His early training there was one workout a week and a seven-and-a-half-mile cross-country race. When he first showed up at Oxford in 1946, he had never run on a track or worn spiked running shoes. He knew that his parents could not afford tuition at an elite university, so he studied very hard and won a scholarship to Oxford University. At the age of 16, he decided to become a runner. He liked to run everywhere instead of walking, and at ages 12, 13, and 14, he won his school’s cross-country runs without any formal training. Meanwhile I trained with and ran slow intervals with Lou Castagnola who finished fourth in the 1967 Boston Marathon in 2:17:17.īannister was born in Harrow, England, into a working-class family. He also won the 1955 AAU marathon and finished third in the Boston Marathon. Olympic marathon team and finishing as the top American in the Olympic marathon. Costes surprised everyone by making the 1956 U.S. The Harvard track team didn’t pay much attention to this new training method, and ran their intervals much slower. I used to watch Costes killing himself to finish behind Barthel while running his intervals as fast as he could possibly run. Nick Costes was a previously-mediocre local runner who had never won major races or competed at a high level. Costes joined Barthel for interval workouts twice a week. They would run two quarter mile repeats each in 55 seconds, a half mile in under two minutes, and three quarter mile in 3:10 and then go home. In 1954, Barthel came to Harvard and convinced only one other runner, marathon runner Nick Costes, to base his training on short workouts of very fast intervals. He started a training program similar to that used by Josey Barthel, of running very fast intervals two days a week and slower recovery workouts on the other five days. In that race, Bannister set the British record of 3:46.3 (the same pace as a 4:01.7 mile).Īfter his “failure” at the 1952 Olympics, Bannister set out to become the first man to run a mile in less than four minutes, a feat many people at that time believed to be impossible. The first seven runners all broke the previous Olympic record. The surprise winner was the relatively unknown Josey Barthel of Luxembourg, in 3:45.1, who put on an incredible sprint at the end. On January 27, 2023, eight University of Washington runners ran under four minutes in the same race and on February 11, 2023, on the Boston University track, 52 runners ran sub-4-minute miles at the same track meet.īannister was one of the favorites to win the 1952 Olympic 1500 meter race (mile equivalent), but he finished in a disappointing fourth place. The training method that allowed him to become the first man to run under four minutes for the mile is now used by most mile racers, and now more than 2000 runners have run sub-four-minute miles. Bannister averaged 28 miles per week, compared to more than 60 miles per week by most other runners at that time. Other runners at that time were training twice a day for as many as three hours a day. Because he was a full-time medical student who had a heavy academic schedule, he was able to train for only a single 30-minute workout each day. This time is very fast when you consider that he raced in track shoes that were heavy and stiff, with spikes that were heavier than the total weight of modern track shoes, and he ran on very slow cinder tracks instead of the super-fast artificial tracks of today. In 1954, at age 25, Roger Bannister ran the mile in 3:59.4 to become the first human to run a mile in less than four minutes.
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