On a particular kind of track - hard, dry clay - and in front of a huge, boisterous crowd urging the runner on to his best-ever performance. It would have to be in perfect weather - 68 degrees and no wind.
The experts believed they knew the precise conditions under which the mark would fall. So the four-minute barrier stood for decades - and when it fell, the circumstances defied the confident predictions of the best minds in the sport. The British press “constantly ran stories criticizing his ‘lone wolf’ approach,” Bryant notes, and urged him to adopt a more conventional regimen of training and coaching. Bryant also reminds us that Bannister was an outlier and iconoclast - a full-time student who had little use for coaches and devised his own system for preparing to race. It’s fascinating to read about the pressure, the crowds, the media swirl as runners tried in vain to break the mark. This was truly the Holy Grail of athletic achievement. And like an unconquerable mountain, the closer it was approached, the more daunting it seemed.” “It had become as much a psychological barrier as a physical one. “For years milers had been striving against the clock, but the elusive four minutes had always beaten them,” he notes. Bryant reminds us that runners had been chasing the goal seriously since at least 1886, and that the challenge involved the most brilliant coaches and gifted athletes in North America, Europe, and Australia. But it was not until I decided to write about him for my book Practically Radical, and read a remarkable account of his exploits by the British journalist and runner John Bryant, that I understood the story behind the story - and the lessons it holds for leaders who want to bust through barriers in their fields. Most people know the basic story of Roger Bannister, who, on May 6, 1954, busted through the four-minute barrier with a time of three minutes, fifty-nine and four-tenths of a second.
As it turns out, when he broke through a previously impenetrable track-and-field barrier, he taught all of us what it takes to break new ground. The sad news of the passing of Roger Bannister, the first human being to run a four-minute mile, got me thinking about his legacy - not just as one of the great athletes of the past century, but as an innovator, a change agent, and an icon of success.
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