The Perfect Mile:
Lost Lesson From First 4-minute Mile
[I’ve always loved the story of Roger Bannister
breaking the 4-minute mile barrier--Sports Illustrated named it the
twentieth century’s greatest sporting achievement. Psychological as well as
physical, it opened the floodgates for those who followed. Before Bannister,
coaches and athletes questioned whether the human body was capable of running
the mile under four minutes. They feared that the human body would be damaged at
that speed. As Steve Chandler wrote in 17 Lies That Are Holding You Back
& The Truth That Will Set You Free, after Bannister turned
his dream into reality, runners "expanded their minds and accomplished even
bigger things."
Now there’s a book
about the era and the athletes--and how it was done. My friend Dick Winett calls
it the perfect book about the perfect mile. His perceptive review highlights the
lost lesson that can make your training more efficient and productive. Learn how
to open the floodgates on your own performance.]
Book Review
By Richard A.
Winett, Ph.D.
Publisher and
Editor of Master Trainer
The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less Than Four Minutes
To Achieve It
By Neal Bascomb, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004
The Perfect
Mile is simply the most perfect book that I’ve ever read. Neal Bascomb is a terrific writer and here he weaves together
a great story about Roger Bannister from England, John Landy from Australia, and
Wes Santee from the United States in their pursuit more than 50 years ago of the
sub 4-minute mile. It is compelling
personalities, history, and details about training and racing all rolled into
one incredible read.
Fifty years ago was
the bare beginnings of almost instant world-wide communication about news and
sporting events and the advent of sports as lucrative, big time entertainment.
Bannister, Landy, and Santee were very much from the prior era where sport and
running was all about personal transcendence and not about money. As amateurs,
there simply was no money that they received for racing, even ‘under the
table’.
There are many
wonderful perspectives that you can take in reading this book and the one that I
relished the most was reading about Roger Bannister’s training. Bannister was
a medical student and had very minimal time to train plus he often worked 12-16
hours per day. By way of contrast, Landy and Santee and most runners then and
now were training hours per day. Bannister’s ideal was that athletics, even
for top athletes, should just be one part of a well-rounded, useful, and
productive life.
More than fifty
years ago, Bannister using his scientific background realized that the way to
properly train was to understand the stimulus responsible for improvements in
fitness and performance for specific events and then to fine-tune workouts to
produce some ‘overload’ but with minimal time required for recovery.
Bascomb used a quote from Bannister to explain his training approach:
‘Does it work?
Does it not? You learn by your mistakes. It’s so subtle. If you run so hard
that you can’t recover, you haven’t done any good. It’s stressing the
machinery to the point where if you had a graph and plotted performance against
stress, the line at first will proceed smoothly upwards, but there comes a point
when more stress becomes counterproductive and the line falls.’ (p. 105)
Using the simple
principles of stress and recovery, Bannister trained about 30 minutes most days
of the week. Before his focused pursuit of the 4-minute mile, many of his runs
in the country–side were long steady warm-ups to reach five or so minutes of
running at a high level of perceived exertion. The runs, however, weren’t
timed.
Once the entire
focus became the 4-minute mile, Bannister’s workouts almost exclusively were
interval workouts on the track. The goal was over several months to gradually
reduce the time for his 400-meter repeats with two or three minutes between
repeats. In 1954, he was greatly aided in these workouts by two friends and
great athletes (Brasher and Chataway) who trained with him almost every day.
A fascinating point
to consider is that as minimal and precise as Bannister’s training was
compared to training then and now, a better understanding of training principles
could have made Bannister’s training even more specific, briefer, and less
frequent. For example, both to increase aerobic capacity and performance, a long
interval between repeats is not optimal. A much shorter interval would have made
the training more specific to the mile event. And, since Bannister primarily
raced miles and half miles, there was no reason to run 10 400-meter repeats.
With a short interval between repeats, training would have been more specific to
the goals and likely more effective. Then too, Bannister’s training also could
have been more effective if he trained less frequently to allow for more
recovery time.
The lessons from
Bannister’s training have been lost during the last 50 years. A top miler
often trains for hours a day doing speed work and overdistance work. The great
increase in the volume of training and its ‘sophistication’ are seen as the
reason that world-class male milers can run in the low 3:40’s.
Bannister only got
to 3:58.8. It was several months after his and the world’s first sub-four
minute mile. It was the perfect race in the perfect mile event in the Empire
Games in Vancouver, with Bannister’s super kick at the end just beating John
Landy.
So, of course, the
notion is that while Bannister was gifted, he was not gifted enough to compete
with any of today’s top milers and his training was just quaint. Consider,
however, that Bannister and his contemporaries were running in what today would
be considered bedroom slippers with spikes on cinder tracks that at times were
even muddy. Suppose much better shoes are worth a few seconds in the mile and
suppose that running on fast synthetic tracks is worth perhaps even more. Where
would that put Bannister today?
Whether your
interest is in the intricacies of training, the details of the races, history
and personalities, or if you just want a great read, The Perfect Mile
is a book you should not miss.
[For more
information about the advantages of interval training, see articles 10, 11 and
12 above, and our book Challenge Yourself. To learn more about
Richard Winett and Master Trainer, a newsletter published every
other month about lifetime bodybuilding and masters athletes, visit www.ageless-athletes.com.]
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