Was Bannister really the first sub-4 minute miler?

ah yes, the oldest trick in the book, the "I ran 4:25 in a dual meet, but the results weren't recorded by Milesplit so that's why it says my PR is only 5:05!"

IAAF and IOC put such roadblocks in front of the average humble Welsh coalminer (amateurism) that only the priggish Oxford elite could afford the lifestyle of gentleman athlete.

The average humble Welsh coalminer had to work 12 hours on Saturday = mandatory STRAIGHT time.

Sub 4 well before WWII if the humble peasant had competitive opportunities. Amateurism wasn't for the purity of the sport; it was to keep the riff-raff out.

I get this is a troll thread, but it in all seriousness it's very possible ancient humans ran like a mf.

"20,000-year-old fossilized human footprints were discovered in Australia in 2006: they indicate the hunter who made them was running at ~37 km/h (or 23 mph), the speed of a modern Olympic sprinter, but barefoot and in sand"

Probably with gear on his back and spear in hand.

Walter George went from 4:20 something to 4:12 ultimately. He was also an assistant pharmacist. No substances were banned at the time.

That was right around when anyone ever bothered to wonder who could run the British corruption of the roman "1000 paces" the fastest. Before then, nobody cared, and before the 1600s or so, timing wasn't precise enough to be sure anyhow. Someone mighta coulda, but for damn sure never bothered to try.

The REAL mile is the 1000 paces of a grown man. A grown man is taller now so it's a meter rather than a yard. The question now is can anyone run a sub-2 mile, 1000 meters. You'll say it's impossible! But it's only 11 seconds away.

The proverbial “caveman” would have been a sprinter in order to catch food and to avoid becoming food. They would have had no reason to run a mile consistent and widespread enough for it to become an evolved trait passed on to later generations.

Any later soldiers or scouts could have become milers to go from village to village, but this would have happened only through training and the experience of actually doing it. Would that training have lead to a sub-4 miler? We have no evidence to support that. Indeed, I don’t know of any verified sub-4 miler in history that didn’t train specifically to accomplish the feat. We don’t have any verifiable accounts of someone doing other types of physical activity and then hopping on the track and breaking 4 without specifically training for it.

There is simply nothing in theory or actual evidence that would suggest Roger Bannister was not the first sub-4 miler in history.

Nigel Spivey's scholarly book, "The Ancient Olympics," says that in addition to the stade, a dash that in Olympia was 192m around the stadium track (they had both covered and open air tracks in Greece), they would run diaulos, up and down the stadium around a hair-pin turn, and they would run up to 24 stadium lengths, which was close to 5,000 meters but more often about 12, which was 2,400 meters. The stade was inconsistent from stadium to stadium, going from 177m at Delphi to 210m at Peramon. No time was kept. They were all races against other competitors. There was great respect for the running champions. "Fleet-footed" Achilles was the hero/goat of the Iliad. Koroibos of Elis was the first recorded champion of the ancient Olympics for winning the stade. In the vases for champions, they are typically depicted as having the physique of sprinters. As for marathon, the battle of Marathon in 490 bc between Greeks and Persians saw Pheidippides (or Philippides) sent from Athens to Sparta 160 miles to get help or Eukles ran from Athens to Marathon to fight in the battle and then ran back, dying from the effort (all this from Spivey, 116-17). They also had a hoplitodroms, a sprint of 2 lengths of the stadium in armor and a shield (119). The fact that the Greeks held the Olympics for over 1100 years, that there was intensive training for full-time quasi-professional athletes trained at gyms throughout the Mediterranean but especially in Greece, with many of the best from Sparta, and that there were distance races of 2.1-2.4k as well as roughly 400m and 5000m shows that there were probably exceptionally good runners who would break 4 on a modern track.

There are also some documented ultra and mile feats among Native Americans in the 19th century. Peter Nabokov's "Indian Running" is a good source for many of the different kinds of running traditions in the Americas. He writes of road stretches of 2500 miles from n. Ecuador to southern Chile with runners like those in Rome, Persia, and China. A coastal stretch was 1100 miles. The job of many would be to carry messages and other things along parts of this route as fast as possible, where there would posts in the 15th century every 2 miles or so, and the chasqui would blast a conch shell trumpet and yell a message on ahead and hand over a quipu message and then the next runner would run two more miles hard to the next stone shelter (20). They worked 15 day shifts. Messages could be sent this way about 150 miles a day during the civil wars after the Spanish conquest (21). Runners could cover Lima to Cuzco in three days when it took the Spanish 12-13 days by horse. One Hopi messenger in N. America would take messages 72 miles out and 72 back with one runner in 36 hours with an answer, wrote George Wharton James in 1903. A Hopi left a pueblo at 4 p.m. and 8 hours later delivered a message 65 miles away by night and then ran back home. That is under 7 1/2 minutes per mile, so either reflected incredible ability or is exaggerated. Edward Curtis claims a Hopi carried a note and returned over 200 miles in 3 days. Another Hopi, Charlie Talawepi, was said to have run 156 miles in under 24 hours carrying a message to Flagstaff and back (in Tuba City?). (Nabokov, 22).

Persistence hunters. Maybe wild boar hunters in moccasins with a 4-inch stack.

All Hail the King!!!

He was the first known sub 4 Miller on an accurately measured track. Did someone run faster while fleeing a sabertooth trigger? We'll never know.

Boxers in the 18th and 19th centuries used to fight with unlimited rounds, sometimes exceeding 100 x 3 minute rounds. Nowadays, even the best conditioned boxers are gassing before the 10th round. People were smaller and lighter back then too. It's quite plausible that they were simply built differently with their lifestyles and diets.

bbc.co.uk

The 18th Century four-minute mile

https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews

Roger Bannister was credited with being the first person to run a mile in under four minutes - but 18th Century runners are reported to have got there first.

Open link

I think the tricky thing there might be what counts as specific training. There are middle schoolers today who run sub-5 off of playing soccer. I recall from “Born To Run” they had a game that was similar to soccer that all the kids played (across a way larger playing area).

For people living such an active lifestyle (including endurance hunting), I imagine they’d be in fantastic shape. Sub-4 is still a big stretch, but I’m sure there are cultures that held races as important events for thousands of years, and I’d be shocked if no one split a sub-4:20 until the past couple hundred years.

Youth might have had an active lifestyle in some areas, but very few adults would have the opportunity to continue with regular daily exercise.

Someday someone will run an official sub two hour marathon.

Until then, it hasn’t officially been done, even though some has actually run a marathon in under two hours that was accurately timed and was not aided by wind or downhills.

That said, maybe someone ran sub four in practice in 1954 before Bannister did it in a real race.
But not before than in any circumstance. It’s too specific of an effort for someone to coincidentally do it that happened to be fit.

And Bannister’s record would not have counted at the time if any of the rabbits dropped out.

Thank you. In my mind these guys were way superior to Bannister as runners, and if you look at their progression it's obvious that sub 4 would have happened in the '40's if they hadn't been busted for "professionalism". Between '42 and '46 WR went from 4:06 to 4:01 and time-drop was accelerating. Actually took 8 years (!) to take another second off. Of course, if Bannister had trained like the Swedes or Zatopek he may well have been sub 3:55 by 1954..... but he didn't.

Bro that is unreadable. That looks like a serial killer or my drug addict cousin typed that.

Here is my take:

Was the course accurately measured?
What was the timing device like?

Yes we had really good timing devices, but were they calibrated.

He says Parrott ran it in 4 minutes, not sub 4.

No confirmation of it and it does not show up for 24 years.

Humans have not evolved any since 1770.

I am sure there was someone somewhere who ran it, but a key is that this is some sort of organized and official competition.

Olbermann is just wanting to stir a pot, and I regret that I actually lessened.

It is a cool story.

people without talent can't conceive what is possible.

i had a tenth grader run 4:17 in the 1500, after basketball season, without having gone for a single jog or done a single running workout in 4 months. His previous PR was a 4:48 in the 1600 from 9 months ago.

all that improvement from basketball and a dose of puberty.