time as per the record.
It was 3 minutes 59.4 seconds.
And once Bannister ran that mile in under four minutes, suddenly everyone was able to do it.
For a line of dominoes to fall, one has to fall first, which then leads the others to follow the same.
But there are too few people in the world willing to be that first domino, too few people willing to take that fall.
So the Roger Bannister message is-
“Once you stop believing something is impossible, it becomes possible for all.”
( Bannister went on to become a distinguished neurologist.
He is the co-editor of the famous “Brain and Bannister’s clinical neurology” : Oxford University Press.
He ultimately published more than 80 papers on the autonomic nervous system, cardiovascular physiology.
He had also edited the “A Textbook of Clinical Disorders of the Autonomic Nervous System”. )
But that’s another story.
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